Better Late Than Never: Banking Investments in Payments Hubs

Payments hubs have been touted as a way to improve efficiency and enhance customer service. Yet, banks have been slow to adopt this technology, due to legacy systems, IT resource limitations and increasing regulatory requirements.

This article from Bank Systems & Technology quotes Accenture’s Matthew Friend, who suggests that as the economy improves, more businesses will recognize the business case for implementing a centralized payments hub—and accordingly, investments in payments hubs should increase.

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Payments hubs provide a centralized platform that is designed to process all types of payments, regardless of mechanism.

According to Matthew Friend, head of payment services in North America for Accenture, payments hubs enable financial institutions to bring together independent parts of the business and operate them as a single, cohesive enterprise. The benefits of doing so include greater efficiency, enhanced customer service and improved risk management.

As with other types of technology innovation, payments hub implementation is challenged by legacy systems, reduced IT resources and increasing compliance requirements.

While some banks have implemented aspects of hub technology, this article argues that very few are capable of processing all types of payments globally—and as such, are not true payments hubs.

This article recommends that banks take an evolutionary, or incremental, approach to building a payments hub system. In particular, banks should:

• Understand the long-term value created by a payments hub.

• Break down the transformation into logical pieces for a multi-generational program.

• Develop an efficient path to achieve that transformation.

By taking an incremental approach, banks can address specific operational problems as they arise—over time, migrating individual payment streams to create a centralized payments hub.