Insights

At Sibos 2022, we sat down with Mario Mendia, the Senior Vice President of International Markets at TAS Group, to discuss the emergence of payments-as-a-service and its potential in making banking more accessible to all possible demographics.

Looking at the trends at this year’s Sibos, Mendia is most excited about the digital developments in cross-border payments and CBDC, and the growing presence of cloud technology in major financial institutions.

10 - 13 October | RAI, Amsterdam

Sibos is back in-person and TAS is again among the official exhibitors. We can’t wait to meet you in Amsterdam  where SWIFT will host a full conference programme and exhibition, along with a wide range of networking events. The agenda will feature business leaders and topic experts from across the financial community and beyond, discussing the most impactful trends in technology, regulation, risks and sustainability. If you can’t make it in person, join Sibos virtually by connecting to the digital conference experience that will extend Sibos to delegates around the world.

Stop by our booth D76 to share insights on the latest trends on digital payments, liquidity management, payment schemes connectivity, open banking and much more.

TAS Group has proudly sponsored two key EU conferences in June, Payments CEE Summit and EBAday 2021, that have clearly shown how deeply the acceleration in digitalization was able to positively impact the banking DNA.

With over 1000 professionals registered at the CEE Summit, connecting primarily but not only from the Balkans, and over 2000 delegates participating to EBAday 2021, the paramount annual conference curated by the European Banking Association, all hot payment trends were deeply debated by speakers coming from all segments of the stakeholders landscape: incumbent banks, challengers, paytechs, payfacs, regtechs, regulators, corporate clients, market infrastructures, academics and market research companies.

Hottest in the agenda: Instant Payments and their convergence with card payments, Request to Pay, Buy Now Pay Later, Fraud Detection in the Real-time era, ISO 20022 migrations, API enablement, and many more core topics, including the power of the Payments as a Service paradigm as a way to accelerate the banking modernization journey.   

In case you missed our speeches at the conferences, by Dragan Spanovic, VP Sales TAS Eastern Europe, and and Mario Mendia, SVP TAS International, you may learn more about TAS Group’s 35+ years expertise as a PayFac in the evolving European Financial Services Market on our website.

We recently surveyed Payment Service Providers from around the world about how they are dealing with today’s volatile payments landscape.

We particularly focused on the hot topics: instant payments, ISO 20022, and liquidity management, all of which are heavily impacting the payments industry, and asked PSPs to reveal what they saw as the main challenges experienced today, how they are rising to these challenges including insights into global technology investment strategies and cloud adoption trends among others.

The survey took place against a backdrop of rapid digitalization, where advancements in technology, regulatory overhauls, the introduction of new initiatives and schemes – not to mention the wide-reaching impact of the pandemic – are having a tumultuous effect in the payments industry – perhaps the greatest experienced in the last decade.

Navigating these changes successfully no doubt involves rethinking existing approaches, business models and systems as well as intelligently leveraging on the many innovative technologies available including, in many cases, adopting a cloud-based strategy.

Less than 11 weeks to go to the obligatory choice for all European PSPs on how to make themselves reachable on TIPS. The Instant Payments settlement service, despite having been launched over two years ago by the ECB is still very much underused. To overcome the fragmentation of the market present in the various EU countries, the Governing Council of the ECB has formalized the new regulatory obligations that will lead to the “pan-European reach” of instant payments by November 2021. Already by the end of January, therefore in less than three months, all PSPs that currently participate in a SCTInst scheme and are reachable on TARGET2 must open a DCA account on TIPS or choose how to make themselves reachable also on TIPS. Have you already chosen how to make yourself compliant? TAS supports its customers both in the management of central currency accounts on TARGET2 and TIPS with Aquarius, its Liquidity Management platform, and for connectivity to the new ESMIG (Eurosystem Single Market Infrastructure Gateway) via SIA-Colt or SWIFT. Our solutions are available both on-premise and as a service or in the cloud. Contact our experts now!

Mario Mendia, TAS Group’s International Markets SVP and Raphael Barisaac, Global Head of Cash Management and Global Co-head of Trade at Unicredit, were recently invited by Fintech Finance to speak with Ali Paterson in his Virtual Arena.

The topic was the dynamic European Payments scene today, how it’s evolving, the COVID-effect on payments, how ISO20022 is set to be a game-changer, and the challenges (and opportunities) of the T2/T2S Consolidation project.

Mario Mendia offered viewers valuable insights and shared his views on the upcoming changes to the Eurosystem, where TAS Group is playing an active role in the T2/T2S Consolidation Project.

In case you missed the Fintech Finace Virtual Arena discussion on the European Payments Ecosystem, you can watch it  on our YouTube channel.