As Payment Channels Converge, What’s the Payment Integrity Payoff?

For many banks and payment providers, retail and enterprise payments are coming together to share more of the same infrastructure, systems and services. But when it comes to validating and monitoring their different payment channels, firms are still falling short of a centralized approach.

Operational controls are often both fragmented and incomplete. And that’s bad news for the integrity of payment processes – whether they relate to everyday card transactions or substantial interbank settlements and faster payment schemes.

In the increasingly complex and regulated world of payments, integrity itself has a higher value than ever. Mistakes, missteps and fraud can cost dearly and result in penalties, complaints or missed funding opportunities.

So, with efficiency, service levels, liquidity and compliance at stake, it’s never been more critical to ensure that retail and enterprise payments alike move exactly as they should, from stage to stage and system to system.

But the sheer complexity of the modern payment life cycle also makes exceptions more likely to happen – and payment integrity less likely to pay off.

In the digital world, as different data streams flow in multiple directions from disparate solutions, there are growing number of connections, systems and third-party relationships to manage.

POS transactions, for example, move through device software, switching networks, payment networks and internal systems, while enterprise payments are pushed from treasury and front-office systems through payment hubs and interbank networks such as SWIFT.

But no matter what the payment flow, you need to ensure – at each stop en route – that no information is lost, muddled, added or amended.

In other words, there are now lots more checks and balances to make, more quickly, across retail and enterprise payments – and at varying frequencies; some in real time, others intraday or at end of day. And traditionally, payment providers have carried out these checks as disparate processes, increasing costs, complexity and risk.

Now, as retail and enterprise payment channels increasingly converge within firms, it’s time to pull together and manage all your payment integrity processes in one place, too.

A single, powerful automated platform for payment validation, dispute management and liquidity monitoring will allow you to do just that – streamlining your operations and providing new economies of scale. As well as ensuring integrity throughout the payment life cycle, an integrated solution of this kind will help you meet settlement obligations and intraday funding requirements, and resolve errors rapidly 24/7, before they affect other processes or your customers. And with AI-powered processes and pre-packaged best practice templates, you can accelerate your time to value, too.

In the face of a more centralized and streamlined internal payments ecosystem, it makes no sense to create complexity with a fragmented integrity framework. Instead, take your cue from the alignment of retail and enterprise payments – and remember that it pays to bring all your processes together. Keep up with convergence at every step and make payment integrity pay off for your business.