The theme of this year’s Identity and Payments Summit, hosted by the Secure Technology Alliance in Tucson Arizona, was Trust, Security and Privacy in a Hyperconnected World.
The 4-day summit covered a wide range of significant topics relevant to the core theme. I was fortunate to be part of a panel of experts discussing one of those topics - the accelerated market demand for instant, faster, more secure payments systems.
I wanted to mention some of the key items discussed in that panel, including some of the challenges and limitations of faster payment systems - and how IR’s payment monitoring solution Transact, can provide valuable insights to address those limitations.
How instant payments are impacting the global financial landscape
The near-instantaneous, secure, and convenient transfer of money globally is helping to drive economic efficiency, growth, and financial inclusion. In fact, instant payments are revolutionizing the way we transact, and adoption use cases are continuing to grow.
The worldwide adoption of the ISO 20022 messaging system is a key factor in the overall modernization of payment processes, and a vital structural element of instant payments. This includes new offerings to commercial customers, such as ACH transactions being broken into RTP for submission.
Meeting SLAs – same challenge, new landscape
While service level agreements (SLAs) are nothing new, the instant payments landscape is (at least compared to many other payment types).
With traditional card transactions, SLAs are often clear cut and financial institutions (FIs) have well-established procedures in place for monitoring full payment flows, addressing concerns quickly, and providing the evidence to say they have met SLAs. But in the emerging worlds of instant payments, it's not quite as clear cut yet.
Instant payments involve multiple stakeholders, including banks, payment processors, merchants, and regulatory bodies. These are often separate systems, so any slowdown in any step of the flow can impact your SLAs.
Scalability is also a challenge. As the volume of instant payments continues to grow, FIs must scale dynamically to accommodate increased transaction loads without compromising performance or reliability.
Delivering on SLAs in the instant payments space requires advanced monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities, seamless integration across a complex ecosystem, and comprehensive reporting.
Trends and future developments in instant payments
While we’ve seen credit and debit payment margins shrink, new opportunity lies in leveraging the exponential growth of data.
Easy access to data can be a game changer when it comes success, helping to identify purchasing trends and preferences, and increase customer adoption and share of wallet.
A world class performance management solution can provide the clarity needed to translate data into insight and enable intelligent decision making.
Why IR?
Comprehensive monitoring plays a crucial role in simplifying the complexity of managing modern, evolving payment ecosystems. With the ability to track transactions from end-to-end, throughout the entire workflow it’s easy to highlight and address points of friction.
For over three decades, our expertise in payments monitoring and analytics has seen us develop trusted partnerships with several of the world’s largest banks and financial institutions. How?
- By helping them to evolve their payment systems and keep them up and running through today’s constantly changing financial environment.
- By providing monitoring and analytics tools to help boost revenue growth and enhance customer experience.
- By empowering business leaders to make informed decisions by turning data insights into intelligence.
- By implementing deep domain expertise to continuously evolve our platforms, products, and services to keep up with growing markets.
- By ensuring full control by bringing deep visibility and insight into all inter-connected technologies and channels from a single viewpoint.
- By enabling the tracking of balance thresholds, flagged accounts and abnormal account usage.
- By monitoring transaction volumes, bottlenecks, and processing backlogs to stay ahead of disruptions before they have a serious impact.
- By providing customized dashboards to allow you to investigate and identify root cause of issues.
Faster payments are already revolutionizing the way we transact and setting new standards for convenience and speed in the digital age. IR Transact provides a level of visibility and control that can help FIs overcome the challenges associated with implementing emerging payment technologies and provide the assurance they need to succeed in an evolving digital payment landscape.
