Future in Real Time: valantic at SIBOS in London

Since 1978, the finance industry meets once a year at the SIBOS (SWIFT International Banking Operations Seminar). This year, the experts from valantic Financial Services Automation also attended the event in the British capital. The general development of the payment and transaction landscape is the best accelerator for valantic’s products. This year, the leading motto of the trade fair was the cost pressure and the growing digitisation in the finance sector. Hereby, the migration to the new ISO 20022 standard played an important role in payments. The current European interest rate policy makes it more and more difficult for banks to break even. Accordingly, each process optimisation for increasing the contribution margin is valuable; the pressure to improve efficiency is growing faster than ever. Digitisation makes a major contribution to the automation of processes. “It is also influenced by the changing needs of bank clients who not least experience digitisation in their private environment and demand similar services from their banks,” said Dirk Vesper, Vice President Product Development at valantic.

On top of this, there are the customer wishes: “New expectations are changing how banks are interacting with their customers,” described Julie Harris from the Bank of America Merrill Lynch during the SIBOS 2019. With the Real Time Payment Engine and FinCASE solution, valantic offers modern and high-performance solutions to assist with all present and future requirements in payments, e.g. instant payments or ISO 20022 compliance. For more than 20 years, valantic develops software for payments, investment banking, transaction management and electronic trading and has gained recognition as a provider for tailor-made solutions. With numerous successful projects worldwide, valantic is one of the leading developers and trendsetters of banking digitisation for the extension of open banking, automation as well as the simplification of business operations.

“We’re looking at instant as the priority, market by market,” described Anupam Sinha by the Citi. The experts agree: instant will be the “new normal”. Instant payments requires a significant reconstruction of the banks’ IT infrastructures. Another important topic at the trade fair agenda was the ISO 20022 standard: “Open banking and ISO 20022 are transformational levers,” described Sungmahn Seo by JP Morgan. As of November 2019, the workflows as per the new standard complement the already existing SEPA regulations; with a transitional arrangement until 2026, banks are still allowed to use MT protocols – beyond that, also for target and SWIFT payments, the ISO 20022 XML protocols are definitely compulsory. “Banks are well advised to promote the ISO migration as fast as possible with a large-scale digitisation strategy,” said Dirk Vesper from valantic. Especially, since banks will have to support certain processes for complaints of SEPA payments as early as November 2019. For this purpose, valantic offers FinCASE, a proven solution for processing exceptions and investigations which already supports ISO 20022-based complaints.

The internationally used ISO 20022 standard supports formats which are considerably more flexible than existing country- and bank-specific message formats and thus provides significant benefits in the field of process handling. For example, extended bank transaction information is provided and improvements for processing complaints are enabled. The use of an end-to-end payment processing also simplifies the interoperability between cross-border payments and domestic real-time payments. With FinCASE, this migration is fully prepared and considerably simplified for the utilising institutions, particularly as long-term sustainability can be secured. The competitiveness of banks is based on processes: Those who successfully optimise and, at the same time, fulfil the requirements, work more profitable than the competition.

Future in Real Time: valantic at SIBOS in London

Interview: Dirk Vesper, Vice President Product Management, valantic