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Payments intelligence payment transactions, built on the ISO 20022 standard, do
more than display amounts; they tell payers and payees
Rojas also mentioned she has seen intelligent solutions what a payment is for and why it was made in full, rich,
and touchless commerce scale in the post-pandemic in- itemized detail. "Conventionally, a payment may only con-
surtech space, especially with peer-to-peer and business- tain four data fields: payer, payee, date, and amount," she
to-business use cases. Insurance platforms are trying to said. "The ISO 20022 standard is the new global standard
capitalize on contactless payments, she added, such as buy for all payments, which delineates over 300 structured
now pay later, streamlined payment platforms and other data points for every payment."
fintech advances. However, she predicted that only a few
will succeed, and the need for advanced intelligent plat- Murphy additionally noted that the ISO 20022 standard
forms will only increase as insurtech firms try to differen- and its surrounding systems form the foundation of mod-
tiate to gain venture capital backing. ern, smart, faster payment processing systems, which
share the following three attributes:
Dr. Jack Baldwin, chairman at BHMI, noted that intelli-
gence in payments is not only creating solutions designed 1. Data intelligence: Rich, standardized, itemized,
to handle the modern landscape, but also solutions that reconciled, verified remittance advice;
can adapt quickly and effectively to whatever may come
next. "This is especially true for the back office, which of- 2. Speed: No more slow checks and one- to four-day
ten gets overlooked," he said. "Many companies are cur- delays of ACH;
rently using disparate, batch-oriented systems to perform
back-office processing for electronic payments." 3. Autonomous systems: Straight-through-process-
ing of payments, approvals, trade documents, rec-
He pointed out that these legacy systems were not de- onciliation, bookkeeping and accounting, good
signed to accommodate the current market's high trans- funds, fraud-free, error-free, exception-free.
action volumes and new payment mechanisms. "Today's
rapid-paced payments environment has given us some Payment solutions that don't deliver on these three ele-
great innovation, but it has also presented challenges," ments cannot itemize, structure and validate data, she
he said. "Many payment networks, banks and third-party said, adding that they just process payments without pro-
processors that made efforts to update their front-end in- viding the rich data, integrations, approvals and ancillary
terfaces are discovering their legacy back-office systems systems that link payments to workflows. In addition, she
cannot handle modern payments environments." stated, manual processing systems are prone to process-
ing delays, exceptions, errors and fraud.
Baldwin additionally emphasized the need to modernize
back-office systems to support not only traditional credit, "Trends we are seeing in this space include faster pay-
debit and ATM transactions, but also mobile, real-time ments, real-time payments, data standardization through
and P2P payments. He suggested that intelligence in back- the ISO 20022, accounts receivable and accounts payable
office operations can be increased by adopting a fast, agile, automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning and
adaptable application environment, which can make the natural language processing," Murphy said. "Service pro-
back office more flexible, dependable and cost effective. viders should evaluate the holistic needs of the payments
This, he said, would enable payment companies to pro- use case, whether they be B2B, B2C, P2P, A2A, or B2G. Pay-
cess all types of transactions, regardless of type or source, ment processing itself is approaching a commodity, but
while meeting stringent service level agreements in the the systems and experience around payment processing
face of ever-increasing transaction loads. And being able is where the value is."
to access and view data, results and reports at or near real Intelligent fraud deterrence
time is a huge advantage, he explained, noting that the
ISO 20022 supports these capabilities. Srii Srinivasan, co-founder and CEO, Chargeback Gurus,
agreed that intelligent systems are an asset to payments
"The new ISO 20022 messaging environment being used as well as manufacturing, distribution and environmental
by real-time rails around the world is designed to support management. Commenting on the old-school paradigm,
a broad range of payment types in a wide variety of pay- she noted that legacy POS systems lack the resources to
ments domains," Baldwin said. "As adoption of ISO 20022 advance new trends and are less likely to anticipate cus-
continues to grow, companies need to ensure they can tomer needs. Without these capabilities, old POS systems
allow any type of payment to be brought into a unified can't deliver an exceptional customer experience, and mer-
payments back office environment, not just card payments chants who use them may have difficulty delivering value
supported by traditional ISO 8583 messaging." or retaining customers, she said.
Building on ISO 20022 "Old, unintelligent systems are neither KPI-driven nor
Angela Murphy, Ph.D., vice president of business devel- scalable, nor do they evolve in response to emerging
opment at Photon Commerce, pointed out that modern trends," Srinivasan said. "Intelligent systems can be KPI-
driven due to their capture of key metrics such as transac-
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