SEPA PSD 2009

A large UK retail bank.

Project Purpose

  • To interpret the regulatory rules of the SEPA Payment Services Directive (PSD) 2009, and translate these into work streams to deliver process and IT compliant changes in very tight timescales.
  • The project was in response to legislative change.

Brief description

The SEPA PSD 2009 project involved changes to the end-to-end processing of every money transmission system within the Bank, including BACS, Paper Clearings, Faster Payments, CHAPS and International.

The Bank's initial estimates for the project costs were in advance of £40million. In addition, resource constraints meant a compliant solution would be delivered 6 months after the mandated deadline.

A team of four Icon Solutions business analysts and senior architects were brought into the project to identify how the Bank could deliver on-time.

Icon's initial task was to manage a team of seven solution architects to develop a levelled set of as-is process and design models, from which the real areas of challenge could be identified and articulated.

Using this insight Icon Solutions began discussion with senior representatives from the Bank's business and legal teams and instigated representation at an industry level in order to agree a more pragmatic interpretation of the legislation. Using this we developed a revised set of requirements, and the project was able to deliver on-time and at a reduced cost of £17million.

Key Products & Services

The solution was delivered on a wide variety of applications, both bespoke and off-the shelf products. The latter included changes to:

  • The Stelink payments gateway - to change the charges calculation processing, amend the response codes, and provide a new interface to send notification messages to 3rd parties.
  • The ACI payments gateway - to change response code processing.
  • The Fircosoft sanctions filtering application - to enhance the response codes issued when payments processing is delayed for investigation.

Business Benefits of Project

As a large retail Bank, our customer could not afford the reputational impact of missing the compliance deadline for SEPA PSD 2009. Our involvement was essential in ensuring the project scope was appropriately managed.

At the same time it was important that we left the customer with sufficient collateral to help facilitate future changes, especially SEPA PSD 2012 which we have also been engaged to support.

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