SIBOS 2020: Finastra enables pre-packaged payments for medium banks

By Sunniva Kolostyak

Finastra has unveiled Fusion Payments To Go – a pre-packaged domestic and cross-border payments solution for small and mid-sized banks – offering reduced costs and risks associated with maintenance and changing market regulations.

Speaking to IBS Intelligence at the annual SIBOS conference, Paul Thomalla, Global Head of Payments at Finastra, said the FinTech provider is aiming to offer smaller banks the same products as it is offering its Tier 1 clients – but with reduced fixed implementation costs and in a standardised flow.

“When you actually look at the sheer volume of financial institutions, they actually reside in Tier 3, Tier 4, Tier 5. You could almost say they are 99 per cent of the financial institutions, versus the 1 per cent which are the large household brand names.”

“They have all the same issues that the large financial institutions have,” Thomalla said, citing issues including regulation, the time it takes to complete projects, and remaining current.

Finastra aims to complete onboarding of Fusion Payments To Go in four months. It includes secure and scalable deployment in the cloud on Microsoft Azure and meets changing market regulations and customer demand for frictionless and immediate payments.

Delivered as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Finastra looks after all elements from contracting, onboarding, service operations and upgrades, to billing, reducing the bank’s operational costs and providing a faster time to market. The solution will grow with the bank via an evergreen service aligned to all relevant regulatory and market infrastructure changes.

“What we have done is taken all of our expertise and legacy and offering it fixed-time, fixed-price, fixed-scope. They are not the words that anyone would use, and we feel rightly proud to be able to offer this. We think that is exactly what the industry needs, because it is going from an analogue world to a digital world. We want to be part of that revolution to help them – and not just the top banks, the vast majority of the financial institutions also need our help,” Thomalla said.

Built on Finastra’s payment hub, Fusion Global PAYplus, Fusion Payments To Go provides functionality and operating rules for supported clearing and settlement mechanisms, along with standard integration to external applications. Clients will also get access to the latest value-added services via its open development platform, FusionFabric.cloud.

Fusion Payments To Go is available to mid- and small-tier banks in Europe interested in implementing RT1 and/or TIPS immediate payments. The Finastra solution also supports banks worldwide looking to implement SWIFT, as well as FED and TCH in the US, with other schemes to follow.

Recently, Finastra announced a partnership with the First Independence Bank in Michigan to offer the Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) its Fusion Phoenix core, Fusion DepositPro, Fusion Digital Banking, and Fusion TotalTransact, as well as other solutions.