Bancon's Payments team brings together specialists who have worked across four continents, navigating some of the most complex regulatory and infrastructure environments in the world. From ISO 20022 migrations to real-time payment scheme implementations, they've seen it all. We sat down with five members of the team to find out what drives them, what they've learned, and what they'd tell a bank standing at the start of a payment’s transformation.
Between them, the Bancon Payments team has delivered transformations across four continents, working with some of the world's most demanding financial institutions. Their routes into the discipline are as varied as the markets they've worked in.
Andrés de Fiore— Payments Lead
Over two decades in core banking across Latin America, Europe, South Africa and Canada — working with SWIFT since 2004, and deep in ISO 20022, SEPA, and UK domestic schemes including Bacs, Faster Payments and CHAPS. His team won the SAP Innovation Award in 2016 for launching a government-regulated product live within 72 hours of the regulatory announcement. "The more I worked on core banking transformations, the more I realised that payments aren't peripheral — they're the heartbeat of everything a financial institution does."
Alejandro Juarez — Solution Architect
Twenty-plus years leading SAP Banking and Payment Engine transformations across Europe, Latin America, Africa and the US. Alejandro's specialism is designing architectures built to absorb regulatory and scheme disruption — without compromising real-time transaction execution. "Payments are the bank's operational backbone."
Pieter Joubert — Functional Lead & Solution Architect
Working in SAP Banking since 2006, focused on payments since 2010 and on SAP Payment Engine since 2014. Pieter operates across both functional design and solution architecture — giving him an end-to-end view of how SAP environments must integrate with the wider banking landscape. His domain spans real-time payments, card transactions and batch processing.
Varsini Bala — SAP Techno-Functional Consultant
Eight years specialising in SAP Core Banking and the SAP Payment Engine. Varsini's grounding in production support — troubleshooting failed and delayed payment transactions at the sharp end — shaped an instinct for end-to-end flow and customer impact that informs how she approaches every transformation.
Sergey Nikafarau — Technical Consultant
An SAP technical specialist with experience spanning card management and interbank clearing, gained on flagship projects at Discovery Bank South Africa and Lloyds Bank UK. Sergey's strength lies in combining deep technical execution with a genuine understanding of the functional and business context around payments.
"I like to think of what we do as rewiring the electricity grid while the whole city is still lit up. Nobody notices the work. Nobody should. But the day someone's salary doesn't arrive, or a corporate treasury can't settle, the invisibility evaporates entirely. That gap between 'nobody noticed' and 'everyone noticed' is where I live professionally — and I find it endlessly motivating."
— Andrés de Fiore, Payments Lead
Andrés also points to the current moment in the industry as particularly interesting: ISO 20022 has crossed its first major milestone with the end of the MT coexistence period in November 2025, but the real work of making that richer data useful is only beginning. The UK's infrastructure renewal program is finding a new shape. And on the horizon, stablecoins and agentic payments are raising new questions before the current answers have fully settled.
"Nothing stays solved for long. A scheme change, a regulatory shift, a new customer requirement — any one of these will force you to revisit decisions you made in the past. That keeps the work intellectually satisfying. The other thing is the weight of it: a reporting defect is embarrassing, but a payments defect is someone's salary or rent. That consequence matters."
— Pieter Joubert, Functional Lead & Solution Architect
"Every time new schemes, regulations, or customer expectations come up, it's a chance to learn something new and adapt. What makes it meaningful for me is being able to look at things from the customer's perspective and solve problems that directly impact their experience."
— Varsini Bala, SAP Techno-Functional Consultant
For Alejandro, the driver is architectural: the challenge of designing systems that can absorb constant regulatory and scheme disruption without ever compromising real-time transaction execution. And for Sergey, it is the intersection of technology, finance and user experience that keeps the work both challenging and rewarding. "The payments space has become an essential part of our everyday life," he says, "and it's exciting to understand how it works under the hood."
For Andrés, one story keeps coming back — and it's a dramatic one.
In December 2015, Argentina's newly elected government announced the overnight elimination of the cepo cambiario — a total ban on buying foreign currency that had been in place since 2011. The peso fell 30% in a single day. Every bank in Argentina suddenly needed to offer products that had been legally impossible the day before: US dollar accounts, FX transactions, regulated savings instruments. "A full suite was designed, built and tested within a working day. We only needed the green light from the board to go live."
"The banks that came through that moment cleanly were the ones who had invested in architecture that could absorb a shock, and in teams who trusted each other enough to move fast under pressure. Everything I do in payments transformation today is, in some way, a longer version of that 72-hour sprint."
— Andrés de Fiore, Payments Lead
Pieter's shaping insight came not from a single event but from a pattern repeated across many projects: the way so-called edge cases in payments turn out not to be edges at all. Non-working day shifts, reversals straddling settlement boundaries, version management. "You have to always think of the unhappy path scenarios and ensure you solve for these upfront instead of waiting for production defects to drive the solution."
Sergey points to two milestones: the Discovery Bank project in 2016, which was his turning point for understanding credit card management, and a Lloyds Bank engagement in 2018 that became a milestone in understanding interbank clearing schemes. For Varsini, it was her years in SAP production support — dealing with the immediate, often distressing impact of payment failures on real customers — that forged her instinct to always think end-to-end and to prioritise reliability. For Alejandro, the defining lesson came from leading complex core migrations in high-pressure markets: that payments transformation must be built around total traceability, with transaction integrity prioritised above the go-live milestone.
The team is consistent on this point: the presenting problem is almost never the actual problem.
"It almost always starts the same way. A bank presents what sounds like a straightforward problem: 'we need to modernise our BACS processing' or 'we want a dynamic cash management solution.' But when you ask the right questions, the real challenge surfaces upstream: a fragmented account structure, a bespoke enhancement nobody fully understands anymore, a business process designed around a system constraint that has since calcified into policy."
— Andrés de Fiore, Payments Lead
Andrés describes a BACS migration that surfaced the need to completely rethink how batch payments were architected — including a processing and accounting pattern that hadn't existed before. "The presenting problem is rarely the actual problem. What gets called 'standard' is usually just how things have always been done there."
"It usually arrives as a symptom — a reconciliation that doesn't balance, a standing order producing the wrong amount, a duplicate posting under specific conditions. The bank has often already tried to fix it, which is why it's landed with us. When we dig, the real issue is two or three layers deeper: a data object that shouldn't still be active anymore, a BADI executing in an unexpected order, a variable not clearing correctly when looping through bulk data."
— Pieter Joubert, Functional Lead & Solution Architect
Varsini describes the team's diagnostic approach as methodical: sitting with the business to understand the impact on end-users, replicating the issue end-to-end to find the root cause, and then providing solutions that fix the immediate problem while also building in long-term compliance. Sergey puts it bluntly: "The devil is in the details. Never underestimate the value of client input — the path to resolving the most complex cases lies in thorough discussions with the client, understanding their needs and deducing the details out of the general picture."
Alejandro frames the challenge as one that is as human as it is technical. "Getting under the surface means patient discovery alongside the customer — understanding the technical landscape, but equally the human one: who the stakeholders are, what they're optimising for, what they're afraid of. Payment transformations touch settlement, liquidity, compliance and customer experience all at once. It's a Jenga tower, and every stakeholder is holding a different piece. The skill isn't just technical synthesis. It's knowing which piece to move first."
With experience across Latin America, Europe, Africa, the UK, North America and beyond, the Bancon Payments team has a hard-won perspective on what transfers across borders — and what doesn't.
"The biggest lesson is how much of what gets called 'payments best practice' is actually local convention. Clearing cycles, scheme integrations, customer expectations, regulatory emphasis — all of it changes when you cross a border. The integration might be based on the same underlying ISO standards, but each local clearing scheme uses and interprets those standards in a slightly different manner."
— Pieter Joubert, Functional Lead & Solution Architect
"Working with colleagues who learned payments in a different context — different regulations, different infrastructure, different definitions of what failure looks like — means we're not all blind in the same places. The value isn't expertise in every market. It's the pattern recognition that comes from having been wrong in enough different ways to know what to look for. You learn to distinguish local colour from structural problem. You stop arriving at a new project convinced your last solution is the right starting point."
— Andrés de Fiore, Payments Lead
Alejandro draws a similar lesson from his experience delivering transformations across Europe, Latin America, Africa and the US: rather than overfitting to local complexity, he builds scalable architectures by abstracting the common transaction patterns that exist across markets.
For Sergey, adaptability means designing flexible, modular solutions that can be tailored to local schemes and regulatory requirements without starting from scratch each time. "Working across markets has taught me that assumptions rarely transfer well. What works in one region can fail in another due to infrastructure or user behaviour. It's made me more attentive to context and more disciplined in designing solutions that are both scalable and locally relevant."
Varsini speaks to the collaborative dimension: "It's very much a team effort. Even though we work across different environments — Direct Debit, Cards, and Direct Credits — the knowledge we share keeps us aligned and on track."
"Remember you're working with people's money. Not ledger entries. Not transaction volumes. Real people: someone waiting for their salary to clear before the rent goes out, someone whose mortgage direct debit is due tomorrow morning. The reason payments transformation deserves rigour, patience and professional pride isn't the architecture. It's the person on the other end of the transaction who will never know your name, will never read your design documents, and is quietly counting on you to get it right."
— Andrés de Fiore, Payments Lead
"Respect the edge cases from day one. The temptation is to design for the clean 95% path and defer the difficult 5% — because the clean path is where the business case is built. But in payments, the 5% is where the losses, the regulatory exposure, and the customer complaints come from. Transformations that go badly are almost always the ones that ignore the 5%."
— Pieter Joubert, Functional Lead & Solution Architect
"If you design your transformation around systems, you will replicate legacy problems. But if you design around end-to-end payment and card flows, you create an architecture that can scale, adapt and survive the next wave of change."
— Alejandro Juarez, Solution Architect
"Adapting to new regulations and schemes is the priority — but the solution should not be complex. It must be faster, more reliable and simpler for the end user."
— Varsini Bala, SAP Techno-Functional Consultant
"Challenge yourself. Dare to learn something new. Always strive to build a holistic picture rather than drowning in the specifics."
— Sergey Nikafarau, Technical Consultant
Find out more about our approach to Payments.
Bancon's Payments team brings together specialists who have worked across four continents, navigating some of the most complex regulatory and infrastructure environments in the world. From ISO 20022 migrations to real-time payment scheme implementations, they've seen it all. We sat down with five members of the team to find out what drives them, what they've learned, and what they'd tell a bank standing at the start of a payment’s transformation.
Between them, the Bancon Payments team has delivered transformations across four continents, working with some of the world's most demanding financial institutions. Their routes into the discipline are as varied as the markets they've worked in.
Andrés de Fiore— Payments Lead
Over two decades in core banking across Latin America, Europe, South Africa and Canada — working with SWIFT since 2004, and deep in ISO 20022, SEPA, and UK domestic schemes including Bacs, Faster Payments and CHAPS. His team won the SAP Innovation Award in 2016 for launching a government-regulated product live within 72 hours of the regulatory announcement. "The more I worked on core banking transformations, the more I realised that payments aren't peripheral — they're the heartbeat of everything a financial institution does."
Alejandro Juarez — Solution Architect
Twenty-plus years leading SAP Banking and Payment Engine transformations across Europe, Latin America, Africa and the US. Alejandro's specialism is designing architectures built to absorb regulatory and scheme disruption — without compromising real-time transaction execution. "Payments are the bank's operational backbone."
Pieter Joubert — Functional Lead & Solution Architect
Working in SAP Banking since 2006, focused on payments since 2010 and on SAP Payment Engine since 2014. Pieter operates across both functional design and solution architecture — giving him an end-to-end view of how SAP environments must integrate with the wider banking landscape. His domain spans real-time payments, card transactions and batch processing.
Varsini Bala — SAP Techno-Functional Consultant
Eight years specialising in SAP Core Banking and the SAP Payment Engine. Varsini's grounding in production support — troubleshooting failed and delayed payment transactions at the sharp end — shaped an instinct for end-to-end flow and customer impact that informs how she approaches every transformation.
Sergey Nikafarau — Technical Consultant
An SAP technical specialist with experience spanning card management and interbank clearing, gained on flagship projects at Discovery Bank South Africa and Lloyds Bank UK. Sergey's strength lies in combining deep technical execution with a genuine understanding of the functional and business context around payments.
"I like to think of what we do as rewiring the electricity grid while the whole city is still lit up. Nobody notices the work. Nobody should. But the day someone's salary doesn't arrive, or a corporate treasury can't settle, the invisibility evaporates entirely. That gap between 'nobody noticed' and 'everyone noticed' is where I live professionally — and I find it endlessly motivating."
— Andrés de Fiore, Payments Lead
Andrés also points to the current moment in the industry as particularly interesting: ISO 20022 has crossed its first major milestone with the end of the MT coexistence period in November 2025, but the real work of making that richer data useful is only beginning. The UK's infrastructure renewal program is finding a new shape. And on the horizon, stablecoins and agentic payments are raising new questions before the current answers have fully settled.
"Nothing stays solved for long. A scheme change, a regulatory shift, a new customer requirement — any one of these will force you to revisit decisions you made in the past. That keeps the work intellectually satisfying. The other thing is the weight of it: a reporting defect is embarrassing, but a payments defect is someone's salary or rent. That consequence matters."
— Pieter Joubert, Functional Lead & Solution Architect
"Every time new schemes, regulations, or customer expectations come up, it's a chance to learn something new and adapt. What makes it meaningful for me is being able to look at things from the customer's perspective and solve problems that directly impact their experience."
— Varsini Bala, SAP Techno-Functional Consultant
For Alejandro, the driver is architectural: the challenge of designing systems that can absorb constant regulatory and scheme disruption without ever compromising real-time transaction execution. And for Sergey, it is the intersection of technology, finance and user experience that keeps the work both challenging and rewarding. "The payments space has become an essential part of our everyday life," he says, "and it's exciting to understand how it works under the hood."
For Andrés, one story keeps coming back — and it's a dramatic one.
In December 2015, Argentina's newly elected government announced the overnight elimination of the cepo cambiario — a total ban on buying foreign currency that had been in place since 2011. The peso fell 30% in a single day. Every bank in Argentina suddenly needed to offer products that had been legally impossible the day before: US dollar accounts, FX transactions, regulated savings instruments. "A full suite was designed, built and tested within a working day. We only needed the green light from the board to go live."
"The banks that came through that moment cleanly were the ones who had invested in architecture that could absorb a shock, and in teams who trusted each other enough to move fast under pressure. Everything I do in payments transformation today is, in some way, a longer version of that 72-hour sprint."
— Andrés de Fiore, Payments Lead
Pieter's shaping insight came not from a single event but from a pattern repeated across many projects: the way so-called edge cases in payments turn out not to be edges at all. Non-working day shifts, reversals straddling settlement boundaries, version management. "You have to always think of the unhappy path scenarios and ensure you solve for these upfront instead of waiting for production defects to drive the solution."
Sergey points to two milestones: the Discovery Bank project in 2016, which was his turning point for understanding credit card management, and a Lloyds Bank engagement in 2018 that became a milestone in understanding interbank clearing schemes. For Varsini, it was her years in SAP production support — dealing with the immediate, often distressing impact of payment failures on real customers — that forged her instinct to always think end-to-end and to prioritise reliability. For Alejandro, the defining lesson came from leading complex core migrations in high-pressure markets: that payments transformation must be built around total traceability, with transaction integrity prioritised above the go-live milestone.
The team is consistent on this point: the presenting problem is almost never the actual problem.
"It almost always starts the same way. A bank presents what sounds like a straightforward problem: 'we need to modernise our BACS processing' or 'we want a dynamic cash management solution.' But when you ask the right questions, the real challenge surfaces upstream: a fragmented account structure, a bespoke enhancement nobody fully understands anymore, a business process designed around a system constraint that has since calcified into policy."
— Andrés de Fiore, Payments Lead
Andrés describes a BACS migration that surfaced the need to completely rethink how batch payments were architected — including a processing and accounting pattern that hadn't existed before. "The presenting problem is rarely the actual problem. What gets called 'standard' is usually just how things have always been done there."
"It usually arrives as a symptom — a reconciliation that doesn't balance, a standing order producing the wrong amount, a duplicate posting under specific conditions. The bank has often already tried to fix it, which is why it's landed with us. When we dig, the real issue is two or three layers deeper: a data object that shouldn't still be active anymore, a BADI executing in an unexpected order, a variable not clearing correctly when looping through bulk data."
— Pieter Joubert, Functional Lead & Solution Architect
Varsini describes the team's diagnostic approach as methodical: sitting with the business to understand the impact on end-users, replicating the issue end-to-end to find the root cause, and then providing solutions that fix the immediate problem while also building in long-term compliance. Sergey puts it bluntly: "The devil is in the details. Never underestimate the value of client input — the path to resolving the most complex cases lies in thorough discussions with the client, understanding their needs and deducing the details out of the general picture."
Alejandro frames the challenge as one that is as human as it is technical. "Getting under the surface means patient discovery alongside the customer — understanding the technical landscape, but equally the human one: who the stakeholders are, what they're optimising for, what they're afraid of. Payment transformations touch settlement, liquidity, compliance and customer experience all at once. It's a Jenga tower, and every stakeholder is holding a different piece. The skill isn't just technical synthesis. It's knowing which piece to move first."
With experience across Latin America, Europe, Africa, the UK, North America and beyond, the Bancon Payments team has a hard-won perspective on what transfers across borders — and what doesn't.
"The biggest lesson is how much of what gets called 'payments best practice' is actually local convention. Clearing cycles, scheme integrations, customer expectations, regulatory emphasis — all of it changes when you cross a border. The integration might be based on the same underlying ISO standards, but each local clearing scheme uses and interprets those standards in a slightly different manner."
— Pieter Joubert, Functional Lead & Solution Architect
"Working with colleagues who learned payments in a different context — different regulations, different infrastructure, different definitions of what failure looks like — means we're not all blind in the same places. The value isn't expertise in every market. It's the pattern recognition that comes from having been wrong in enough different ways to know what to look for. You learn to distinguish local colour from structural problem. You stop arriving at a new project convinced your last solution is the right starting point."
— Andrés de Fiore, Payments Lead
Alejandro draws a similar lesson from his experience delivering transformations across Europe, Latin America, Africa and the US: rather than overfitting to local complexity, he builds scalable architectures by abstracting the common transaction patterns that exist across markets.
For Sergey, adaptability means designing flexible, modular solutions that can be tailored to local schemes and regulatory requirements without starting from scratch each time. "Working across markets has taught me that assumptions rarely transfer well. What works in one region can fail in another due to infrastructure or user behaviour. It's made me more attentive to context and more disciplined in designing solutions that are both scalable and locally relevant."
Varsini speaks to the collaborative dimension: "It's very much a team effort. Even though we work across different environments — Direct Debit, Cards, and Direct Credits — the knowledge we share keeps us aligned and on track."
"Remember you're working with people's money. Not ledger entries. Not transaction volumes. Real people: someone waiting for their salary to clear before the rent goes out, someone whose mortgage direct debit is due tomorrow morning. The reason payments transformation deserves rigour, patience and professional pride isn't the architecture. It's the person on the other end of the transaction who will never know your name, will never read your design documents, and is quietly counting on you to get it right."
— Andrés de Fiore, Payments Lead
"Respect the edge cases from day one. The temptation is to design for the clean 95% path and defer the difficult 5% — because the clean path is where the business case is built. But in payments, the 5% is where the losses, the regulatory exposure, and the customer complaints come from. Transformations that go badly are almost always the ones that ignore the 5%."
— Pieter Joubert, Functional Lead & Solution Architect
"If you design your transformation around systems, you will replicate legacy problems. But if you design around end-to-end payment and card flows, you create an architecture that can scale, adapt and survive the next wave of change."
— Alejandro Juarez, Solution Architect
"Adapting to new regulations and schemes is the priority — but the solution should not be complex. It must be faster, more reliable and simpler for the end user."
— Varsini Bala, SAP Techno-Functional Consultant
"Challenge yourself. Dare to learn something new. Always strive to build a holistic picture rather than drowning in the specifics."
— Sergey Nikafarau, Technical Consultant
Find out more about our approach to Payments.
