An instant payments solution for Allianz Bank Bulgaria

Executive summary

Goals: Create a service for 24/7 processing of real-time incoming payments

Solution: А custom incoming instant payment service using Oracle FLEXCUBE and API with a retry mechanism

Benefits: Three times quicker time to market of the solution; compliance with the new banking regulations of the European Commission

Services delivered: Custom software development, DevOps

Client background

Allianz Bank Bulgaria is part of Allianz SE, one of the leading global insurance and asset management companies with over 122 million private and corporate customers in 70+ countries. Allianz Bank Bulgaria is a universal commercial bank that provides complete bank services, including general insurance, retirement provision, mortgage loans, e-banking, leasing, and other financial services. It is among the 10 largest banks in Bulgaria.

• Client: Allianz Bank Bulgaria
• Cooperation period: One month
• Location: Bulgaria
• Industry: Financial services
• Website: https://www.allianz.bg/

Business challenge 

In 2023, Allianz Bank Bulgaria set out to deliver a robust incoming instant payment service to their customers in just three months. It was a highly demanded service by bank users and an obligation issued by the European Commission in October 2022 for banks and payment service providers.

As Allianz Bank’s trusted technology partner, Tieto Tech Consulting was tasked with delivering a solution fast so that it would go live with the effectiveness that the competitive market expected. The system had to be capable of processing real-time inbound payments around the clock, as well as enable payments and information exchange across all Bulgarian banks in under 10 seconds.

Solution & business value

In close cooperation with Allianz Bank, the Tieto Tech Consulting team developed and deployed a custom incoming instant payment service that enables near immediate request processing. The solution features a unique mapping system based on microservices that reuses Oracle FLEXCUBE standard services and allows parsing an incoming request in just a few seconds.

Main features:

• 24/7 end-to-end processing of incoming instant payments
• A retry mechanism for all declined cases – reattempting the processing of payments at intervals
• The ability to manually accept or decline payments if the initial validation has failed
• Custom jobs based on Oracle FLEXCUBE to automate the incoming instant payment process
• Information logging with 24/7/365 access to it
• Full logging of the incoming instant payment process, logging of all requests and responses

Benefits for the client:

• Three times faster time to market – our team deployed the solution in just one month as compared to the expected three months.
• Higher customer satisfaction, ability to engage new customers, a stronger market position – Allianz Bank became one of the first banks in Europe to successfully provide an incoming instant payment service to its customers.
• Compliance with the European Commission’s new banking regulation for the immediate availability of funds to the recipient and the respective requirements of the Bulgarian National Bank
• The service allows for processing a huge amount of data almost immediately, taking only seconds to respond to the request and process the payment.
• More successful payments are to be expected due to the retry mechanism and manual re-validation option.
• Further digital transformation of core banking processes

Technical Details 

Considering the tight deadlines, Tieto Tech Consulting adopted a creative approach to the development of the solution. Allianz Bank was already using Oracle FLEXCUBE, but the standard Oracle services wouldn’t be able to handle the massive amounts of datа or process payments during the end-of-day operations. Therefore, Tieto Tech Consulting made extra customizations to enable 24/7 incoming instant payments.

In collaboration with the Allianz Bank team, we developed a Java service using microservices that would parse files on the fly without using directories and process the incoming request directly through API. The custom service accesses the standard Oracle FLEXCUBE services with all the required data and creates a payment in Oracle FLEXCUBE, providing an instant response to the external systems.

This allows completing all the processes of the cycle in just 1 second.

Detailed process of a custom incoming instant payment system:

• When receiving an incoming message on the API side, the system parses the incoming XML. FLEXCUBE checks the account where the transfer is supposed to arrive.
• If the account is not available, FLEXCUBE returns an instant response.
• If the transfer operation is possible, then, according to mapping, we substitute the parsed parameters into a new service Oracle FLEXCUBE.
• Next, FLEXCUBE creates payments in accordance with the configured accounting model.
• FLEXCUBE returns a multi-tier response that the operation has been performed.