Innovation in Payments: Ramesh Siromani, SVP, Enterprise Payments, RBC

Interview with Ramesh Siromani, SVP, Enterprise Payments, RBC

What do innovation opportunities in Payments look like in post-COVID world? Highline Beta has put together Crisis Manifesto: Innovation Opportunities in Payments post-COVID report, and asked Ramesh Siromani, SVP, Enterprise Payments, RBC to share some of his thoughts (summarized below) on modernizing payments.

“Payments today are faster and simpler than ever before, which will only increase and improve in the next few years. We are in the midst of a large-scale payment system modernization in Canada. On the business side, modernizing payments in the next 2-3 years will be accelerating the speed of payments and about providing more data along with the payments. The ISO2022 standard will be a very rich, useful type of dataset, offering more invoice and reconciliation data. We can expect to see even more use cases to come through in the next few years. There will be more opportunities for businesses to leverage the new ISO2022 data standard. International cross-border payments will become quicker and more data-rich.

As an example, when a business receives a payment, they typically want to know which invoice and customer this payment should be applied against, the payment method and what items have been paid for, which can be very complex to reconcile. However, if the data comes along with the payment, businesses can see when, for instance, two payments are still pending or that three more have been paid without having to manually sort through their invoices and accounts.

This kind of rich information provides an ability to automate and improve inventory management. More data with the payment means better integration into personal accounting systems at home, and more automation for both personal and business use cases. Right now, credit card statements look like a bunch of numbers, but in the future they will provide more detail. There will be more data to use.

This pandemic has underscored the tremendous value of payments modernization and as an industry, we have a very important role to play when it comes to providing our clients with promising innovations while also educating and protecting them along the way

Ramesh Siromani, SVP, Enterprise Payments, RBC

Open banking is also being discussed as a promise of the future as well. Open banking does two main things. It aggregates financial information for a client and allows you to share information in a secure manner, and also allows individuals to consent and use third party providers who are not banks, to securely initiate payments on their behalf. Open banking will enable payments to be much more seamless.

This pandemic has underscored the tremendous value of payments modernization and as an industry, we have a very important role to play when it comes to providing our clients with promising innovations while also educating and protecting them along the way.”