 We’ve launched a new whitepaper on preparing your payments infrastructure for the next decade. Complete the form below to download the whitepaper, and find out what’s changing in the European payments landscape, How failure to adapt became the biggest infrastructure risk facing payments businesses, and how you can design a payments infrastructure that allows you to reduce risks and quickly bring new products and services to market. Retail payments are a route to profitability for banks, but it’s also a route to market share and new customers. FinTechs have one main advantage in the market - flexibility. They have been able to move quickly to develop new features and roll them out before traditional banks could. Now however, we see traditional banks rolling out those same features - FinTechs will lose some of their competitive advantage if they can’t maintain the same level of innovation as before. The challenge for traditional banks is that it’s taken them a long time to get here - they couldn’t respond to the challenge as soon as it happened. At the end of the day, this is a conversation about tech infrastructure. Challenger banks, working on modern tech stacks, could quickly develop and deploy. The way for traditional institutions to take this on is to introduce similar degrees of agility in order to give options to customers who don’t like the pared-back experience of digital banks but feel traditional banks don’t understand their needs either. The issue is inertia born of fear. When a bank’s technology fails, the first repercussion is that it makes headline news. The second is that the regulator gets involved. Combined, the bank could face fines, fees and a badly damaged reputation. The desire to avoid this scenario at all costs stifles a lot of technology advancement in the financial space. Unfortunately in the long term, this policy is likely to create more problems than it solves. If we look even further into the future, disruptions from the likes of Blockchain and AI could bring further, more dramatic change to the industry. While they are still very much in the early stages of development and roll out, a CTO must be able to anticipate the change that these, or other unknown technologies, might bring - and be in a position to react and adapt. Technology leaders must be able to keep pace with the new products and services that technology will introduce. And do it efficiently.
We’ve launched a new whitepaper on preparing your payments infrastructure for the next decade. Head to our Market Insights page to download the whitepaper, and find out what’s changing in the European payments landscape, How failure to adapt became the biggest infrastructure risk facing payments businesses, and how you can design a payments infrastructure that allows you to reduce risks and quickly bring new products and services to market.  Many financial services companies today are operating on technology stacks that aren’t up to the challenge of today’s market. Some banks are even operationally dependent on technology that was installed in the 70s or 80s. Global growth and opening up of economies will help the payments sector thrive again post-pandemic, but it’s only those with the right infrastructure in place who will be able to seize these opportunities. It’s become a cliche, but the pandemic has accelerated a decade’s worth of change into just a few short years. While the core infrastructure helped banks keep on top of the day to day challenges in the pandemic, many senior teams will be left wondering what they could have done differently had there been better infrastructure in place. Customers needed new and different types of products more than ever. They needed protection from increased online fraud. Businesses needed to change how they operated and collected payments. In general, banks were positioned to survive, not thrive going into the pandemic. That could cost them customer loyalty, and ultimately revenue if left unchanged. Part of the challenge is that creating and buying payments infrastructure is a big decision - it’s the engine room of your bank’s operations. That can make it all too easy to stick your head in the sand and leave changing it as a decision for another day. But that only creates bigger and bigger problems down the road. Eventually your current infrastructure will meet a challenge it can’t handle - and you’ll end up with bad headlines and an appointment with the regulator. What do my customers expect and what’s my business model? When faced with social changes, a raft of digital-first competitors, and regulatory pressures, understanding your positioning in the market landscape is critical. The financial institutions need to figure out how they can appeal to new consumer expectations, and turn them into a sustainable revenue stream. The success of this generation of banks has been fueled by changing expectations of a new generation of end-users. With more trust placed in the internet, digital only offerings have been able to flourish. Banks are facing pressures on their business models. Many are struggling to make money the way they used to, with pressure from falling interest rates, current account revenues, managing branch footprints and loan losses amongst others. On top of that, new regulations like the European Payments Initiative means technology must be geared towards adapting to the new challenges and opportunities created. Follow Five Key Principles for Decision Making
The payments industry in Europe is facing an unprecedented set of challenges, and the speed of change makes this more pressing than ever before. The challenge facing the industry isn’t whether we understand the technical barriers, but instead whether financial institutions are able to execute the right technology strategy to meet market needs. Customers need new and different types of products more than ever. The risk is that CTOs, boards and other senior leadership teams fall into a false sense of security that could prove fatal.
 In today’s highly competitive Retail Payments market, there is no margin for error. To be successful, payments organizations need the very best technology, the right skills and experience, and the commercial agility to rapidly exploit any opportunities. It is a fact of business-life that all organizations have their ups and downs. However, the smart organizations continually pay attention to the critical factors that reduce the likelihood of ‘nasty surprises’, while also creating the best chances for accelerated success. A simple ‘roll the dice’ strategy cannot ensure a future of strong growth, even if that’s how you have always ‘played’ before. The availability of powerful payment solutions like TANGO, the effectiveness of DevOps and Agile methodologies, and the perpetual shift in consumer demands are combining in a perfect storm. Unless of course, your organization can transform itself to thrive in this new era of Retail Payments. Interestingly, the humble "Snakes ‘n Ladders" game provides a great metaphor for the ups and downs of a modern Retail Payments business. SEEK COMPOUNDING GAINS Fortunately, some business gains lead directly to further gains with a significant amplification of the overall benefits. Being more competitive comes from being able to learn and change more quickly than your competition. Using the TANGO micro-services payments suite delivers all the flexibility and commercial agility you need. This is clearly a crucial benefit. Additionally, with TANGO you can reduce your time and costs for compliance, support a wider range of consumer payments types, and easily form new business partnerships for accelerated growth. One ‘ladder’ leads to another, and another. Lucky dice throws aren’t guaranteed - but smart planning can, and does, make them more likely.
 In today’s Retail Payments market there are two critical success factors; scale your business for revenue growth and optimize your operations for cost savings. This is a simple and well-known adage, but it masks a myriad of complexities. The inherent difficulties in meeting stringent regulations, reducing costs, and responding to rapidly changing market needs has driven legacy payments systems to breaking point. Changing payments platforms represents a multi-decade investment commitment with serious repercussions in the event of failure. However, no amount of “just hanging on” will avoid the inevitable and it will only result in a loss of opportunities to more nimble competitors. With so much at stake it is understandable that management teams are cautious about changing payments platforms – but perhaps to their own detriment? Fortunately, a clear way forward is emerging – TANGO by Lusis Payments. TANGO is used by 4 of the top 10 Retail Banks to power their payments strategies, as well as a multitude of banks and processors around the globe. TANGO’s advanced micro-services technology and pedigree customers are clear advantages over its rivals. Additionally, TANGO’s functional richness, and unique configuration flexibility, guarantee ongoing business advantages. A recent TANGO Cloud deployment provides a great example of these advantages. An existing Lusis customer successfully redeployed their legacy DCC service into the Azure cloud using TANGO. As a result, the customer achieved substantial cost savings and vastly improved operational efficiencies. The entire service was implemented using standard product code and was delivered for acceptance testing within 3 months. TANGO was deployed in the Azure cloud with Azure SQL using TANGO’s built in Active-Active configuration to ensure the highest availability. External links were used to connect to the bank’s on-premise HSMs and Card Association networks to leverage existing investment. TANGO’s tokenization support protects the card details and the Azure security was augmented with the bank’s own measures to achieve PCI certification.
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