Retail & Payments

Regulatory scrutiny across payments resilience, customer outcomes and third-party risk continues to intensify. Real-time payments and faster settlement windows are increasing control expectations and reducing tolerance for operational failure.

Regulatory change is delivered under compressed timelines alongside live payment services, where control ownership is fragmented across operations and technology.

Hybrid regulatory and payments delivery skillsets remain scarce, limiting firms’ ability to remediate controls and build sustainable internal capability.

Expansion into digital and real-time products, alongside M&A and platform consolidation, is increasing integration and migration complexity across payments ecosystems.

Growth and migration activity delivered alongside live customer services increases delivery risk, particularly where regulatory and resilience priorities compete for capacity.

Product, integration and payments SMEs remain in short supply, limiting firms’ ability to scale growth safely.

Legacy core banking and payments platforms constrain agility, while pressure to modernise, automate and adopt cloud increases integration and migration risk.

Modernisation is delivered alongside business-critical payment services where tolerance for disruption is minimal, increasing release and sequencing risk.

Payments-literate engineering and cloud expertise remains limited, increasing contractor reliance and constraining long-term capability build.

Fragmented payments and customer data, intensified by ISO 20022 change, increases reconciliation complexity and limits trusted insight.

Data issues often surface mid-programme, introducing remediation effort and execution risk alongside BAU.

Hybrid data and payments skillsets remain scarce, limiting sustainable data foundation uplift.

Rising expectations across digital onboarding, KYC and real-time payment journeys are increasing pressure on service performance and control.

Service improvements delivered alongside live operations increase inconsistency and execution risk, particularly where processes remain manual.

Specialised KYC, payments and process improvement capability remains limited, constraining sustainable service model change.

Cost pressure, ISO 20022 complexity and rising resilience expectations are exposing inefficiencies across fragmented payments operations.

Operational change delivered alongside live payment services increases strain on teams and limits sustainable improvement.

Operational improvement and payments-literate change expertise remains scarce, limiting continuous improvement and long-term capability build.