Banks/PSPs typically use multiple customer/staff channels for initiating payment transactions (Mobile Banking, Internet Banking, Phone Banking, Branches, Host-to-Host, ERP etc.) and it is required to integrate each payment initiation channel with the VOP solution. Some of the channels are customer-facing and hence a prudent analysis & implementation are required to ensure a good customer experience in terms of understanding the VOP responses and continuing with the payment.
Based on our experience from implementing account verification services in other markets, we consider this a critical as well as high-risk task due to the following reasons:
1. Technical Complexity
Channel integration involves integrating with multiple systems built using a variety of technologies and possibly supported by multiple external vendors. Some of these technologies are a legacy in nature and require thorough planning.
2. Delivery Risk
To address the technical complexity and prepare a change management process, the PSP needs to deal with gap assessment, technical architecture changes, budget approvals, delivery plan and resource planning.
Based on our experience, even though the VOP providers can provide the VOP solution in 2-4 weeks (at least for us at Banfico), the channel integration in essence takes somewhere between 3-6 months. We have also seen some tier-1 banks have taken a longer time to comprehensively address VOP for offline channels such as teller applications at the branch and phone banking process updates.
3. Customer Experience (CX)
Currently in the EPC VOP scheme, the main scope of work involves the inter-PSP domain. Guidelines related to PSU-to-PSP are not explored within the scheme – such as customer experience guidelines in all operational scenarios (e.g., PSP systems not available, PSP not enrolled in EPC, guide customers in case of no-match – allowing them to pursue a transaction with a disclaimer etc.). We hope EPC may address this in future. In the meantime, the PSPs need to adopt customer experience guidelines consistent with the market or be ready to pivot if market CX guidelines are published in future.
4. Bulk VOP challenges
Integrating with the bulk check API poses its own complexity as we can expect a variety of responses (MATCH, CLOSE_MATCH, NO_MATCH, NOT_AVAILABLE, ERROR, RESPONDER TIMEOUT) for different accounts within the same bulk file and the response is returned in asynchronous mode & may take longer time to aggregate all responses. A good understanding of the business requirements and a detailed analysis of various possible scenarios is essential to manage the response received for a bulk check. The industry also needs to deal with how many concurrent VOP checks a PSP can support.
To learn more about VOP channel integration, please register for our webinar
