Viewpoints

In today’s fast-paced payments world, building a processing business to meet the requirements of financial institutions (FIs) old and new, traditional and disruptive, is no mean feat. In this blog, we share the five fundamental building blocks that helped grow our successful business and overcome the complexities of the modern-day payments landscape.

Selecting a new payments processor is a complex task, made more so by the fact that, on the surface, the majority of processors in the market today appear to cover all the bases, with very little between them other than branding and price. We can all acknowledge that the processor an FI decides to partner with will be instrumental to the success of its payments business, so what should be on their shopping list when looking to determine if a processor is the right fit?

The word 'legacy' in the world of payments is typically used to reference the monolithic mainframes built 60+ years ago that surprisingly often still underpin some of the largest banks today. Industry experts, vendors and FIs themselves have used a multitude of forums over the last twenty years or so to denounce the shelf life of older platforms and their projected expiration dates in the modern payments world, yet legacy, in its many forms, still prevails.

The culture surrounding ATMs in the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region today is unlike those found in other markets, especially in comparison with Europe and the US, where ATMs are mostly used as cash machines for withdrawals, deposits and the occasional mobile top-up.

When you think about outsourcing your payments business, flavours are not the first thing that come to mind. Instead, it is the widespread and ‘standard’ definitions of the SaaS and PaaS deployment models that come to the fore. However, SaaS is no longer restricted to one ‘standard’ definition or ‘flavour’ and the understanding the majority of people have of this model and its capabilities is outdated …

In our latest webinar with Consult Hyperion, our very own Maria Nottingham and Bethan Cowper sat down with Gary Munro to discuss our latest whitepaper; Model behaviour – is your payment processor the right fit?

While the digital banking market in South Asia is undergoing an exciting period of change brought on, in part, by new technologies and initiatives, many FIs in the region are being weighed down by a lack of connected digital infrastructure and, as such, are struggling to keep pace with market demands.

The failure to address systemic weaknesses is leaving FIs at risk of limited customisation, with an inability to integrate with modern payments applications, and they are finding themselves tied-in and restricted by their vendors. Bethan Cowper, Vice President, Business & Market Development at Compass Plus Technologies discussed this with Payments, Cards & Mobile.

Alexey Osipov, Executive VP, MEA Managing Director & Adil Ahmed, Vice President & Deputy Managing Director, MEA, of Compass Plus Technologies, discuss on FinextraTV payments tech, rising vendor independence, eCommerce, and what’s going on in the Middle East & Africa banking & payments sector.

In conversation with Finextra, experts from OakNorth Bank, Nationwide Building Society and Compass Plus Technologies elaborated on their experiences with maintaining strong technology partnerships, and the many opportunities and challenges that come with it.