Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc. (NYSE:BR), a global Fintech leader, has announced a collaboration with PPI AG, the Hamburg, Germany-based payments consultancy and supplier, to launch a joint payments initiative for banks and financial institutions in Europe.
Many banks are currently facing major challenges in payments processing, driven by recent and ongoing market changes, such as the implementation of PSD2, SEPA ISO migration, TARGET2 and SWIFT ISO20022 migration, while also responding to national payments infrastructure changes and the emergence of new protocols, such as EBICS. There is also increasing market demand for Request to Pay and SEPA IP via TIPS, which are on the horizon although not yet mandatory.
To remain agile and competitive, it is important that banks and financial institutions use the latest technology and expertise, instead of continuing to invest in proprietary payments infrastructure and operations. Specialized payments providers are better suited to manage the latest technology development and support operations.
“Banks and financial institutions are weighed down by legacy systems supported by a diminishing technology resource pool and need to dramatically reduce their cost/income ratios, all while providing high-quality service for their customers and responding to the velocity of change,” said Andreas Günther, Managing Director of Data Control Solutions for Broadridge in Germany. “Our collaboration with PPI AG creates a timely answer to this with Payments-as-a-Service providing a specialized payments solution that can help banks meet their current needs and challenges and get ready for what’s next.”
This new solution has already secured its first customer, a Europe-headquartered commercial bank active in corporate and private banking. Banks are increasingly seeking a mutualized, shared services approach to advance their core payments platform technology and operations; something that previously may have seemed out of reach is now a viable option.
“We are genuinely thrilled to be collaborating with Broadridge again,” said Dr. Thorsten Völkel, CEO of PPI AG. “Payments-as-a-Service can be offered fully or partially for a range of service and solution options, as we know there are different levels of needs across the industry. Our payments platform combines all payment types into a hybrid solution, allowing us to leverage the economies of scale for commodity payment types while still being able to preserve the individuality of banks’ core offerings in international payments. Working with Broadridge enables us to offer banks a leading technology and operations capability, backed by a deep pool of highly experienced payments experts.”
Payments-as-a-Service is a modern, hosted payments platform with connectivity to critical payments infrastructures, together with managed services and support by deeply knowledgeable payments specialists. The offering includes core payments processing, a dynamic customer channel and Interbank/CSM connectivity. Surrounding the core payments platform, the service offers Anti-Money Laundering and sanctions screening, intelligent reconciliation, transaction monitoring and exception management.