Big banks are facing challenges in innovating payments strategizing while keeping up with the pace of the industry. In an EBAday 2025 panel, leaders in banking explored what avenues incumbents are pursuing to revolutionise payments services.
In the strategic roundtable: ‘Achieving New Levels of Excellence in Payments – Quick, Easy and Predictable’, Dave Birch, published author and Top 100 Global Fintech Influencer, moderated speakers Jean-François Mazure, global head of cash clearing services, Societe Generale and Simon McConnell, managing director and global head of European clearing, Citi Services as they discussed levelling up payments products in banking.
When discussing challenges that big banks in the industry are facing today, McConnell highlighted that addressing data consistency and balancing compliance and innovation is a struggle for European financial institutions, especially with heavy regulation like ISO 20022 and SEPA requiring full compliance.
"It’s just a bit of software!" Birch joked, to which McConnell responded: "It is just many different bits of software and many different institutions. So it becomes a real challenge in and of itself."
McConnell mentioned that the industry is still struggling to find consensus on how to implement new data requirements, however good core data is essential. He added: "One of the biggest challenges for us is doing the hygiene factors before we get to the innovation space."
Mazure shared his belief around compliance and balancing it with innovation: "In a sense, a bank makes money out of the risks. To accept them, to take and manage. When you think about such a statement, the first reaction is to think about credit risk. But from a business philosophy standpoint, it's exactly the same for companies. That’s why I personally encourage my teams to be natively active since the very early stages of any business relationship."
Mazure pointed out that when seeing promising developments in the market and possible investments as an intermediary bank, there is a lot happening and they are being asked the same questions on what to focus on when it comes to product payments, but their resources are not infinite.
Mazure compared financial institutions to cruise boats, explaining that it is difficult to steer the boat in the right direction, and quality of decisions depends on the captain, but there needs to be harmony throughout the boat staff to keep it afloat; it is important to secure senior support for continuous business investments, but there has to be comprehensive understanding of the business across teams and senior management.
When asked to define ‘excellence’ in the space, McConnell insisted that there is no single answer to this question, as it depends on where the payments provider is located, the access they have to the market, and the behaviors of their consumers. He pulls an example from his work, "with the clearing business, it's our ability to fund, to extend the credit, to make sure that the wheels are greased, and the most important thing is for the payments to get through when they need to get through; that is critically important."
Mazure added that cost, speed, and transparency is what the users are demanding, and McConnell responded on the note that transparency is essential in order to harmonise across borders to allow access to data and information: "What the cross-border payment working group is calling for is a called to action to for banks of Europe to make themselves open in that space, so we can create that consistency."
Mazure added to McConnell’s point on excellence and transparency, stating "I would like to insist on the criticality of what we do. As intermediary banks, we are taking care of our end users payments, and our clients end users payments, which is a huge responsibility. Measure the noise created anytime we fail at correctly processing a payment, and you can easily see how important is it is. What is at stake is the capacity of our own institution to keep on accessing to certain currencies or markets. What is at stake, possibly, if one day we fail, is a mere default of payment. So we're speaking about a serious responsibility.
"Criticality means that beyond cost, beyond transparency, beyond all these important criteria, I strongly believe that the most important is our ability to keep on protecting the delivery of our services."
When the conversation moved on to digital assets and blockchain, McConnell noted that there has been a pickup in blockchain investment, however challenges remain in achieving ubiquity. Mazure mentioned that there is potential for blockchain-based solutions in internal banking processes, but doubted the immediate impact of these technologies.