Webinar: Cutting complexity and improving control in payments

Finextra and Bottomline will host a webinar examining how banks and payments firms can reduce operational complexity while increasing control and agility across the payments lifecycle. Natasha Lapierre of Bottomline and Scott Hamilton of Finextra will appear on the panel. Date and registration details are available from the organizers.

The session will focus on shifting from basic connectivity to greater intelligence, visibility and centralized control across payment flows and channels. Panelists will address ways institutions can extract more value from existing payments infrastructure as customer expectations, operational pressure and regulatory demands rise.

Speakers will describe the fragmented payments environment, which includes domestic and cross-border schemes, real-time rails, legacy systems and emerging payment methods. The webinar will examine how firms are managing routing, data handling, fraud defenses, compliance and reporting in a multi-rail landscape.

Adoption of ISO 20022 has produced more consistent message formats, but operators still face challenges harmonizing data, optimizing routing and improving fraud detection across networks. The discussion will cover practical steps to reduce operational overhead while retaining oversight of transaction paths, exception handling and regulatory reporting.

The panel will consider the role of AI, automation and analytics in payments operations, including realistic machine-learning use cases, the need for reliable data foundations, explainability of automated decisions and where human oversight remains necessary for high-value or high-risk transactions.

Speakers will look at technical approaches such as APIs, wider ecosystem connectivity, cross-border innovation and distributed-ledger technologies to improve interoperability and efficiency. The conversation will weigh trade-offs among speed, security and customer experience when firms reconfigure payment processing for a global, multi-rail environment.

The webinar will outline operational measures payments teams can take, including consolidating monitoring and controls, simplifying routing logic, strengthening fraud prevention, aligning compliance workflows and improving data governance and traceability to support automated decisioning and oversight.

Natasha Lapierre, Global Head of Product Strategy and Innovation for Financial Messaging at Bottomline, will share product and messaging perspectives. Scott Hamilton, a global payments and liquidity expert and contributing editor at Finextra, will moderate and guide questions on operational design and resilience.

Organizers invite industry practitioners to register for the webinar to hear the panel discussion and practical approaches to managing operational complexity in payments.