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Insights and Expertise

Client experience begins in the

payments back office

iLEX Consulting Group. "When clients can see issues,
understand causes, and take action instantly, it transforms
the relationship from reactive support to proactive
partnership."
By capturing and structuring data throughout the
transaction journey, back-office systems can provide
insights such as real-time financial positions, anomaly
detection, and behavioral triggers. These insights
transform payments from a commodity to a strategic tool.

Today's business clients want intuitive, real-time tools that
By Kate Knudsen deliver the information they need when they want it.
BHMI • Dashboards: Real-time dashboards showing the full

n the increasingly data-driven payments ecosystem, transaction lifecycle including initiation, authoriza-
client expectations are shifting from "just get the tion, clearing, fees assigned, dispute activity, and
money there" to "help me see, understand, and act settlement.
I across the entire transaction lifecycle." That shift • Rules-based search and query engines: Powerful
means the true differentiator lies not in checkout speed, filtering by parameters such as date, amount, status,
but in how much insight and control a payments service reason code, payee, and geography is essential. The
provider gives its business clients. next level is ad hoc rule-based querying that empow-
ers clients to become analysts of their own data.
The payments back office can be leveraged as the source of • Artificial intelligence (AI): AI and machine intelli-
transparency, opportunity and trust. gence can surface trends, forecast volume or working
Shifting expectations in a data-driven ecosystem capital needs, and cluster client segments by behav-
ior.
In B2B settings where payments volume and risk are • Industry forces driving change: Several industry
higher, finance and treasury teams are pushing that shifts are fueling the need for richer data analytics.
expectation into their dialogues with banks, fintechs, and Examples include:
processors. The 2025 Association of Financial Professionals
(AFP) Digital Payments Survey (see www.jpmorgan. • ISO 20022 adoption, which is bringing struc-
com/insights/payments/trends-innovation/afp-digital- tured, standardized data that enables more con-
payments-survey-2025 ) revealed that data analytics is sistent parsing and intelligent automation.
now the most widely adopted technology in corporate
payments operations. • Real-time payments, which are compressing op-

The AFP study also found that 76 percent of organizations
plan to update their payments strategy over the next three From back-room utility to
years to adopt new formats, channels, and analytics. This strategic control center
points to a market in rapid transformation, and to the
opportunity for forward-looking payments providers The idea that "client experience begins in the back office"
to turn their payments back office into a strategic would have sounded odd a generation ago. For decades,
differentiator. payments back offices were quiet, batch-driven utilities:
paper ledgers, tape files, overnight posting and reconciliation
Empowering clients with actionable insights runs. Card and ACH systems were engineered for reliability
and cost, not transparency.
Traditionally, back-office functions such as reconciliation,
fee assessment, dispute management and settlement were Message formats were stripped down to save bandwidth
disconnected from client experience. Now, they are the and storage, which limited remittance data and made
foundation of client intelligence. reconciliation a manual art.

"The most trusted payments providers will be those that In the 1970s and 1980s, global card networks industrialized
give clients self-service visibility into what's happening this back-office machinery. Standards like ISO 8583
behind the scenes," said Joyce Mehlman, founder of

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