Emerging trends & technologies in remittance and payment processing: Following the fads, exploring the realities

Today, Jun 2000 by Pinkham, Rick

With the ability to pick-and-mix preferred products for remittance processing solutions, platforms and transports, customers can "mix and match" their own solutions, selecting the software, systems and hardware best suited to their existing needs or compatible with alreadyinstalled servers, transports and imaging systems.

At the same time, there is a danger of the customer overdoing the mix and match-a good vendor partner should advise the customer if there are inherent incompatibilities or not enough system resources for the solution selected. The vendor partner can also help the customer review possible alternatives.

Some transport and remittance processing software vendors are beginning to expand the geographic scope of their partnership agreements, bringing the technologies of their European counterparts to the U.S. These agreements range from reselling or re-marketing other vendors' technologies, to working together to create complementary offerings. Still other agreements involve combining the strengths of different vendors' remittance processing software to run on commonly-used transports.

Customers opting to implement these combined solutions need to be certain that vendors are actively providing suitable interfaces for these new, cross-platform applications.

Joining Forces: Competitors Become Partners

In a trend similar to remittance software and hardware vendors configuring products to become cross-platform, many competitors in the remittance processing market are joining forces to better address customer needs and reduce the time needed to bring new solutions to market.

Custom changes to software, particularly very complex remittance processing software, typically require a long lead-time. Through alliances formed with their "competitors," vendors can offer customers more powerful solutions and take a product-based approach to serve customers with time-sensitive, highly specific transaction balancing and high-exception processing needs. Here's how that might work: One vendor's solution is used for the imaging and reading front-end of the process (pass 1) and the partnering vendor's software is used for correction, balancing, encoding, and endorsement (pass 2).

Other companies are engaging in licensing agreements that actually integrate products and applications with other vendors' complementary features. This poses a curious situation for customers that once had to choose between one vendor and another-there's now a single combination offering on the market, which may provide a better product but may reduce competitive offerings.

In larger business ventures, some transaction processing companies are actually executing a strategy of acquiring lockbox providers with large corporate clients, and therefore are able to offer customers enormous new resources, expertise and services.

The Present - and Future of Remittance and Payment Processing

Customers of remittance and payment processing are in a position of advantage in today's remittance and payment processing market. Vendors are clamoring for their attention, and aren't dictating the trends and solution offerings as they had before. For the first time, remittance and payment processing companies have more control than ever over the breadth, depth and features of the systems they choose.