Transforming payments architecture capability to improve the customer experience

Our client, a global Tier 1 bank, faced challenges around the resilience and the performance of its payments systems. Due to the complexity of the bank’s payments IT estate, changes were slow and costly to implement and there were concerns about whether the systems would be able to handle a significant increase in payment volumes. Various initiatives were undertaken to address the issues, however there remained a clear need to:

• Establish a Reference Architecture with the aim of delivering a payments platform able to improve the customer experience for Faster Payments

• Develop a deliverable roadmap to guide payments transformation and intermediate transition states

The complexity and reach of the project meant navigating a complex set of stakeholders with differing interests and technologies, as well as conflicting architectures and preferences. A series of design decisions needed to be agreed across different domains to align on the delivery approach, which meant a significant amount of time was spent getting stakeholders and governance forums to agree to, and support, common approaches.

Icon has a strong track record of successfully assisting the bank to transform its complex customer journeys. For this engagement, our experience in event-driven architecture and API design was critical.

Our approach included:

• Establishing an operational framework for the architecture and design in the payments domain, broadly aligned to the industry-standard TOGAF methodology, and tailored to suit the client's environment

• Adopting innovative work practices to emphasise agility, collaboration, and a 'test and learn' approach, drawing on the expertise and experience of the payments industry experts who make up Icon’s Payments Centre of Excellence

• Developing the target Payments Reference Architecture, comprising of the architecture building blocks, capability model, landscape diagrams and solution overviews

• A re-engineering of the existing payments architecture roadmap to detail the transition states needed to move to the target architecture

Deliverables were produced by working with the client’s payments enterprise
architects and key SMEs, to maximise the use of expertise across the whole team
and to ensure outputs were directly mapped to the client’s Enterprise
Architecture framework. Working within a closely integrated team, rather than just
providing external consultancy, ensured that the output was well aligned to the
client’s technology and business strategy.

Icon delivered:

• A target Payments Reference Architecture that met the client’s strategic objectives, in terms of resilience, performance, simplification and agility

• An architecture that catered to future industry initiatives, achieved through a combination of consideration for the client’s ambition, industry best practices and Icon’s payments expertise

• A refresh of the payment architecture roadmap, depicting the candidate transition states in moving to the target state (this provided the client with a clear understanding of best practice and has formed a solid base for moving into the implementation phase)

• An assessment of, and recommendations to address, key pain points in the client’s cards processing IT estate, enabling the client to initiate projects to implement proposed solutions

• A payment platform procurement exercise, from a functional and technical perspective, which provided the client with a robust analysis and measured data points to support the vendor procurement decision

Icon successfully demonstrated our strong architecture capability along with our extensive payments and banking domain knowledge. Icon’s collaborative and focused way of working with the bank’s product teams resulted in a deliverable roadmap that included MVP and future enhancements; a key achievement was receiving confirmation that only the customer-in-the-loop part of the journey was required to be real-time, and that other functions could use existing batch methods, reducing the need to build new orchestrated workflows.

Icon has a history of uplifting architecture capabilities within the bank and has
repeatedly delivered successful outcomes over a number of years. As a result,
we quickly established a strong reputation, and utilised our architects’ extensive experience in payments, to become a trusted advisor to the client’s stakeholders.

Icon’s pedigree for delivering best-in-class payments to leading banks and
payment regulatory bodies underpins our positive reputation with clients.