Interview: Nadish Lad, Volante – destiny and dreams
Nadish Lad, Volante: be gone, financial messaging integration nightmares!
In an exclusive interview with payment specialist Volante Technologies, Nadish Lad, director – head of payments product, explains the firm’s foundation, vision and its key unique selling propositions (USPs).
“Financial messaging integration is a nightmare – something of an art form almost. So how can one make this more of an efficient, quick and consistent process? The vision of our founders was to apply intellect and design to create products that make financial message integration easier through automation and readily available out-of-the-box modules to speed up integration.”
Lad makes it clear where Volante’s strategy lies. It is not to build a large team of people offering services – but rather invest in the creation of software IP. With smart software you can reduce the time and amount of effort needed to get the desired result. Today, Volante is a 200+ people strong organisation with offices around the globe supporting its growing diverse customer base in financial services. It is this diverse client base that drives product innovation through best practice very effectively.
From its origins 17 years ago, the Volante Designer software rapidly evolved. The firm started to build a library of plugins – seen as quick solutions out of the box, but with business rules applied – such as validation, exception management and enrichment.
Three years ago, Volante added functionality specific to the payments industry to its time proven Volante Designer product and created the VolPay Suite of payment processing products. Volante products are “platform agnostic” and cloud compliant. Volante is experiencing much interest in the payments processing domain from organisations looking to increase business agility through technology.
Business focus
Lad says Volante’s “golden principle” supporting its promise of accelerated implementations is essentially, automation, out-of-box plugins, configuration rather than coding, and inbuilt testing.
“For every dollar of software licensing, the client will typically pay $6-8 to implement it. We can bring this cost down dramatically,” he adds. “We provide the software, some consultancy and training. The client then becomes empowered to take charge of their own destiny rather than heavily depend on external specialists when it comes to payment transformations and changes.”
Volante maintains a growing library of hundreds of international and domestic message standards plugins, transformations and real-time payments processor modules. Updates are fast – usually within a week of them being announced. This means that Volante clients need not worry about such changes and focus on the business instead.
Quality control
Volante software is used in mission critical areas of financial institutions and therefore needs to be thoroughly tested. In fact, Lad points out that about 65% of its R&D staff are focused on testing and quality control of the product. In Volante’s 17-year history, they have never had a case in which a system went down due to Volante’s software.
He adds, “When it comes to helping our clients achieve quality in their implementations, our products offer inbuilt test harnesses – eliminating the need for traditional, time consuming testing processes.”
And as a final reminder, he makes it very clear of what Volante is focused on: “Volante has successfully, for many years, been providing innovative development platforms for financial message integration and processing with Volante Designer and VolPay Foundation.
“However, for a while now we have also been providing business applications for the payments industry with products like VolPay Channel, VolPay Hub and VolPay Gateway and additional ones to be launched soon. We will continue to invest in delivering our promise of enhanced agility in the payments business to our customers.”
This article is also featured in the November 2017 issue of the Banking Technology magazine.
Click here to read the digital edition – it is free!
