Windows for Financial Services - Oct 2007

What do you see as the main challenges facing bank and corporate participants in the payments industry at present?

The main challenge facing both banks and corporates is standards, particularly at the domestic payment level. From one country to the next there is a different standard for payments, and often where there are standards they are not totally adhered to.

There are issues at the connectivity level as well. Banks around the world have adopted different connections into their infrastructure, ranging from Connect:Direct to virtual private networks (VPNs), and more recently through SWIFTNet adopting firstly the Member Administered Closed User Group (MA-CUG) and latterly the Standardized Corporate Environment (SCORE). But while MA-CUG and SCORE may be the answer for some corporates with large budgets, it remains price prohibitive for the small and medium enterprise market.

Standards also level the playing field. And while banks may seem to support such initiatives, standardizing any environment opens oneself up to competition, something the banks will want to avoid, even if their corporate customers benefit from such an approach.

What advantages does your approach offer users?

Clear2Pay offers two solutions in this area. One is Corporate Payment Hub (CPH), an internal corporate payment solution that allows corporates to manage and rationalize accounts, and route their payments to their preferred banks. All ERP systems at the various corporate offices are connected to the CPH.

The second is Open Payment Framework (OPF), which resides at the bank that provides an enterprise-wide payments engine for the processing of all payment types. The OPF has a number of solution derivatives, including SEPA Credit Transfers, SEPA Direct Debits, International Payments and Domestic Payments, as well as the enterprise-wide bank payment hub.

Both suites comprise a series of business components, one of which is a transformation framework. This means corporates can send payments in any format from the ERP to the CPH, or directly from the ERP to the bank, and the Clear2Pay engines will handle the transformation to ISO 20022. This makes SEPA implementation at the corporate easy

“From one country to the next there is a different standard for payments, and often where there are standards they are not totally adhered to,” says Clear2Pay’s Hartley.

Mark Hartley, Vice President Strategy and Marketing
Clear2Pay