VolPay Foundation
Fiona Hamilton explains the thought process behind new VolPay Foundation
VolPay has just launched its Foundation platform, can you tell me how it works?
The technology within VolPay has been used for many years by financial institutions and corporate treasuries in implementing payments integration projects. We have a set of tools for accelerating this integration, and over time we have gained good insight in to the common challenges within the payments market.
VolPay Foundation brings together many of the technologies we’ve provided for years, and we’ve bundled them together to create a development platform for any organisation looking to ring-fence their implementation of a payments hub from the complexities of changing message standards among other benefits.
Typically, when firms implement a payments system, it costs a lot of money, but actually that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Integration can be as much as 80 to 90 percent of the subsequent cost of connecting the new hub to internal systems and the outside world.
Some of that extra cost is also caused by clients returning to their vendors for integration support, which can typically take up to six months, and that’s before requests testing and adding engine software are taken into account. They’re also paying in terms of lost revenue. If you spend six months on-boarding a corporate, that’s six months that you’re not getting that customer’s revenue.
Clients need to accept that integration is one of their biggest challenges. VolPay Foundation allows clients to integrate and build their own payments processes and insulates them from on going change.
How does the technology adapt to different users?
The challenges that businesses have in payments processing are generally quite similar. Often they will have particular source applications but a very high number of different payment channels. Correspondent banks, for example, will run in to more challenges the larger they get, as they start representing various different formats. VolPay Foundation provides more control in clearing these trades.
Traditionally, companies created a spreadsheet and identified what needed to be matched. That would be given to a programmer, and immediately it would create a disconnect between the programmers and analysts. Changes might then be made during initial discussions, but eventually they would find that the code they were trying to match no longer met the original specification.
VolPay Foundation creates a common user interface that both analysts and programmers use simultaneously, and the specification eventually, when ready, becomes the deployment code itself. It’s an algorithm model that self-documents itself, achieving greater consistency for on-going maintenance.
It also uses best practice programming technology, which is Java-based, and that makes it open and accessible. Processing capabilities must be available 24 hours, 7 days a week, 365 days a year with no outage, so we use state-of-the-art technology that is fully compliant with the OSGi standards, allowing for hot swapping.
Hot swapping ensures that changes can be made as the programme is running. Whether it’s a change in rating rules, or sending a payment to a different destination, the process does not need to be halted to add the new code.
How reliable is it?
About 75 percent of Volante’s development team is dedicated to quality control and testing, and we take a lot of pride in that. We’re looking at payments information and messaging between corporate treasuries and banks, so there is a strong requirement to make sure that all connections are utterly reliable.
We have been providing solutions for more than 15 years so our customers benefit from a combined, best-practice approach. Many of the software modules that are inside the VolPay Foundation development platform are already in place at our client companies. This approach sees VolPay Foundation bound together with the existing capabilities of Volante Technologies to deliver a solution specifically for payments integration, processing and orchestration projects. We already have three projects running with the newly launched platform.
What can asset managers gain from VolPay Foundation?
When it comes to payments, asset managers are akin to corporate treasurers, as neither has a banking licence. These firms have to instruct banks to make their trades for them, so the payment initiation challenges can be very similar; they have to maintain connections with a number of investment banks and brokers.
The common end point for any organisation carrying out any form of business is to make money, so there’s always a payment to be processed and a transaction that has to happen.
We have been working in multiple asset classes for a long time, so we offer expertise in clearing and settlement in terms of FIX and FpML standards, and with regulatory reporting standards. This means that asset managers can take a consistent approach across all their processes whatever the asset class.
Another challenge for institutions, whether they’re an asset management firm, a corporate or a bank, is keeping up with multiple changes in standards.
As new instruments come online and more advanced technologies emerge, firms have found that they have to change the way that they receive data, and then they have to test and retest their new systems.
We address and support changes in standards quickly, meaning our clients can focus on their own business-related procedures.
Standard changes will continue to get more complex and more frequent. Our aim is to insulate systems from the white waters of change. That’s why we exist, to take the pain away and allow our clients to focus on being competitive in their marketplace.
