The UK is due to upgrade its instant payments platform by mid-2025. The New Payments Architecture (NPA) aims to deliver multiple benefits, including ease of access and enhanced data carrying capabilities. In…

By all accounts, 2022 was difficult for just about everyone. Continuing economic fallout from the pandemic, geopolitical upheaval, soaring inflation, rising energy costs and a host of other pressures all underscored the…

It’s no secret that the account-to-account payments processing model remains under strain. Despite payment services being ‘mission critical’, many Tier 1 banks continue to see these payment operations as a ‘cost centre’….

Innovation is enabling new types of payments and creating a truly dynamic ecosystem. Yet in order to create a market where new schemes like Account-to-Account payments can compete, regulation must play a…

  Caught between two regulatory juggernauts I’ve been really enjoying the recent Six Nations rugby: there is some phenomenal skill on show, and some very astute tactics, but you can’t beat the…

  2017: The year of Instant Payments  Unless you’ve spent the last 365 days hiding under a rock, you’ll be fully aware that 2017 has been the year of Instant Payments. Regulators…

Author: Lauren Jones Date: 13th July, 2017 Lauren Jones, Icon Solutions’ International Payments Ambassador, has created a country profile on the Guatemalan payments market. This shares key facts and figures for this country including modernisation plans…

Author: Lauren Jones Date: 4th July, 2017 Lauren Jones, Icon Solutions’ International Payments Ambassador, has created a country profile on the Belize payments market. This shares key facts and figures for this country including the launch…

Author: Lauren Jones Date: 18th May, 2017 Lauren Jones, Icon’s International Payments Ambassador has created a country profile on the Mexican payments market. This shares key facts and figures for this country including the names of…

Author: Tom Hay Date: 13th July 2016 Until now financial institutions (FI’s) have been in control of their digital presence, offering their own branded services to customers via tablets, mobiles and wearable…

As a European directive, PSD2 has to be transposed into UK law. HM Treasury has recently launched a consultation inviting comment on the proposed legislative changes. The consultation document is written in…

Icon’s Payments team have just returned from the FinExtra’s  NextGen Banking conference in Helsinki, Finland and thought we’d share some highlights from the event. To open the event, Erkki Poutiainen summed up…

Following the recent publication of the European Banking Association (EBA) draft Regulatory Technical Standards (RTS), covering Secure Customer Authentication (SCA) and secure communication, Icon’s Tom Hay takes a closer look at ten…

The Access to Accounts provisions of PSD2 oblige banks to allow third parties (TPPs) to access bank details and initiate payments on behalf of the bank’s customers. The huge unanswered question is,…

Fragmentation has become a very real challenge for the industry as instant payment schemes are being implemented on a country by country basis, and each country is doing it differently. Like the…

Icon Solutions, the independent IT payment consultancy and specialist technology provider, today announced the worldwide launch of its Instant Payments Framework (IPF). IPF is an agile yet robust software product that expedites…