- Payments technology company Icon Solutions has secured a strategic minority investment from NatWest. The amount of the investment was not disclosed.
- The funding follows a December investment Icon Solutions secured from Citi Treasury and Trade Solutions (TTS).
- NatWest integrated Icon Solutions’ Icon Payment Framework in September as part of its payments modernization strategy.
Payments technology company Icon Solutions has secured a strategic minority investment from NatWest. The amount of the investment was not immediately disclosed. The funding is the second for Icon Solutions in the past four months; the company announced in December that it had received an investment from Citi Treasury and Trade Solutions (TTS), a division of Citi’s Services organization. The amount of that investment was similarly undisclosed.
In both instances, Citi Treasury and Trade Solutions and NatWest have integrated or further integrated Icon Solutions’ Icon Payments Framework (IPF) as part of their investments. Citi TTS will expand its use of IPF to enhance its micro-services orchestration architecture. NatWest announced its plan to integrate IPF as part of its payments modernization efforts in September.
Icon Payments Framework is a low-code payment framework that enables business payments professionals to build payment workflows and empowers bank software engineering teams to create customizable integrations into their existing systems. Both NatWest and Citi TTS noted that the technology will help them build on current relationships as well as enhance their ability to keep pace with changes in payments technology.
“Overcoming vendor lock in and powering in-house builds with the Icon Payments Framework (IPF), NatWest can now drive change from within,” Icon Solutions co-founder and Director Tom Kelleher said. “Building new revenue streams, anticipating regulatory change, responding to market changes or competitive pressures. Today’s investment is much more than an investment, it’s a commitment to a future where payments are safe, immediate, and flexible.”
Icon Solutions made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2017. In addition to its partnership announcements, the company in recent months secured “Qualified Software” status from Amazon Web Services (AWS). “Qualified Software” status is granted to technologies validated as meeting AWS cloud infrastructure’s performance, security, and reliability standards.
Icon Solutions also recently launched a FedNow scheme pack for IPF. This will help banks negotiate the balance between “near-term requirements like FedNow compliance and ISO2022” and their “longer-term strategies around driving innovation, improving CX and reducing costs,” Icon Solutions CTO Donal Fleming explained.
