Volante lays Foundation for faster payment systems integration
Hamilton: “we’ll pretty much guarantee that months will become weeks and years will become months …”
Financial messaging and data integration specialist Volante Technologies has taken a step into the world of packaged products with the launch of VolPay Foundation, a development platform “designed to ease the challenges of payment integration and payment processing projects”.
Volante has worked with banks and corporates implementing payment systems over the past 15 years on message and data integration projects and has now brought together the experience it has gained into the new platform, claiming that it will dramatically speed projects and reduce over-run.
“The problem has always been implementation and integration – you are already legacy by the time you’re live,” said Nadish Lad, Volante’s recently appointed head of payments product. “VolPay Foundation is packaged as a tool that business analysts can deploy – if you can understand Excel and a bit of Visio, you’re sorted.”
Lad said that his previous experience working at organisations such as Citi and EY was that most projects are “big, disruptive and never take less than three years”.
Fiona Hamilton, vice president of Europe and Asia said: “People always under-estimate how many end-points there are that payment service providers have to support: each integration becomes a major project in its own right.”
The VolPay Foundation development platform includes a suite of modular tools developed to address these payment integration issues. Functional components of the product include graphical model-based automated code generation, validation and conversion logic, mapping tools, proprietary format definition, industry standard payments plug-ins, an ISO 20022-based payments canonical model and the ability to design a payment integration code – all with typically very limited hand coding, because the business modelling used to create a specification automatically generates Java code and documentation. The platform also includes pre-built and maintained payment message standards and pre-built conversions to over 50 clearing standards to ensure support for a growing number of clearing and settlement mechanisms.
The company is so confident that this approach will save time and money in implementation and ongoing maintenance that “we’ll pretty much guarantee that months will become weeks and years will become months”, said Hamilton.
The approach with VolPay Foundation has been “to take the complexity out of the application” said Lad. The integration of different mechanisms is separated from the processing, so that new services or customers can be on-boarded easily and changes to standards implemented very quickly.
