Instant payments are the ‘new normal’. The last decade saw a ramp-up in adoption as regulation, customer expectation and technology dovetailed to create immediate, 24/7 demand for financial services. This means that…

Find out how Icon helped a leading UK financial institution with a savings and mortgage customer base of over 15 million facing challenges around the performance and resiliency of their payments systems.

Discover how Icon delivered APIs for a leading UK bank in record time, helping them avoid breaching CMA and PSD2 regulations.

Read about how Icon Solutions designed, developed and led this Tier 1 Bank’s App-to-App programme in response to PSD2/CMA Open Banking regulation.

Find out how Icon ensured a new core banking platform was integrated into the UK’s largest retail and commercial bank’s existing systems landscape.

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 –…

A colleague summed it up perfectly when he described a ‘tsunami of payments’ heading the way of banks on account of changes in the payments landscape. The changes have been fuelled primarily…

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…

  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…

  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…

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….

Author: Lauren Jones Date: 13th July, 2017 Lauren Jones, Icon Solutions’ International Payments Ambassador, has created a country profile on the Guatemalan payments market. This shares key facts and figures for this country including modernisation plans…

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…

Author: Lauren Jones Date: 4th July, 2017 Lauren Jones, Icon Solutions’ International Payments Ambassador, has created a country profile on the Belize payments market. This shares key facts and figures for this country including the launch…

  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…

A year ago, the European Retail Payments Board (ERPB) flagged that “In practice, PSD2 and the EBA RTS will not cover all aspects that are relevant for the development of an integrated…

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…

  Retail Instant Payments in Europe will hit €725bn in transactions by the end of 2027 Single card payments set to decline from 40% to 11% market share by 2027 Instant Payments…

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…

  With PSD2 around the corner and Instant Payments no longer a dot on the horizon, the crucial question is: are you ready? Icon Solutions will be partnering with Capgemini to host…

Author: Lauren Jones Date: 18th May, 2017 Lauren Jones, Icon’s International Payments Ambassador has created a country profile on the Mexican payments market. This shares key facts and figures for this country including the names of…

Tom Hay, Icon Solutions’ Head of Payments will be a panellist at ECN’s Open Banking Summit, where experts from banks, fintechs and government bodies will gather to discuss the huge potential of the…

  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…

  London, 27 March 2017, Tom Hay, Icon’s Head of Payments will speak at the forthcoming techUK event: PSD2 Authentication…the rumours, facts, challenges and solutions on 3rd April, London Last month, saw the release of PSD2…

  The EBA’s new final RTS on Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) and Secure Communications is an acceptable offering that seems cover a lot of ground and will satisfy most, but ultimately leaves…

Author: Tom Hay Date: 13th July 2016 Until now financial institutions (FI’s) have been in control of their digital presence, offering their own branded services to customers via tablets, mobiles and wearable…

  Following the success of our whitepaper PSD2 Draft RTS: Ten Key Points, we will be holding an exclusive webinar on the key insights from the recently published PSD2 RTS. Final PSD2 RTS…

As a European directive, PSD2 has to be transposed into UK law. HM Treasury has recently launched a consultation inviting comment on the proposed legislative changes. The consultation document is written in…

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) recently mandated that larger banks adopt and maintain a common standard for open APIs (Application Programming Interface) to help create more innovation and competition in the…

  London, 7 February 2017, Tom Hay, Icon’s Head of Payments will speak at the forthcoming webinar: Avoid the common pitfalls of instant payments installations in association with InstaPay.Today and Lipis Advisors on…

The revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2) has been the cause of much hand-wringing in the banking space, with incumbents foreseeing a future when the new banking giants are Starling, Tandem, Monzo and…

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…

Over the last couple of weeks the media agenda has been dominated by Payment Services Directive Two (PSD2), and unfortunately not for the right reasons. PSD2 has always been a controversial regulation,…

  We’re delighted to have been invited by the Hungarian Banking Association to present at their PSD2 Payments Workshop on Monday 12th December 2016 in Budapest, Hungary. At the event, we’ll be…

While reading through the second payments service directive and trying to decipher the recently published RTS draft, I have been trying hard (without much success) not to draw parallels between the soon…

Icon’s Payments team have just returned from the FinExtra’s  NextGen Banking conference in Helsinki, Finland and thought we’d share some highlights from the event. To open the event, Erkki Poutiainen summed up…

I was recently on a panel at NextGen Banking Nordics, discussing PSD2 (of course) where I was pretty critical of the draft Regulatory Technical Standards (RTS) on Secure Customer Authentication. After the discussion, a…

Tom Hay, Icon’s Head of Payments has been invited to speak at this year’s NextGen Banking conference, 11th October in Helsinki. Tom will take to the stage alongside other payment industry experts to…

Following the recent publication of the European Banking Association (EBA) draft Regulatory Technical Standards (RTS), covering Secure Customer Authentication (SCA) and secure communication, Icon’s Tom Hay takes a closer look at ten…

The Access to Accounts provisions of PSD2 oblige banks to allow third parties (TPPs) to access bank details and initiate payments on behalf of the bank’s customers. The huge unanswered question is,…

Sahana Hussain, a senior member of the API Banking practice within Icon Solutions has been asked to speak at Thursday’s Payment Services Seminar, where the focus will be on PSD2 as the market opens…

Here at Icon we always look to the future on how Banks can improve their service offering. The following  informs you of the criteria that the API platform needs to meet in…

Yesterday, saw the second of our well received payment roundtables with the topical discussion on PSD2: The Payments World Turned Upside Down? – the second iteration of the Payments Services Directive, which…

An eclectic group of payment professionals attended this morning’s Payment Services Seminar to discuss PSD2 and its profound impact on the payments industry. Joining the speaker panel was Icon’s Sahana Hussain, a…

Tom Hay, our Head of Payments, was recently invited to speak at the prestigious Payments Conference in Trondheim, Norway. Tom’s presentation “PSD2 – will bureaucracy bury the banks?” looks at one of…