UK high street bank

Project Purpose

Following regulatory pressure to improve the processing of domestic credit transfers, thirteen member banks collaborated to scope and deliver UK Faster Payments. The resulting solution aimed to reduce the processing timescales from three-or-more days for BACS to sub-fifteen seconds for Faster Payments.

Brief Description

The project involved replacing batch file exchange of payments with message based systems and online interface between the members.

In reality this involved massive changes to the front end systems, the security systems, the reconciliation and settlement models, the interfaces to legacy accounting platforms and the business operating models.

Key Products & Services

The Icon Solutions team had already been instrumental in defining and delivering a highly scalable and robust message based payments hub (hosted on WebSphere message broker) within the Bank.

In order to address this new combined technical and business challenge, the Bank appointed two Icon Solutions consultants to the industry steering committees (hosted by the UK Payments Council, formally APACS). The purpose of these appointments was to provide the Bank's representation into:

Within the Bank, Icon Solutions' staff undertook delivery responsibility for enhancing payments hub, as well as architecting and designing the end-to-end solution. This task involved defining the collaboration and interfaces between fifteen discrete systems in the Bank, including legacy platforms and 3rd party packages.

The team also led the technical testing effort, including the particular challenges of controlling message flows to achieve a steady processing rate of 1800 (business) transactions per second (tps) through the payments hub and an unprecedented 220 tps through the ACI gateway.

The fraud potential introduced when allowing the immediate and irrevocable exchange of credit funds also called for unique detection solutions. Based on the Fair Issac analytics and decisioning software the solution consolidates feeds from all channels to give a holistic pattern of fraud attacks.

Clearly such convoluted and complex system interactions needed an equally intelligent reconciliation solution. Icon Solutions' combined business and technology insight also lead the development of the reconciliation suit, based on Smartstream TLM.

Business Benefits of Project

Most member Banks approached Faster Payments as a mandated project which had to be delivered to placate the FSA.

Whilst most members struggled with escalating budgets (some seeing a ten-fold increase in cost) and elongated timescales, Icon Solutions' unparalleled experience in the banking sector, combined with the company's unique technical expertise, proved invaluable to the Bank. With Icon Solutions' assistance the Bank delivered the Faster Payments solution to the original projected budget and to the industry agreed timescales.