TITLE:
Establishing Payment Hubs—Unwind the Spaghetti?
AUTHORS:
Christoph Markert
KEYWORDS:
Payment Hubs, IT Management, IT Architecture
JOURNAL NAME:
American Journal of Industrial and Business Management,
Vol.4 No.4,
April
4,
2014
ABSTRACT:
Banks and financial
services providers are facing a more and more competitive business within the
retail banking as well as corporate market. Increasing productivity and
efficiency by decreasing operational costs is very often one milestone on the
strategic business roadmap of a bank or financial services providers. The
payment area is usually seen as a cost intensive, but necessary part of the
business and information technology (IT) landscape. Many banks and financial
services providers do still follow a best-of-breed approach within the system payments
landscape, which ends up in high operational and maintenance costs as different
payment processing platforms are serving different business purposes. The
establishment of a single globally centralized payment hub cannot be only the
solution for the ending of a heterogeneous payment processing landscape, but
also for supporting the strategic management roadmap by decreasing system
complexity and increasing the efficiency of the payment platforms and thus
decreasing operational and maintenance IT costs. Furthermore it can support
banks to establish a far more flexible technological implementation approach
for an entire core banking transformation program. This paper is analyzing the
challenges and issues banks and financial services providers are facing with
the establishment of payment hubs in their enterprise system landscape from a
management as well as IT point of view.