Thought Machine’s Post

Transcript

At The Machine, we've had the luxury to work with some of the world's most successful banks and observe and understand their pain points around payments. While payments might seem complex and there are all sorts of different payment methods from cards to cross-border high value crypto or central bank digital currencies. At the most fundamental level, a payment is just a way to exchange money. There is someone who wants to pay and someone who wants to get paid. Really, what an optimal payment system would do is not only cater to all the existing payment methods that can be used today. But also be flexible enough to adapt for future needs and banks requirements as well. You need a payment system that comes with as much control as possible being able. To define your own payment flows. Being able to define your own rules. Being able to define your own parameters rather than being locked into what a vendor's vision of these rules and parameters would be. Gives you a lot more control and gives you a lot more flexibility in terms of serving your target market, so. What we discussed with our clients and partners is instead taking a long term view, a product thinking of type approach. That will allow you to put in place payment infrastructure that is more future proof and more able to scale, lowering that cost of change. So when we looked at all the disparate payment systems across the world, what we started to see is there are similarities between each of them. Different payment systems are made-up of very similar building blocks. And they fall into very similar scheme families, which is what we call it here at Thought Machine. Effectively what we've done is we have managed to escape this vertical trap of designing a system rail by rail and then seller taping it together and instead we have. Effectively assemble this selection of horizontal building blocks that can be combined together to allow you to express payment logic for any payment scheme that exists today or into the future. What we get is a single pane of glass view of all the payment types and methods within a single system. So it is this product thinking that is acquired and not just project thinking. An example could be. Talking to a head of architecture at one of the banks. One sentence he uttered was right. This configurability and this power means I will never have to say no to any requirements from the business again, right? And that is fantastic validation.