Integration

Technology-first approach to payment integration

Organisations are under increasing pressure to automate payment processes to standardise payment controls that strengthen fraud prevention and ensure that each payment is handled consistently by enforcing and reducing costs regardless of the payment type, amount or frequency.

Centralised and automated payment solutions can address these challenges – but often at an unacceptably high cost and with an unnecessarily broad range of features. However, many financial services and insurance organisations require highly customisable solutions that address their unique needs – without extraneous features – and can flex and scale with the organisation.

The Challenge

A tier-2 insurance company headquartered in the United Kingdom needed a central payments solution to take care of their entire payments and collections life cycle in a straight-through processing solution. The customer’s legacy system was cumbersome, increasingly costly, and offered limited functionality. Notably, it did not support API integration, which the customer needed.

The new payment solution needed to provide easy and scalable payment integration with a network of global banks and enterprise ERP systems. Given the increasing threat of cybercrime and payments fraud, the solution needed to be highly secure while remaining flexible enough to cater to the organisation’s dynamic and innovative products.

The solution streamlines and automates payments and is scalable and flexible enough to meet current and future needs. Payments from 5 different business units were integrated into the centralised solution. More than 60 different payment formats needed to be standardised and validated before they could be consumed by the payment solution and fall into the payments process workflow. All payment types, including batch payments, automated API payments, and manual payments are sent to different levels of approval – dependent on specific rules and criteria set out by the business.

A consolidated view of all payments and approvals was pivotal to the success of the implementation, all underpinned by accurate logging and audit trail functionality. Real-time notifications at every step in the payment process were created to keep the client up to date on their enterprise-wide payments and cash visibility. Integration with leading global banks for real-time payments using APIs was implemented, all while keeping transactional banking costs as low as possible. A functionality-rich solution was implemented without increasing complexity or workload for the shared service treasury team.

The Result

The central payments solution provides financial control, consistency, security and scalability to the client’s business, taking care of the bulk of its payments off a single system. The solution reduced complexity and slashed the time for approvals and payments at a highly competitive cost.

Configuring the payments process workflow, approval levels and payment rules elevated the central payment team’s productivity and efficiency. The successful implementation of the payments solution has resulted in APIs being used for real-time payments and centralised financial reporting in the organisation.

Linx stripped the complexity and cost out of the customer’s payments environment, allowing the client to implement a custom solution in just three months.

Data Integration is considered one of the more complex tasks when building digital services. Since every application relies on data, a robust yet flexible integration determines whether projects are a success or failure. Success in today’s dynamic landscape, characterized by immense scaling requirements, diverse data formats, varied endpoints, and substantial technical innovations, hinges on having the right platform to effectively manage such complexity. Linx empowers businesses to handle the intricacies of custom integration, allowing you to identify the source, ownership, validity, and quality of data across processes and make more informed and confident decisions.