Global Wholesale Payments Vendors: Making STP a Reality
A new report from Aite Group examines the opportunities and challenges financial institutions face in responding to business clients’ demands for straight-through processing (STP) of wholesale payments. The report profiles off-the-shelf payments solutions offered by seven global payments technology vendors – ACI Worldwide, Clear2Pay, Dovetail, Fundtech, Logica, Misys and SunGard – and evaluates them on a number of criteria: deployment environments, number and geographic reach of deployments, technology used, types of payments supported, and strength of functionality.
Corporate treasurers, who are responsible for these functions, are increasingly demanding greater efficiency from payments through STP, and improved visibility of payments status in real-time or near real-time. Treasurers rely on their financial institutions to provide the necessary functionality, but these financial institutions typically fall short – financial institutions maintain a plethora of systems for individual payments types, some of which are redundant due to past mergers and acquisitions remaining unconsolidated. Combined with the increased need for regulatory compliance, fraud prevention and risk management, financial institutions may find that outsourced technology provides the necessary solution. Even the largest global financial institutions are embracing vendor-provided solutions for global wholesale payments.
“While the largest financial institutions once perceived their in-house, proprietary systems to be differentiators, banks of all sizes are now embracing open standards,” said Nancy Atkinson, senior analyst with Aite Group and author of this report. “The model is changing from the system itself offering distinguishing characteristics to rules-based configurations that provide financial institutions and their clients with the ability to customise vendor offerings without coding changes.”