Dave B. is Payments Lead at Bancon, heading up a team he has helped build over the past two years. Today, Dave leads an established team with a centre of excellence in India and experts spanning the UK and Europe, delivering payment transformations for banks and corporates operating across multiple geographies and regulatory environments. We sat down with Dave to hear his view on the payments landscape, what makes infrastructure truly resilient, and why getting the foundations right matters more than chasing the next trending thing.
After University, I went straight into SAP consulting, working on implementations at large multinational corporates. I was fortunate enough to end up working in the corporate treasury area, with a specialist focus on SAP solutions for payments, Internal Banking and Bank Connectivity. Having worked on integrating corporates to banks, I became more interested in exploring the technologies that support banking payment processes. Whilst on a personal level we all interact with payments every day, there is a complexity behind processing payments that I find really interesting.
When I first joined, we were really building the payments practice from scratch. We had a few people with different bits of experience, but no cohesive offering. Over the last two years, we've come a long way — upskilling the team, building out payments functionality for customers, developing proof of concepts, and creating internal capability that we can demo and deploy for clients. We now have some fantastic training resources and use cases we've built and refined in our own systems.
We operate a centre of excellence in India with around 15 experts, built through a combination of new talent and upskilling existing Bancon people — not just technically, but on the business knowledge side too. We also have experts across Europe, in the UK, Barcelona, and elsewhere. We're at a point now where I feel genuinely proud of what we can offer clients — and importantly, the expertise we've developed in banking payments is something we can bring into the corporate space as well.
Many clients are looking for off-the-shelf solutions that might replace custom-built solutions. Whilst those custom-built solutions did the job at the time, the ability to upgrade and maintain those solutions is very restricted. Part of this is because the knowledge around the solution sits strictly within the organisation.
One of the biggest trends at the moment is the shift away from file-based payments and messaging towards real-time payments. There's a genuine move in the corporate space towards this, but I don't think there's total clarity yet in the industry about the best ways of connecting, integrating and tooling for it.
That's where we can really add value — helping clients make strategic decisions that will serve them for the long term. Payment infrastructure is not something you want to keep rebuilding. It's important to help corporates be bank-agnostic, so that if they change their banking relationships, they don't have to tear up their entire infrastructure. That means building to global standards — ISO 20022 being a key one — while also navigating the constantly changing landscape of local payment schemes, which every country has its own version of, its own rules, its own timelines for modernisation.
On top of that, you have payment collections — direct debits, request to pay, biller-driven mechanisms. The UK was one of the first countries to implement direct debits, but it's expanding globally now, and these tools give corporates much better visibility and predictability over cash flows. Request to pay is a particularly interesting concept — the biller requests the funds, and the payer has the ability to approve or decline, which is great for people with less predictable incomes.
In the UK, a lot of the change has been driven by regulation. The introduction of Pay.UK as the payment system operator, and the directive from central government to mitigate against fraud and fraudulent payments, has been significant.
Confirmation by Payee has been introduced by Pay.UK to mitigate fraudulent payments by validating the beneficiary's name against the sort code and account number. Whilst this is nearly always used for payments from banking apps or online banking, it is much less common to see this implemented in corporates. Implementing Confirmation of Payee in corporates for UK vendors/customers would be a good opportunity to reduce fraud and ensure cleanliness of data used in payments.
Request to pay will also be introduced which will give a payer-driven payment mechanism that offers greater flexibility than direct debits. This has benefits for the consumer, with the ability to confirm payments before they go out. It also has benefits for the biller, with better insight into payment patterns and end-to-end traceability.
The first thing I'd want to understand is the geographic footprint of the bank. Different banks can have very different footprints — some might have specialist solutions for certain markets, others might run a more centralised infrastructure. Getting that picture right is essential, because payment infrastructure needs to be constructed to match how the bank actually operates across geographies.
The second is the wider technology architecture — understanding what's already in place, and particularly the integration points. The critical dependencies: bank ledgers, fraud and sanctions screening systems, other payment engines they might already have running. Those integrations are always the pain points, and you need to understand them before you can make good architectural decisions.
The third, and in my opinion the most important, is “What does good look like for your customers?”. By looking not just at the general profile of customers, but specific groups within the customer base, you can target key problems. For example, a reasonably-sized user group needed immediate processing of credits to enable spending activities as soon as possible after midnight. The specific solution that was built optimised timing for application of funds, which had a significant customer benefit after the implementation was completed.
I think it's even higher than that! We're processing hundreds of thousands of payments a day, millions at end-of-month peaks. Over the last year, I can count on one hand the number of times we've needed a manual intervention.
What straight-through-processing means is that the solution is fully hands-off. It has monitoring and alerting built in, so that payments are created, triggered and posted; consistently, accurately and automatically without anyone needing to intervene. That consistency is what allows everyone to sleep, knowing the solution will operate consistently.
The key metric we track is throughput rates on the interfaces — particularly the speed of posting onto bank ledgers. We're constantly trying to optimise that, and it connects back to the customer-focused approach I mentioned earlier. Ultimately, customers of the bank want to see a credit on their account as quickly as possible. Get that right consistently, and then you can start thinking about what else you can do to keep them happy.
Building the payments capability has been genuinely rewarding, and the quality of the clients we're working with makes a real difference. These are banks and corporates who are serious about getting payments right for the long term, not just looking for a quick fix. That's the kind of work that keeps you engaged. For anyone who has payments expertise and wants to do something meaningful with it, I'd say Bancon is a great place to do that. We're building something exciting here, and there's still plenty of potential.
Find out more about payments at Bancon
Dave B. is Payments Lead at Bancon, heading up a team he has helped build over the past two years. Today, Dave leads an established team with a centre of excellence in India and experts spanning the UK and Europe, delivering payment transformations for banks and corporates operating across multiple geographies and regulatory environments. We sat down with Dave to hear his view on the payments landscape, what makes infrastructure truly resilient, and why getting the foundations right matters more than chasing the next trending thing.
After University, I went straight into SAP consulting, working on implementations at large multinational corporates. I was fortunate enough to end up working in the corporate treasury area, with a specialist focus on SAP solutions for payments, Internal Banking and Bank Connectivity. Having worked on integrating corporates to banks, I became more interested in exploring the technologies that support banking payment processes. Whilst on a personal level we all interact with payments every day, there is a complexity behind processing payments that I find really interesting.
When I first joined, we were really building the payments practice from scratch. We had a few people with different bits of experience, but no cohesive offering. Over the last two years, we've come a long way — upskilling the team, building out payments functionality for customers, developing proof of concepts, and creating internal capability that we can demo and deploy for clients. We now have some fantastic training resources and use cases we've built and refined in our own systems.
We operate a centre of excellence in India with around 15 experts, built through a combination of new talent and upskilling existing Bancon people — not just technically, but on the business knowledge side too. We also have experts across Europe, in the UK, Barcelona, and elsewhere. We're at a point now where I feel genuinely proud of what we can offer clients — and importantly, the expertise we've developed in banking payments is something we can bring into the corporate space as well.
Many clients are looking for off-the-shelf solutions that might replace custom-built solutions. Whilst those custom-built solutions did the job at the time, the ability to upgrade and maintain those solutions is very restricted. Part of this is because the knowledge around the solution sits strictly within the organisation.
One of the biggest trends at the moment is the shift away from file-based payments and messaging towards real-time payments. There's a genuine move in the corporate space towards this, but I don't think there's total clarity yet in the industry about the best ways of connecting, integrating and tooling for it.
That's where we can really add value — helping clients make strategic decisions that will serve them for the long term. Payment infrastructure is not something you want to keep rebuilding. It's important to help corporates be bank-agnostic, so that if they change their banking relationships, they don't have to tear up their entire infrastructure. That means building to global standards — ISO 20022 being a key one — while also navigating the constantly changing landscape of local payment schemes, which every country has its own version of, its own rules, its own timelines for modernisation.
On top of that, you have payment collections — direct debits, request to pay, biller-driven mechanisms. The UK was one of the first countries to implement direct debits, but it's expanding globally now, and these tools give corporates much better visibility and predictability over cash flows. Request to pay is a particularly interesting concept — the biller requests the funds, and the payer has the ability to approve or decline, which is great for people with less predictable incomes.
In the UK, a lot of the change has been driven by regulation. The introduction of Pay.UK as the payment system operator, and the directive from central government to mitigate against fraud and fraudulent payments, has been significant.
Confirmation by Payee has been introduced by Pay.UK to mitigate fraudulent payments by validating the beneficiary's name against the sort code and account number. Whilst this is nearly always used for payments from banking apps or online banking, it is much less common to see this implemented in corporates. Implementing Confirmation of Payee in corporates for UK vendors/customers would be a good opportunity to reduce fraud and ensure cleanliness of data used in payments.
Request to pay will also be introduced which will give a payer-driven payment mechanism that offers greater flexibility than direct debits. This has benefits for the consumer, with the ability to confirm payments before they go out. It also has benefits for the biller, with better insight into payment patterns and end-to-end traceability.
The first thing I'd want to understand is the geographic footprint of the bank. Different banks can have very different footprints — some might have specialist solutions for certain markets, others might run a more centralised infrastructure. Getting that picture right is essential, because payment infrastructure needs to be constructed to match how the bank actually operates across geographies.
The second is the wider technology architecture — understanding what's already in place, and particularly the integration points. The critical dependencies: bank ledgers, fraud and sanctions screening systems, other payment engines they might already have running. Those integrations are always the pain points, and you need to understand them before you can make good architectural decisions.
The third, and in my opinion the most important, is “What does good look like for your customers?”. By looking not just at the general profile of customers, but specific groups within the customer base, you can target key problems. For example, a reasonably-sized user group needed immediate processing of credits to enable spending activities as soon as possible after midnight. The specific solution that was built optimised timing for application of funds, which had a significant customer benefit after the implementation was completed.
I think it's even higher than that! We're processing hundreds of thousands of payments a day, millions at end-of-month peaks. Over the last year, I can count on one hand the number of times we've needed a manual intervention.
What straight-through-processing means is that the solution is fully hands-off. It has monitoring and alerting built in, so that payments are created, triggered and posted; consistently, accurately and automatically without anyone needing to intervene. That consistency is what allows everyone to sleep, knowing the solution will operate consistently.
The key metric we track is throughput rates on the interfaces — particularly the speed of posting onto bank ledgers. We're constantly trying to optimise that, and it connects back to the customer-focused approach I mentioned earlier. Ultimately, customers of the bank want to see a credit on their account as quickly as possible. Get that right consistently, and then you can start thinking about what else you can do to keep them happy.
Building the payments capability has been genuinely rewarding, and the quality of the clients we're working with makes a real difference. These are banks and corporates who are serious about getting payments right for the long term, not just looking for a quick fix. That's the kind of work that keeps you engaged. For anyone who has payments expertise and wants to do something meaningful with it, I'd say Bancon is a great place to do that. We're building something exciting here, and there's still plenty of potential.
Find out more about payments at Bancon
