Establishing Payment Hubs—Unwind the Spaghetti?

Abstract

Banks and financial services providers are facing a more and more competitive business within the retail banking as well as corporate market. Increasing productivity and efficiency by decreasing operational costs is very often one milestone on the strategic business roadmap of a bank or financial services providers. The payment area is usually seen as a cost intensive, but necessary part of the business and information technology (IT) landscape. Many banks and financial services providers do still follow a best-of-breed approach within the system payments landscape, which ends up in high operational and maintenance costs as different payment processing platforms are serving different business purposes. The establishment of a single globally centralized payment hub cannot be only the solution for the ending of a heterogeneous payment processing landscape, but also for supporting the strategic management roadmap by decreasing system complexity and increasing the efficiency of the payment platforms and thus decreasing operational and maintenance IT costs. Furthermore it can support banks to establish a far more flexible technological implementation approach for an entire core banking transformation program. This paper is analyzing the challenges and issues banks and financial services providers are facing with the establishment of payment hubs in their enterprise system landscape from a management as well as IT point of view.