systems: acquisition ention in 2023

an efficient recruiting process that offers candidates a fair and fast experience, with a focus on ensuring a good candidate experience.

Retention is also a key focus for Baton Systems. Many of the engineers and new graduates who joined the company in 2017 have now moved into leadership roles. The company invests time in mentoring its employees and provides them with opportunities to work and interact across teams and with customers. Additionally, the company provides training in both technical and soft skills to help employees develop their careers and keep morale high.

Diversity and inclusion are also important values at Baton Systems. The company has always sought to welcome employees from all walks of life and has a balanced mix of men and women. Additionally, the company supports the PRIDE initiative and has implemented inclusive policies in its workplace and employee benefits.

Baton Systems also has a strong representation of women in leadership roles, including Bathija herself. Women lead initiatives in product and program management, as well as engineering. The HR team is also entirely led by women.

Moving forward, Bathija believes that the company's Core platform and technology will be key factors in attracting and retaining top talent in the coming year. Employees will have the opportunity to work on cuttingedge technology, handle complexity, upgrade software at banks, work on security, understand performance expectations, and more.

Finally, Bathija sees tremendous scope for growth for Baton Systems in the coming years. As the company expands its reach to global Tier 1 Banks in the collateral, foreign exchange, payment, and liquidity space, it will continue to mature its processes and the variety of its implementations, providing even better support to its users. Baton Systems has always dared to be different and has made its mark on the FinTech industry by choosing to tread the path less traveled, and will continue to do so in the years to come.

Data sharing to help combat fraud is a regularly shared “ideal” within the economic crime industry. It’s common to hear it raised as “what we should be doing” at external conferences. What interests me is that we don’t often talk about what we’d do if we had that information. We tend to talk about the actual blocker to doing the work to solve the problem. We talk about the challenges with sharing information rather than what the techniques are that we can use to combat economic crime.

Working for Pay.UK (the central UK retail operator), my colleagues and I sit in the middle of all UK retail payments. We manage Bacs, Faster Payments, Cheque Clearing, Confirmation of Payee, amongst many other services, and we’re responsible for building the New Payments Architecture (the NPA). But the sending of information is the cornerstone of what we do: whether that information is sort code and account number, or the name of the beneficiary, or remittance information that helps the recipient (for example, a business) reconcile their payments… or data for the use of detecting fraudulent payments.

Prior to working at Pay.UK, I was a bank supervisor at the PRA at the Bank of England, supervising some of the world’s largest banks. As part of that, I have led regulatory reviews on data governance and understand some of the challenges that organisations face with respect to managing data. Given what I’ve seen over most of my working life, making the exchange of data frictionless is the future I’m striving for. And I know that to combat fraud, making decisions as accurately and as quickly as possible is absolutely key.

I’m talking about it being ready to use for you: a world where you’re not having to muck about with data before you can actually do something useful with it.

But we know this isn’t the case now. There are many challenges we face with data on a daily basis, whether that’s in our jobs or whether it’s in our personal lives. For example:

● Challenges around manual reconciliation: invoicing, receipts, remittance data

● Bank statement clarity: we’ve probably all had statements where we don’t recognise where the money has gone, either a random reference number or the name of the parent organisation that owns the company you purchased from. Indeed, how can people identify fraudulent payments on their bank statements accurately if they don’t always understand what the entries are on it?

● Manual errors: data entered incorrectly by hand and in the worst-case scenarios, resulting in sizeable errors

These instances are where the