An Icon Solutions
success story

Icon Solutions leverages Akka to deliver unique and flexible cloud native payment solutions to tier-1 banking institutions around the world

Executive summary

Icon Solutions is a global innovator that delivers payment technology and consultancy solutions to leading financial institutions worldwide, including Citi, NatWest, and BNP Paribas through its Icon Payments Framework (IPF).

IPF is a unique low-code yet powerful framework that allows its customers to create world-class payment solutions that meet each individual institution’s unique needs. Icon turned to Akka to build and evolve this framework due to its flexibility, resilience, and reliability.

The challenge

Icon Solutions started life as a consultancy that assisted global banks and other financial institutions with their payments and banking system needs. Through these engagements, Icon realised that their banking clients had a dilemma: they wanted to reduce the cost of ownership and increase flexibility to create unique differentiated payments offerings – which implied moving away from legacy technology platforms and existing, prescriptive vendor solutions. But simultaneously they lacked the in-house capabilities to safely and cost-effectively build robust, secure, and future-proofed solutions.  

Icon Solutions team decided to use their unparalleled business domain and technology expertise, to investigate how they could provide the payments industry with a modern solution that was flexible enough to adjust to an organization’s individual needs, meet modern cloud native IT standards, and deliver powerful, secure payment orchestration capabilities that its clients could rely on. 

With IPF, we were interested in building a fundamentally different approach to payments systems. Akka really gave us a powerful foundational component to do just that right out of the box.

Donal Fleming
Chief Technology Officer. Icon Solutions

The solution

The Icon Payments Framework (IPF) is the framework that underpins payment orchestration solutions sitting at the heart of the core payments architecture of international banks.

IPF is a low-code framework that allows banks to develop their own payment processing solution using the IPF software development kit and any desired optional modules or ready-made scheme packs. This can be done by the banks themselves or with help from Icon or an ecosystem partner.

To underpin this innovative solution, Icon Solutions leveraged Akka and its distributed architecture to provide a stable, resilient foundation capable of scaling with its customer base but also flexible enough to provide the customization that its banking clients required.

With Akka as a foundational component, Icon Solutions was able to infuse IPF with the following attributes:

  • Flexibility and Customized Flows - Each bank has very specific needs, so IPF was designed specifically as a framework that these organizations could use to build their payment systems to their unique requirements. Moreover, these systems can evolve and adjust to changing market needs.
  • Modern Cloud Native Architecture - Leveraging Akka, IPF provides a modern cloud native experience with all of the agility, cost-efficiencies, and performance benefits that entails.
  • Reliability and Resiliency - These institutions' payment systems are mission-critical, so uptime and security are core elements. Akka is also compliant with multiple standards meant to enhance reliability and security, including NIST, SOC 2, and others.
  • Scale and Performance - Tier-1 global financial institutions use IPF to build systems that can handle millions upon millions of requests without missing a beat.

“Probably the best thing I can say about Akka is that it just works. I don’t have to think about it much. I just focus on building the value-add that I need, and Akka does the rest," said Donal Fleming, Chief Technology Officer at Icon Solutions.

The results

By leveraging Akka, Icon Solutions has been able to deliver incredible results to its demanding Tier-1 global financial institution clients.

  • Flexibility and Customization
    The technology behind payment solutions changes quickly, so it needs to constantly evolve. For financial organizations that need to quickly build and add new features specific to their needs, Akka provides a flexible foundation that enables these banks to add new capabilities and build future-proof solutions. 
  • Scalability
    Akka can scale both vertically (on a single machine) and horizontally (across multiple machines), automatically adding more nodes to the system.
  • Resilience and Fault Tolerance
    Akka provides strategies, leveraged by IPF, to handle failures and restarts for microservices in case of failure, ensuring that the system can recover immediately, remain stable, and is always available.
  • Ease of Development
    Akka made it easy for Icon’s team to focus on building their business logic while automatically handling functions like sharding, concurrency, load balancing, and universal naming.

A dedicated Icon Solutions team leveraged Akka to build a world-class solution that is capable of serving as a foundation for multiple world-class payment systems used by global finance leaders.

About Icon Solutions

Icon Solutions is a payments solutions company that provides financial institutions with technology, payments subject matter expertise, and multi-disciplined services. Financial institutions engage these capabilities on their payments transformation journey, from defining their payments strategy to accelerating IPF-based solutions built by their in-house engineering teams, Icon, and/or a Systems Integrator.

The Icon Payments Framework (IPF) is Icon’s major contribution to the payments industry. It is the framework that underpins payments orchestration solutions and sits at the heart of the core payments architecture of banks such as Citi, UBS, NatWest, and BNP Paribas. Leveraging the IPF software development kit, banks can easily, quickly, and safely deliver payments systems with a low total cost of ownership. IPF also features a range of additional optional modules and ready-made integration to clearing and settlement schemes to accelerate the implementation of end-to-end payments solutions.

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