Financial institutions can fall victim to a few mistakes when introducing a new payment solution. Here are the top 5, and how you can avoid them.
1. Choosing a rigidly designed solution that cannot be parametrized, extended, or customized
Not all payment solutions and solution providers are flexible enough to offer parametrization mechanisms, allow extending functionalities to meet future needs, or offer customization capabilities. So, your financial institution should make sure that the solution offers enough parameters that can be altered over time and extended in terms of upgrades and updates. Your financial institution should also ensure that your solution provider can customize the solution to your distinctive processes and operational environments.
2. Falling short with a traditional/legacy infrastructure
Outdated legacy systems consume massive operational resources and efforts and lack scalability and reliability in the long term. Accordingly, your financial institution should opt for cloud-native solutions that can be easily deployed within a cloud infrastructure whether on-premises or on a private cloud. These solutions not only offer ease of deployment, but also consume less computing power, are easier to maintain, and are horizontally scalable to accommodate for peak loads.
3. Selecting solutions with limited endpoint integration interfaces
Payment solutions with limited endpoint integration interfaces result in numerous change requests required to integrate with new domestic and international payment partners and correspondents. Accordingly, your financial institution should opt for a payment solution with many endpoint integration interfaces that accommodate for locally hosted, nationally integrated and internationally connected systems exposed by local clearing houses and international payment networks and providers.
4. Opting for proprietary non-standard compliant solutions
Solutions that do not comply with the latest payments standards and message formats such as ISO 20022 will result in massively higher operational costs when a financial institution is mandated to comply with new standards. So, your financial institution must opt for solutions that comply with the latest standards but also offer backward interoperability with old standards and message formats.
5. Overlooking hidden infrastructure requirements
Sometimes, financial institutions purchase a low-cost solution while overlooking hidden infrastructure requirements such as compute power, storage, database management systems, etc. The result is incurring double the amount which would have been paid to another solution provider with no hidden costs. To avoid this, your financial institution should request all details of infrastructure requirements in advance in addition to a drill exercise on the total cost of the solution in comparison to other vendors.
Finally...
All these mistakes can be avoided if you select the right solution vendor who can assist you with the entire journey from inception to feasibility, and more importantly, implementing a payment solution that is flexible and customizable.
