Building out a payments hub with Infosys Finacle
Part of Finacle’s banking solution offering is payments. Peter Ryan, senior product manager at Infosys Finacle, speaks to FinTech Futures about how the firm is building out the peripherals of its enterprise payments hub.
ISO 2OO22-native
The payments part of Finacle’s offering works with both its own and other, third party core banking solutions.
One of its big benefits is that it’s ISO 2002-native. “As payment systems continue to move to this standard, it places us in a good position,” Ryan explains.
One of its big benefits is that it’s ISO 2002-native.
That’s because it speeds up the roll out of new payments schemes and allows Finacle to act as a good-quality data acquirer.
“If it’s already ISO 2002-compliant, then you keep that granularity of data. But if you transfer it from a legacy alternative to an ISO 2002 format, then you lose that granularity and the data is worth less.”
With this granularity, firms can monetise their data better, and use it to complete fraud and anti-money laundering (AML) checks.
But the advantages don’t stop there. With real-time payments based on ISO 2002, Finacle’s same-based payments hub can also improve processing times – such as the number of transactions per second.
Real-time depends on the context
Asked how Finacle defines “real-time” payments, Ryan says “it depends on the context”.
“If you’re sitting in a restaurant waiting for meal payment to go through or paying in front of a busy supermarket queue – these are the sort of payments which need to be done in seconds.
“But large commercial business-to-business (B2B) payments can take longer than seconds, particularly if they’re cross-border.”
Whilst Infosys Finacle’s largest presence is in India, its home market, the firm also spans the US and Europe, as well as Southeast Asia. Ryan argues that India and Southeast Asia are some of the “most innovative” markets for payments around the world.
Some 49% of urban commercial bank customers in Southeast Asia already use e-wallets. That percentage is projected to jump to 84% by 2025, according to Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
And in India, the government-led creation of a Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has significantly boosted the interoperability of digital payments across the country.
The future
Finacle has already built its messaging hub, so now an area of focus for Finacle is payment order management.
“Payments can come from different sources,” explains Ryan. “But they need to come together and be routed correctly based on their source and the data they contain.”
Asked what Finacle is doing in terms of open banking-initiated payments, the product manager says it’s definitely an area of interest.
Infosys Finacle already supports open banking. “We are looking at open banking processing and the initiation of payments through APIs. We have the APIs there to support that, it’s just looking at what else we can do, particularly for SME customers.”
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