Enterprise Payments Hubs Attracting Interest

By Mark Brousseau

Challenged by new regulations, the overhead and inefficiencies of siloed payments systems, and fast-rising unit costs for paper-based transactions, more billers and banks are taking a hard look at so-called Enterprise Payments Hubs -- solutions that enable the end-to-end processing of any paper-based or electronic payments or clearing channel.

Twenty-percent of participants on a recent US Dataworks (www.usdataworks.com) Webinar stated that they plan to implement an Enterprise Payments solution in the next six to 12 months, while 25 percent of the Webinar participants stated that they plan to implement an Enterprise Payments solution in 12 to 24 months. Ten percent of the Webinar participants said they already have implemented an Enterprise Payments solution. The survey respondents included billers and financial institutions.

Backing up their plans, 25 percent of participants on the US Dataworks Webinar said they already have researched Enterprise Payments solutions.

So why the rising interest in Enterprise Payments solutions? Webinar participants cited high unit costs for transaction processing (30 percent) and the inability of their legacy systems to adapt to new payment types (15 percent) as their two biggest challenges with traditional standalone payment systems.

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