Faster Payments Originating from Overseas

A large UK retail bank

Project Purpose

Following the delivery of UK Faster Payments, the industry decided to expand the use of the solution to allow correspondent banks to use the Faster Payments infrastructure to forward-on CHAPS and International payments.

The implication of this decision was that the Faster Payments solutions would need to be enhanced to apply compliance checks, to ensure that Payments Originating from Overseas (POOs) were not originating from countries or individuals whose details appeared on industry sanctions lists.

Brief description

Following Icon Solutions involvement in the successful delivery of a Faster Payments solution at a major UK high street bank, and given our close ties with the industry's governing bodies, we were asked to help them deliver the changes needed to introduce compliance checking of Faster Payments Originating from Overseas.

Icon Solutions consultants undertook the roles of:

  • Senior Business Analyst and Senior Solution Architect - Providing oversight on the internal analysis team's definition of the requirements and the solution changes needed to meet them. In particular, this encompassed defining the settlement and risk challenges which occur when Faster Payments are 'delayed in transit', and the impact of this on 3rd party products (Fircosoft and Pegasystems). These roles also included liaising with the UK Payments Council's Faster Payments industry body (Icon is a member of the FPS technical design council) to provide an industry perspective on the solution needs.
  • Project Management - Drawing together the work of the business, the various IT applications, the third party suppliers, and the testing teams to ensure that the project met very aggressive delivery deadlines.
  • Testing Governance - Providing technical insight to ensure that the test plans were comprehensive yet pragmatic - too much testing would delay delivery and increase costs, insufficient testing would risk undermining the stability and credibility of the entire Faster Payments solution.

Icon Solutions were chosen for this engagement because of our combination of payments industry contacts and knowledge, our technology skills and our track-record of working with the bank, its off-shore providers and third party vendors.

The project was successfully delivered on time and within budget.

Key Products & Services

  • The main parts of the solution were delivered via products from Fircosoft (sanctions list checking) and Pegasystems (managing the case management of potential non-compliant payments).
  • Both of these packaged solutions were invoked from an Enterprise service bus hosted on WebSphere message broker.

Business Benefits of Project

  • Compliance with industry regulations within the set timescales
  • Delivery of a sanctions compliance framework which could be extended to other payments types.
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