Finastra increases readiness for UK banks awaiting the New Payments Architecture

Finastra’s cloud-based payments technology and collaboration with new and established bank and technology partners, such as Microsoft, will support banks’ compliance with the infrastructure changes ahead of the 2024 deadline.

The number of banking payments processed via the current Faster Payments Service (FPS) grew by 23% from 2020 to 2021, reaching 3.6 billion, and is predicted to continue rising year on year (UK Finance), as per the press release. NPA, the new payment scheme by Pay.UK, the operator of the FPS, will provide the infrastructure to accommodate this growth. However, banks still using legacy systems may experience delayed readiness and ongoing challenges in adapting to future developments, such as the new ISO 20022 messaging standard, a requirement for NPA.

Adapting to the changes in the payments ecosystem

As a native ISO 20022 solution, Finastra’s Fusion Payments To Go addresses such challenges, simplifying compliance efforts, enabling rapid NPA readiness, and unlocking new opportunities, both for the initial phase of immediate payment support and downstream when BACS is migrated. Integrated with value-added services such as real-time fraud detection and liquidity monitoring via FusionFabric.cloud, it will enable banks to adhere to the new way of managing clearing and settlement of UK interbank payments. The solution, alongside Finastra’s ongoing engagement with Pay.UK, the Payment Systems Regulator (PSR), and the Bank of England, will ensure banks can seamlessly address both regulatory and business implications.

Finastra’s officials stated that this is a significant change for the UK payments market, and one of the biggest they’ve seen since 2010 and the introduction of Faster Payments. In particular, smaller organisations might struggle with the cost and capacity to make the move internally. The temptation to delay could also prove dangerous. Their position in the payments space and experience with similar schemes, such as the New Payments Platform (NPP) in Australia and FedNow in collaboration with the US Federal Reserve, ensures Finastra is well placed to support banks with this essential digital transformation journey.

Fusion Payments To Go, supported by Microsoft Azure and integrated with Finastra’s FusionFabric.cloud, enables banks to keep pace with rapidly changing regulation and customer demands. It offers pre-integration with existing core banking systems for speedy onboarding and go-live. As a SaaS solution, it helps banks to reduce operational costs and spend more time and resources driving innovation and delivering service excellence.