AMERICAS TECHNOLOGY
When it comes to payments, think inside the {Sand}box The 21-century payments industry is part of a sector that has come to reward FIs prepared to push the boundaries by finding new, innovative ways of making money management user-friendly and convenient. Similarly, it does not suffer fools gladly. Mistakes are not easily forgiven.
Historically, military tacticians would plan military supply lines, troop formations, defensive strategy and so on, quite literally by drawing them in a box of sand. Now while IT developers and military personnel are an unlikely pairing, the historic term transfers nicely.
More recently, sector success stories tend to flow from challenger banks and innovative money app start-ups. Clever people with clever ideas who think outside the box. Often the driving Ideas can retrospectively appear to be so simple we wonder why we didn’t think of them in the first place. Yet, there is one “box” organisations in financial services might want to think very much inside, and that’s the experimental sandbox.
A sandbox is an isolated testing environment that offers FIs room to roam, room to succeed, room to fail, and room to try again. It lets organisations test new ideas and respond to regulatory requirements using real transaction types. Businesses can assess the effects of new services and validate them as part of their pre-live testing, eliminating risk and instilling confidence.
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Thanks to the arrival of 21-century cloud-native technology, the concept of an experimental sandbox isn’t restricted to larger organisations who can afford the extra server space. Instead, the sandbox becomes an affordable operational expense, paid for when required rather than as an upfront capital investment. Addressing the diversification agenda The evolution of consumer spending behaviour has accelerated at pace in recent times. Consumers are savvier about how they spend and the payment tokens available to them. This trend comes at a very interesting time for the payments industry. While on the one hand, we’re witnessing