of transactions.’ The next phase, for cross-border, was where Mouton expected to see the largest benefit. In this area, probably 60 per cent of transactions were not STP, he said. He expected this to fall to 20 per cent or lower. Probably around 25 per cent of the improvement would be from business process reengineering. Using the workflow capabilities, much of this was about synchronising processes, he explained, and moving from decentralised to centralised ways of working. Functionality would be moved out of the branches, where much of the work was essentially manual, and into the hub. A lot of repair work would become automatic. Tasks such as FX rate look-ups that were semi-manual in the branches would become fully automated in the GPU. The same was true for a number of regulatory-related tasks. ‘Staff will be able to focus on the problem transactions rather than the run-of-the-mill.’ For customers, a key long-term benefit should be a clear view of their transactions at any point in time. This was largely the focus of the Systar BAM part of the project. The capability to do enquiries on transaction status would be used internally but was expected to be a capability that could be increasingly pushed out to the customers themselves. This transparency was anticipated to be greatly aided by the consolidation of payments into the single hub. An initial task previously was to locate which system a payment had ended up in. The bank also built a separate bulk file application outside of Global PayPlus which forms part of the GPU. For the future, ABSA Bank planned to evaluate the SOA revamp of the Fundtech platform (so Global PayPlus-SP). This version was basically not ready when ABSA made its selection, said Mouton. ‘It is of interest in the future, it has to be if we are to move to a full service-based architecture,’ that will support further transparency and flexibility for customers. As for the bank’s UK parent, by early 2013, Barclays was live on all inbound activity for all currencies across the entire UK platform, and for around 70 per cent of the overall volume of outbound transactions. A conversion was under way for a number of smaller payment initiation channels for customers around the group, with this expected to conclude in April 2013. It would bring to a close the migration of the outbound traffic for all currencies. The work was now shifting to the low- value payments segment (or ‘mass payments’, as Barclays called them) and the platform was being rolled out across international locations. The venture was not without ‘some challenging defects’, acknowledged Steve Allen, head of global payments at Barclays Corporate Banking. This was partly due to Barclays’ own infrastructure, partly due to the product and partly due to the market conditions, he said. ‘This comes with any re-platforming. However, there were no market-visible issues during the deployment and in fact we are one of the few institutions that didn’t have a Chaps [Clearing House Automated Payment System] extension during 2012.’ The Barclays team was ‘delighted with the achieved quality and accuracy’, he added.


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Time-wise, it was running a couple of months behind schedule. ‘Our original expectation for deployment was 36 months, we will land on about month 38-39,’ said Allen. ‘A 90-day movement on a 36-month schedule - we are very happy with that.’ Dan Pilling, head of the strategic change management team at the bank, added that ‘a conservative approach and concentration on quality rather than speed has really paid dividends. The accuracy rates are very high: in our activity out of the UK, for example, we are operating at greater than 5.5 Sigma.’ A number of legacy systems were now being decommissioned. ‘I am aggressively trying to eradicate the number of legacy applications,’ said Allen. Decommissioning was done in ‘a very structured way’, as there was a lot of historical data on the old payments platform.


Bank of America Merrill Lynch


For Global PayPlus-SP, the stand-out initial customer has been Bank of America Merrill Lynch. The first focus was to replace a range of payment systems in the treasury space but Fundtech was hopeful that the use of the system might also be extended to retail. The bank had more than six online applications for payment initiation, said Cindy Murray, head of product innovation and development for global product solutions. There were legacy applications for specific niches, some of which were built more than ten years earlier. The bank looked at these applications to see whether any could be enhanced to form the basis for a new, standardised platform but it was decided that none fitted the bill. The aim, as described by Murray, was a single payment application that would allow customers to send and receive any kind of payment, anywhere in the world, without needing to understand the complexities of the payment processes. That platform should also allow customers to see the status of their payments at any point in time, along the lines of a parcel within FedEx, regardless of the nature or route of those payments. To a degree, the situation was brought to a head by Bank


of America’s acquisition of LaSalle Bank Corporation from ABN Amro in October 2007. LaSalle’s technology was far superior to that of Bank of America from a payment portal standpoint, said Murray. The latter’s customers wanted a better online experience but the LaSalle technology did not have the capacity to be applied to the entire group. The same was true of LaSalle’s single payment platform which resided behind the portal, with this deemed not to have the necessary scalability. After an ‘exhaustive’ selection, Global PayPlus-SP was


taken for the bank’s online payment hub. Eight vendors were evaluated, starting with a ‘very comprehensive RFI process’. This was followed by lengthy presentations and the building of a prototype solution by each vendor. The selection was then reduced to a couple of companies and these were given a detailed RFP. They needed to produce a second prototype solution and meet the criteria set out within the RFP, with these scored by the bank. There was also dialogue throughout


Payment Systems & Suppliers Report | www.ibsintelligence.com


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