by IBM’s Senior Offering Manager, Craig Rector

Across a variety of current and emerging use cases, mobile is becoming the key channel for digital payments. However, as the market for mobile payments matured across the globe, it has become increasingly difficult for financial service providers to differentiate themselves from the vast variety of offerings in the marketplace.

 

Activities which were once the domain of a few niche companies are becoming crowded, with both established payment industry leaders that are keen to expand their service offerings and an ever increasing number of new pure-play digital operators. This is the competitive market reality.

 

Why Banks are Adopting Digital Reinvention

 

A number of key factors are reshaping the global payments landscape, including regulatory mandates such as PSD2 and GDPR. In parallel, there is immense pressure on banks and other financial institutions to deliver improved instant payments services – ensuring that they remain attractive to savvy, digitally-connected customers.

 

Additionally, competition from non-traditional operators who offer mobile payments and e-wallets are further eroding a bank’s traditional margin. In response, banks need to quickly transform their payments platforms and operating models, owing to several operational challenges and non-functional requirements, such as:

 

• Managing complex regulatory and technology evolution
• Delivering sub-second response time for clearing and settlements
• Providing bullet-proof security and continuous availability
• Improving operations and influencing the development of new services
• Scaling vertically and horizontally to match unpredictable workload peaks and anticipating transaction growth without interrupting services

 

That being said, the challenge is balancing the strategic imperatives of operational efficiency and lower operational costs with the pragmatic need to accelerate efforts to renovate legacy payment operations progressively. Resolving these key issues will pave the path to progress.

 

That’s why forward-thinking banks embrace the ‘digital reinvention’ opportunity to deploy a unique high-performance payments processing solution that supports a wide range of payment types; ranging from the latest immediate payment schemes to traditional payment types including ACH, SEPA, SWIFT, and Check.

Today’s informed CIOs and CTOs, and their company’s line of business leaders, also crave a modular, service-oriented architecture so institutions can modernize operations to match their business needs while retaining legacy systems where needed. Commercial benefits include:

 

• Minimizing operational risk of changes to the environment by taking a modular approach to add a new payment rail via a progressive modernization approach.
• Providing superior customer payment experiences with a real-time capable payments hub, which allows faster deployment of new products using common monitoring and reporting across payments rails.
• Delivering improved risk mitigation and compliance by easily uncovering payment status using pattern recognition that provides greater insight into the payment.

 

Proven Path to Growth in the Digital Age

 

IBM can help you design a Payments infrastructure for how banking needs to get done today –positioning you to capitalize on emerging industry initiatives. So, why partner with IBM? First, working with our experienced team of subject matter experts is proven to be more cost-efficient. It’s the fastest path for you to achieve your digital growth goals and objectives.

 

IBM has an unmatched pool of talented business, technical and logistics resources for implementing any Payments Modernization infrastructure, and this can eliminate the need for hiring new consultants and programmers, or having to search for qualified expertise.

 

Second, IBM offers both the robust IT infrastructure and purpose-built software components that enable you to rapidly advance from a proof of concept (PoC) pilot to full production deployment in the shortest amount of time – verified by case studies of client success stories.

 

IBM LinuxONE servers are a premier platform to deploy on premises the most demanding payments solutions for today’s digital world. Pervasive encryption and the ability to offer lower cost transaction-based pricing are two of the key attributes that the IBM LinuxONE servers uniquely offer.  It provides 100 percent data protection, near zero downtime, integrated blockchain technologies and on-demand personalized insights which drive lower costs, new revenue streams and improved customer satisfaction.

 

As for software, IBM Financial Transaction Manager family of offerings integrates, orchestrates and monitors financial transactions with an open, modular architecture that allows for modernization that maps to the business needs. It delivers consistent processing across multiple payment types, enabling institutions to converge their payment operations on to a single, unified payment hub which then lowers operational risk and costs.  IBM Financial Transaction Manager can accelerate the delivery of improved payment processing and services to customers.

 

You can learn more about these integrated solutions at an upcoming event. Mobile Payments Conference 2018 is your ticket to full-access training and networking with world-class experts in FinTech, Mobile Payments, Cyber Security and more. You’re invited to attend an insightful panel session. Discover peer-proven lessons learned and best practices that you apply.

Join Craig Rector, IBM Commercial Payments Offering Manager, who will be participating in the Panel “Real Time Payment/Faster Payment” on Thursday, August 23, along with Kassi Quimby with the Federal Reserve, Gail Angel with FIS and Travis Dulaney with Push Payments.