Dear Customer,

A happy New Year to you all. I hope you had a relaxing break over the holiday period.

In my column today I would like to highlight four payments trends to watch in 2024 - and how you can prepare your business for these changes.

Firstly, I expect operational resilience to be a key focus this year. In Europe, this will be driven largely by the new Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) regulation. With DORA setting rules for the detection of ICT-related incidents, we advise banks to develop a much better understanding of how these requirements can be practically applied.

Similarly, in the UK this year, financial institutions need to ensure their processes are in line with SS1/21 and PS21/3 – directives issued by the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority. In order to safeguard critical services, we advise banks to make sure they are deploying the right technologies to handle these directives.

My second trend is more banks embracing the multi-cloud approach to payments this year. A multi-cloud payment service can handle any increases in demand, cope with outages, and has a built-in backup for disaster recovery, meaning banks can improve the resilience of their system to the satisfaction of regulators.

My third prediction is that authorised push payment (APP) fraud will continue to be a challenge this year. Responding to this ever-growing national security threat, Form3 delivered a crucial milestone in 2023, through proving the value of consortium data and cutting edge technologies to allow the real-time identification of scams within the payment message.

Crucially, as 2024 will be a year in which regulation changes are driving action, Form3 is continuing to champion the use of new technologies, coupled with customer communications, education and partnerships, to take control back from the fraudsters and protect end-customers from becoming victims of scams.

Finally, a big focus for banks this year will be moving further back offices processes, such as payments, to cloud-native technology. This approach increases performance, resilience and scale. While I don’t wish to say that making the transition to the cloud is an easy process, banks should now have their own learnings and best practice guidelines on how they can do this.

In summary, I feel that the year ahead holds a great deal of promise for banks that want to improve their customer experience, satisfy regulatory requirements, and future-proof their back office infrastructure. Form3 can help you on this journey by offering practical advice and technology solutions that fit your business needs.  

Many thanks for taking the time to read my column. I hope you all have a successful 2024.