Accelerating Payments Transformation to Drive Business Value

The drive for action

 

A myriad of changes for payments are upon us. Instant payments, Open Banking, ISO 20022 and rising customer expectations lead to a tsunami of new payment volumes, which will ultimately result in the need to deliver significantly more value at a much lower cost. Think at least a 50% reduction in spend… so is this ‘mission impossible?' How do you find the opportunity in amongst the challenges? Icon Solutions empowers financial services clients to accelerate their payments transformation by laying the foundations to innovate, drive new revenue streams and tackle the market disruptors.

Challenges facing banks


Most banks have a complex Payments IT estate consisting of legacy systems unable to cope with the rising volumes, lower margins and rapid changes in business models. Challenges they are currently facing include:

  • High maintenance costs due to technical debt, duplicate functionality and a lack of STP
  • Ever increasing resilience risks (and regulatory attention) as volumes grow and unpredictable spikes become more extreme
  • Limited ability to innovate, cost effectively, to create business differentiation and generate revenue
  • Being outpaced by competition, losing customers and revenue to those who leverage data and can identify and respond to the growing demands of customers

Key areas banks need to address to enable transformation 

Resiliency

Continuous service, resilient to failures in processes & technology, dealing with unpredictable volume demands

Agility

Ability to deliver changes more rapidly and better respond to threats and opportunities

Efficiency

Delivering more for less – reduce cost to change & run, without impacting quality of the service

Innovation

 Building a foundation to leverage data and create differentiation to tap into new opportunities

End-to-end services to support your journey to transform

Our portfolio of services is tailored to each stage of the payments transformation journey

1. Strategy Outline
Define the payment strategy by identifying
opportunities that support the business case.

2. Design & Plan
Prioritise and define the transition roadmap,

which drives the planning and scoping of

workstreams.

3. Implement
Develop lifecycle activities, products and tools needed to build new services.

4. Operate & Optimise
Deliver business outcomes and reassess to
produce actionable operational improvements.

From strategy to unlocking business value in 10 weeks

A typical payments technology strategy engagement with Icon Solutions

Scope

Part 1: "Why"


Payments Technology Strategy: Context and Drivers

Part 2: "What"


Payments Target Architecture & Guardrails

Part 3: "How"


Payments Technology Roadmap & Business Case

Contents

  • The need for the renewed strategy, taking into account regulatory activity, market / technology trends, current payments landscape and challenges
  • Addressing the internal and external drivers and leveraging Icon’s Payments assets
  • KPIs to measure the success of the strategy 
  • End-state target architecture 
  • Define architecture building blocks to supports the strategy 
  • Architecture Principles and Constraints: Set the architecture guard rails 
  • Leverage Icon’s payment blueprint for mapping, taking into account the defined strategy
  • Propose a transition roadmap for migrating to the target architecture defining the business value for each state
  • Define Transition architectures for the interim states highlighting the impacts on the current architecture 
  • Document business value realised

Example Timescales

3 weeks

4 weeks

3 weeks

From strategy to unlocking business value in 10 weeks

A typical payments technology strategy engagement with Icon Solutions

Scope

Part 1: "Why"


Payments Technology Strategy: Context and Drivers

Part 2: "What"


Payments Target Architecture & Guardrails

Part 3: "How"


Payments Technology Roadmap & Business Case

Contents

The need for the renewed strategy, taking into account regulatory activity, market / technology trends, current payments landscape and challenges


Addressing the internal and external drivers and leveraging Icon’s Payments assets


KPIs to measure the success of the strategy

End-state target architecture 


Define architecture building blocks to supports the strategy 


Architecture Principles and Constraints: Set the architecture guard rails


Leverage Icon’s payment blueprint for mapping, taking into account the defined strategy

Propose a transition roadmap for migrating to the target architecture defining the business value for each state


Define Transition architectures for the interim states highlighting the impacts on the current architecture 


Document business value realised

Example Timescales

3 weeks

4 weeks

3 weeks

Our accelerator tools are an important part of the process

Payment Value Stream

  • High level processing activities: list of key payment processing elements
  • Actors and participants: Roles played by the various users

Functional Reference Architecture

  • Capability Model: Functional building blocks composing the payment services
  • Services Catalogue: Capturing functional components and use case based interaction models

Payments Data Architecture

  • Payments Logical Data Model
  • Data Architecture from Source to Analytics
  • Best Practices to enable monetising data

Technology Architecture

  • Guardrails and Principles to adhere to
  • Technology Reference Architecture: represent technology and infrastructure services

Payment Maturity Model

  • Mapping IT applications against target capabilities
  • TCO Calculator: Estimated price per transaction 
  • Maturity Assessment: Evaluation of IT architecture

A FEW OF OUR CLIENTS

Speak to us today to discover how we can help you with your payments transformation challenges

RESEARCH

What is the criteria for payments transformation success?

Payments transformation report identifies payment profitability hurdles & how to tackle them

ACCELERATING YOUR PAYMENTS TRANSFORMATION

Find out more about our payments transformation offering