News
Icon Solutions, the UK fintech enabling banks globally to design and implement state-of-the-art payment systems, has today announced a new equity investment from UBS.
Read more
Accelerating payments transformation to drive business value
Our payments services enable banks to meet the changing demands of an open, digitalised and real-time payments business, through innovative technology solutions and subject matter expertise. 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, enabling our clients to find the opportunities in amongst the challenges. Our approach to transformation leverages Icon's accelerator assets.
There are big opportunities for enhanced payments innovation and lower-cost services, including growth of real-time payments volumes, new data standards, cloud provision, and API-connectivity. Banks need to have up-to-date payments technology strategies, including a clear target architecture, roadmap and transition states that will deliver stronger customer propositions, lower-cost operations, and more robust compliance.
Banks have the strategic option of moving payment processing from a cost centre to a revenue stream by adopting the Payments Processing as a Business (PPaaB) business model. Our solutions support this payments transformation, enabling banks to develop new revenue models and increase control over their profit margins.
There is an explosion of information volumes generated both internally and externally that are moving at unprecedented speeds. With increasing customer demands and competition pressures, banks need to re-assess their data strategy in alignment with their business strategy and realise the benefits of a data-led organisation. The advances in analytics and AI technologies create a compelling need to modernise infrastructure and deliver golden-sources of refined and enriched data.
Due to increased competition from neobanks and non-bank PSPs offering innovative payment services to customers, banks need to enhance their capabilities to develop new services and bring them to market quickly.
Icon’s approach to this challenge is to create an Order Management layer, decoupling channels from payment engines, and allowing new value-added services for clients to be added quickly to a bank’s payments capabilities, without fully transforming their estate.
Payments Engineering is a service designed to support organisations that are either developing or planning to develop their own payments applications and require help with implementing changes.
Icon practitioners bring expertise across various specialised areas, enabling organisations to leverage technological advancements for agile Software-development lifecycle, continuous delivery and integration, infrastructure management, and application configuration.
Industry initiatives
The scheme is not a new concept, however with rising globalisation and the increasing need for interoperability of payment flows, the standards have gained momentum – pushed further by the wide global adoption of instant payments.
Pay.UK is leading a programme of enhancements to the existing Faster Payments System that will be developed and delivered through 2025-27. These will include handling ISO 20022 format messages, API options for connecting to FPS, and improved resilience and security. This work builds from HMT’s National Payments Vision (published Nov 2024).
CELENT RESEARCH
The payments processing opportunity
To better understand these challenges, Icon commissioned Celent to carry out research exploring the payment processing opportunities for banks, where they surveyed and interviewed senior executives at several tier 1 banks.
CASE STUDY
Enhancing the technology strategy for corporate payments
Find how Icon helped to sharpen and future-proof this bank's technology strategy for payables and receivables products.
CASE STUDY
Creating a platform for high volume payment processing
Learn how Icon enabled a Tier 1 bank to migrate to new technologies which were capable of executing enormous volumes of payments.
CASE STUDY
Unlocking the business value from payments data
Discover how Icon helped this global Tier 1 bank to realise the value available from their payments data, and use it as an asset to generate value for their customers and the bank.
News
Icon Solutions, a fintech company enabling banks globally to design and implement state-of-the-art payment systems, has today announced the appointment of Hannah McKechnie to its leadership team as Director of People.
Read more
News
Icon Solutions has published its 2023-24 Annual Report, demonstrating how new strategic partnerships, product and service innovations, and an ongoing commitment to its people and customers have provided a foundation for the next phase of global growth.
Read more