It is critical for financial institutions to have an efficient Reconciliation and Investigation (R&I) capability to minimise financial risk by identifying potential payment errors, discrepancies, or irregularities promptly and fixing them early…

A recent independent survey conducted by Celent found that 73% of corporate banks have reported clear revenue benefits from investment in advanced data analytics. Looking ahead, analytics, intelligent automation, and artificial intelligence…

The banking industry is going through significant transformation across its various business domains and core banking has been one of the key areas of focus for many banks in recent years. Most…

Back before Christmas, at the same time as the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement, a new report by HM Treasury was released – the Future of Payments Review report [1]. This report proposes a set…

In the first blog of our two-part predictions series, we explored the key technological and regulatory trends shaping the payments landscape in 2024. In this second blog, we explore the practical strategies…

2023 put the traditional processing model for account-based payments to the test, as evolving customer demands, intensifying competition from fintechs and shifting regulatory requirements continued to intensify margin pressures. And although 2024…

Last month Icon hosted its final IPF Client Day of 2023. The event brought our clients together in London to explore the latest business trends in the payments market and technologies shaping…

Where is your bank on the order management (or pre-processing, or initiation management – whichever you prefer) maturity scale? Are you running your order management on legacy technology as a routing/integration layer…

With Artificial Intelligence (AI) being part of the Zeitgeist and almost every newspaper containing an article on AI, it is reasonable to want to ensure that your business can gain competitive advantage…

Icon Solutions was founded in 2009 with the desire to be different and simplify banking transformation, using technological expertise and deep experience to fight complexity, promote transparency and put the needs of…

With the Payments IT landscape frequently changing due to regulations, customer needs, and innovations, Financial Institutions (FIs) face challenges of high cost, slow pace of change, operational complexities, and a constant struggle…

By all measures, Sibos 2023 in Toronto was a great success. The event brought together more than 9,000 attendees to discuss this edition’s theme – ‘Collaborative finance in a fragmented world’. Rich…

Traditional banking has evolved over centuries into what we have today: digitalized products and services that keep the worldwide economic cogs turning. In pursuit of automation and digitalization banks have accrued sizeable…

As banks continue to grapple with the account-based payments processing model amid seemingly interminable margin pressures, the wider commercial implications of software developer capacity limitations are coming into much sharper focus. In…

The traditional payments processing model for account-based payments is under unprecedented strain amid diminishing profit margins, increasing competition from fintechs, and rising costs. These challenges are only set to compound in a…

The rapid convergence of emerging technologies and evolving business models is presenting banks with systemic and operational challenges that are proving profoundly difficult to navigate. Many banks are simply slow in responding…

On 28th June 2023, the European Commission (EC) set out its proposals for ‘modernising payment services and opening financial services data’. The proposals for payments – referred to as ‘PSD3’ –essentially reflect…

With 2023 emerging as the year of choice for banks when it comes to adopting new strategies and technologies to take control of their payments processing capabilities, many now find themselves at…

Just over a year ago, my colleagues and I offered a few predictions about developments and trends in global payments and banking, intended to help financial institutions shape their strategy for the…

The critical role of women in computer science has arguably been under reported throughout history. From Ada Lovelace – who developed the first computer software – to Margaret Hamilton leading the development…

A sea-change is coming to UK payments. In 2016-17, the UK’s industry-wide Payments Strategy Forum created the New Payments Architecture (NPA) initiative. The initiative seeks to create a state-of-the-art, real-time payments infrastructure…

As we celebrate the eighth International Day for Women and Girls in Science on Saturday 11th February 2023, we know that, as technology specialists, our industry needs to do so much more….

Research indicates that payments transformation isn’t optional—it’s imperative for survival. Yet modernising payments infrastructure can be a costly undertaking. Toine van Beusekom, Strategy Director at Icon Solutions, discusses how Tier 2 and…

By all accounts, 2022 was difficult for just about everyone. Continuing economic fallout from the pandemic, geopolitical upheaval, soaring inflation, rising energy costs and a host of other pressures all underscored the…

The opening keynote by Swift’s Chairman and their CEO ultimately gave out one simple message: in times of change we must collaborate, innovate and adapt. More industry mambo jambo? No! It was…

The deployment and usage of global payment message standards enabled by ISO 20022 provides many benefits for processing banks and regulators. Efficiency, enhanced treasury operations and liquidity, and improved targeted services for…

By all accounts, Sibos 2022 was a success. Over 8,000 people met in Amsterdam last week to discuss Progressive Finance for a Changing World. For many of us, the conference offered a…

At Icon Solutions, we spend a lot of time thinking about the ever-evolving payments landscape and the challenges it creates for its stakeholders. Banks struggle to make money processing payments and therefore…

When it comes to new ways to pay, consumers are making their preferences known. Overwhelmingly, today’s customers want fast, easy, and secure transactions and are increasingly willing to try new and emerging…

At a recent payments forum hosted by the Bank of Finland, ECB board member Fabio Panetta signalled commercial banks must make instant payments ‘cheap and easy to use’. While on the operational…

How many people have heard of Kathleen Booth or Margaret Hamilton? Chances are not many. But why not? These two women achieved two significant firsts. Kathleen invented the first assembly language and Margaret,…

In the fourth part of our series exploring the motivations, architecture and principles driving the development of IPF, Tom Beadman, Principal Engineer at Icon Solutions, discusses the benefits of using Domain-Specific Languages…

As competition in payments has increased, data has long been touted as the cure-all for incumbent banks. If banks could charge a transaction fee for every time they are told that ‘data…

Remaining competitive in payments is the key to future relevance and profitability for incumbent banks. But with incumbents now competing on multiple fronts against various players, how can they stay ahead of…

For several decades, incumbent banks have held a comfortable leadership position in payments. But the rapid growth of digital payments has signalled opportunity for new market entrants to attack this status quo….

In July 2020, a group of sixteen major European banks from five Euro countries announced the launch of the European Payments Initiative (EPI) with the aim of creating a unified payment solution…

Financial and technological industries have always been male dominated, with men at the forefront of key projects and making up most of the workforce. Although things have improved over the years with…

Setting the scene In the third part of our series exploring the motivations, architecture and principles driving the development of IPF, Pat Altaie, Senior Consultant, discusses the benefits of using interoperable programming…

It has been said that prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future. The unprecedented events of 2020 demonstrated quite how difficult it can be. The monumental uplifts in digital…

In the second part of our series exploring the motivations, architecture and principles driving the development of IPF, Sirin Sevinc, Senior Solution Architect, explains the roles CQRS and Event Sourcing play in…

Standardisation, regulation and technological innovation means payments are well on the way to becoming instant, invisible and free. This is good news for everybody. Well, not quite everybody. Banks are now faced…

Over the past 20+ years, I have been deeply involved in designing, building and delivering systems in a few different sectors across a multitude of technologies and methodologies, varying team sizes and…

As part of Icon Solutions’ thought leadership in the world of payments, our latest webinar, ‘Busting the Myths of Payments Transformation’, delved into the noise and misnomers in the payments transformation space and…

COVID-19 has been a major stress test for digital transformation. Merchants have had to ramp up their e-commerce, delivery and card-not-present capabilities. As COVID-19 continues to take its toll, players in the…

‘Payments transformation’ has emerged as perhaps the single biggest opportunity for banks. But getting payments transformation right is no easy task. With only 9% of banks nearing completion in their transformation efforts,…

In the U.S. and across the globe, financial institutions are wrestling with evolving consumer expectations, razor-thin margins and increased competition. Yet, significant opportunities are there for those who have built a foundation…

A recent webinar, hosted by Icon Solutions, convened a panel of industry experts to explore the progress of ISO 20022 in the US and across the world, and what this means for…

In October, the UK Treasury Committee published a report on IT Failures in the Financial Services Sector and in November, it launched an inquiry that will focus on “the common causes of operational incidents…

It has been two years since the European Payments Council published the SEPA Instant Credit Transfer (SCT Inst) scheme and EBA Clearing launched RT1 – their infrastructure solution for the processing SCT…

As traditional financial institutions compete with big tech and fintech players, gaining access to and extracting value from payments data has become paramount. In fact, the Economist recently described data as now the most…

There’s been a lot in the press recently about the benefits Machine Learning offers when it comes to fraud detection. However, there are limitations. In reality, most of the payments transactions made…

The first Faster Payments Barometer, conducted by the US Faster Payments Council in partnership with Glenbrook, received over 700 responses with broad coverage across industry stakeholder groups such as financial institutions, core…

At a recent webinar hosted by InstaPay on payments transformation, a question was posed to the speakers (from HSBC, Nordea and Icon Solutions); “Given the challenges involved in payments transformation and the…

AFP Annual Conference drew a huge number of attendees this year and packed a lot into three days. People came from far and wide to attend and discuss all things payments, risk…

Increasingly software development in large organisations is moving to agile methods, primarily scrum.  Agile empowers developers to design and build the system – where does solution architecture fit in? Agile and scrum…

This year’s EBAday, hosted in Stockholm, focused on three themes: innovation, infrastructure and reinvention. It explored positive disruption, the opportunity of payments and examined the impact of real-time, roadmaps and regulations. Here…

Faster Payments have changed the world for the better and many corporates are already reaping the benefits. During our recent webinar we heard from industry experts in the US, Steve Ledford –…

While Canada has been a leader in mobile and app-based banking technology, the same cannot be said for the speed of their implementation of Real Time Payments (RTP).  However, the last Payments…

Since Fed catalysed the private sector to deliver real-time payment capabilities, there has been advocacy for the central bank backed, real-time payments (RTP) scheme. Many feel the lack of a ubiquitous RTP…

Since time began men have been at the forefront of technological innovations and in the finance world, building and establishing themselves as leaders – this culture has made it difficult for the…

Last week I attended a Women in Payments event entitled, ‘New Payments Architecture – What can we expect and how will we get there?’ The event was hosted by AmazonPay in London…

Last week I attended the Federal Reserve’s inaugural FedPayments Improvement Community Forum in Chicago which had six Fed COOs participating and the Fed Governor, Lael Brainard, giving the opening keynote.  The purpose…

  Open Banking is transforming the financial services market. There is no doubt about that. Financial services providers are quickly building the same types of ecosystems that we’ve become familiar with from…

I recently attended a meeting of the European Payments Council (EPC) Scheme Technical Forum, a group of payments professionals who carry out technical assessments of changes proposed to the SEPA schemes –…

  I recently had the pleasure of speaking at an event in Paris organised in partnership with DXC, one of Icon’s partner organisations. The audience included representatives of banks and corporates, and…

There was one overwhelming take away for me from EBAday in Munich. It was that the phrase “instant payments is the new normal” has become meaningless. The statement fails to capture the…

‘Customers are willing to sacrifice security for engagement’, one speaker said to a full ballroom of payments professionals at the Global LEI (Legal Entity Identifier) Foundation (GLEIF) workshop in San Francisco. Customers…

  Welcome back! The past two posts in our series on building reactive systems have dealt with the topics of performance and fault-tolerance. In this post I’m going to talk about resilience,…

  En France, de nombreuses banques étudient actuellement l’évolution des systèmes de paiement en vue d’adopter les Instant Payments. Ceci est principalement dû à des facteurs tels que la réduction des coûts,…

  A few years ago, the question “how fast is fast” was being debated across the globe, with many organizations feeling that faster was good enough and hoping to get away with…

  “Been there, done that, got the scars to prove it!” Experience is a great thing, but it’s sometimes painful to get it the hard way. It’s quicker, less expensive, and generally…

  The recent InstaPay webinar “Transitioning to Instant Payments in Germany” provided some more TIPS (pun intended) for the introduction of SCT Inst.  Icon’s very own Gene Neyer took part along with…

In Germany, many of the smaller banks (for example Sparkasse banks) have opted to use payments as a service via a Technical Service Provider (TSP) in order to deliver Instant Payments.  This…

  In the previous post in this series, we talked about the performance and scalability benefits that we get from actors and the actor system. I also briefly mentioned fault tolerance and…

  Caught between two regulatory juggernauts I’ve been really enjoying the recent Six Nations rugby: there is some phenomenal skill on show, and some very astute tactics, but you can’t beat the…

I vantaggi di essere i primi ad adottare il sistema dei pagamenti istantanei Benché l’azienda EBA Clearing abbia lanciato i pagamenti istantanei dell’area unica dei pagamenti in euro (SEPA) a novembre 2017…

“Have I got PPI?” that particular earworm is thankfully going to die out soon with the deadline for claims defined and most of the market tapped out. However, brace yourself for another…

  I’m sure your business is deep in the weeds with understanding and remediating GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), we all are. In the process of the mad rush to meet the 25th…

  While the conversations we have had with payments business leaders point to a willingness to participate in the Clearing House’s RTP scheme, many of them are struggling with the business case…

The benefits of being an early-adopter of Instant Payments Even though EBA Clearing launched SEPA Instant Payments in November 2017 via RT1, so far only a handful of banks (early-adopters) have decided…

  At the European Central Bank’s #TIPSapp event on Tuesday there was lots of focus on opportunity, both short-term and longer-term from the introduction of Instant Payments (IP). The day was to…

  As part of Icon’s continued efforts to support the adoption of Instant Payments across the Eurozone, we were invited to present our thoughts and expertise on Instant Payments to a wide…

  2017: The year of Instant Payments  Unless you’ve spent the last 365 days hiding under a rock, you’ll be fully aware that 2017 has been the year of Instant Payments. Regulators…

  Much of what we write about on the Icon blog is instant payments and instant payment adoption around the world. This blog is part of a series, which aims to bring…

  The neusten Zahlen des European Payments Council (EPC) zeigen, dass sich derzeit mehr als 400 deutsche Payment-Service-Provider (PSPs) auf die Einführung der neuen SCT Inst-kompatiblen Instant-Payments-Plattform RT1 von EBA Clearing vorbereiten….

  In the Canadian market, both consumers and banks have been early adopters when it comes to banking innovation, whether it is mobile, desktop or behind the scenes technology. Canadian consumers generally expect,…

  The Clearing House’s (TCH) central processing scheme in the US has recently started Real Time Payments (RTP) testing for the clearance and settlement of funds between banks. The event is significant…

  The latest stats from the European Payments Council (EPC), show there are over 400 German Payment Service Providers (PSPs) gearing up to go-live early next year with EBA Clearing’s new SCT…

There was much agreement at Retail Banking Europe (#RBE2017) in Amsterdam last week. Banks need to support the digital economy and are slowly reinventing themselves to become digital entities. Although different approaches…

  This week the Icon team was at Money 20/20 where we saw a lot of discussion around the new ways in which consumers are interacting with their money, modes of payments…

  At the recent Sibos 2017 conference in Toronto, one theme rang out loud and clear – it’s time to think about the corporate. The common thread throughout the four-day conference was…

The US has always been more business-friendly than the Old World, and New York is peppered with temples to industry built by 19th century tycoons such as John D. Rockefeller and J….

We’re at something of an inflection point in the payments landscape. It’s pretty clear that the arrival of PSD2 and Instant Payments will significantly disrupt retail payments, and the media has been…

  In 2014 Europe started ramping up the rhetoric for building a pan European Instant Payments solution (now known as SCT-Inst). In response, various forums sprung up to enable interested parties to…

  It’s fair to say that Dublin in the June sunshine was out to impress the financial world attending the European Banking Association’s 12th annual congress. Dublin, founded by the Vikings during…

While the industry continues its race against time to be PSD2-ready in January 2018, there still remains a number of unknowns and conflicting opinions on how the banking and payments landscape will…

The world is now immediate. We’re able to buy things online and have them delivered the same day (sometimes within an hour), our correspondence is sent and reacted to in seconds, and…

The banking community of Mexico joined together at SWIFT’s Business Forum in the capital to discuss how the industry should build the future of financial services. It may not come as a…

  PSD2 brings a seismic shift in what it fundamentally means to be a bank. It’s no longer enough to be a trusted custodian of consumer transactions and the traditional bank position…

  With real-time payments on the horizon for the US, NACHA’s Faster Payments 2017  was a key conference for payments professionals. But how close is real-time payments to becoming the norm there…

  What insights can the U.S. take from early real-time payments adopters?    Change is constant in the banking and payments industry – and organizations that can keep pace with this change…

  PSD2 paves the way for a new way to pay online across Europe. Instead of using a card, consumers will soon be able to pay directly from their bank accounts. Similar…

  Lauren Jones, ex Head of Standards at Payments UK, and now Icon’s International Payments Ambassador, reports from out in the field where she is actively testing different methods of payments and…

  At Finovate Europe, 2017, 71 Fintech companies got to present their latest and greatest products via a 7 minute live demo, in front of 1,500 people.  What makes this years’ Finovate…

The end of 2016 witnessed an excellent step by the Hungarian Central Bank (MNB) – the release of the ‘Operational model of the instant payment service in Hungary’. It is remarkable for…