CLOUD: RESILLIENCE
Hard lessons Determined not to be caught out again, resilience is the new buzz word when it comes to PSPs’ tech strategies, says Form3’s Mike Walters The global economy has been upended in the last two years by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the payments industry hasn't escaped that impact. Which has led, according to Mike Walters, chief product officer for Cloud-native platform payment technology provider Form3, to a push to strengthen infrastructures against future shocks. He believes that Cloud technologies should be front and centre in that drive. Having raised $200million to date, including $160million from its latest funding round in September, Form3 provides banks and regulated fintechs across the globe with an end-to-end managed payments service, which delivers complete payment processing,
clearing and settlement to the universe of payment schemes through a single API. Overseeing teams designing and laying out the products and services Form3 offers for its financial customers, Walters knows better than most how habits have been changing in his industry – a landscape he describes as ‘challenging over the last 12 months’. Not surprisingly, COVID-19 has seen an increase in the volume of remote transactions, given reduced access to shops, restaurants and hospitality and leisure venues during successive lockdowns. The volume of push payments and other account-based transfers, has also increased dramatically. “That’s been compounded by the move away from cash and towards contactless. In those areas that have stayed open, there has been a much more immediate, digital feel to payments for consumers over the last 12 months,” says Walters. And these trends have ‘exposed a little bit of the complexity of doing that in a real-time environment, with legacy technology’, he adds. “This kind of move to even more rapid,
remote, digital-focussed payments, has really started to reinforce an issue that was already there – a need for continued investment in the flexibility of the technology used in financial institutions to make those payments happen.” Given Form3’s Cloud-based credentials, it's no great surprise that Walters is a cheerleader for such technology. “Cloud is a fantastic thing, and has a role to play in the way customers maintain their flexibility, particularly when you see rapid changes in demand,” he says. “Resilience, security, scalability, cost- effectiveness… for all these reasons we would encourage financial institutions to embrace the use of Cloud technology, particularly Cloud-based ways of working around development, maintenance, and a full embracing of DevOps (development and operations) models,” he says. Financial services infrastructure provider, Banking Circle’s, July 2021 survey Futureproofing Payments Tech: The Challenges Facing CIOs And CTOs, polled 600 CTOs and CIOs at banks, fintechs and payment services providers (PSPs) across the UK, DACH (Germany, Austria and
Solving the equation: Banks are looking at ways to build better, more resilient, payment services
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