Sibos 2026: Icon Solutions' Liam Jeffs and Toine van Beusekom on payment modernisation

Quick Summary

Legacy infrastructure remains a significant hurdle for financial institutions providing critical payment services. At Sibos 2026, Liam Jeffs and Toine van Beusekom of Icon Solutions explain how their Icon Payments Framework (IPF) allows banks to modernise incrementally, moving from vertical product silos to horizontal, value-driven operating models.

How is Icon Solutions addressing the challenge of legacy infrastructure?

Legacy systems are difficult to replace because they support critical services that cannot be interrupted. Liam Jeffs notes that Icon Solutions encourages banks to start with a simple initial use case, such as instant payments or high value transactions, using IPF to integrate with their existing estate. This approach builds confidence, allowing banks to subsequently transition other rails, including digital assets, onto the framework. Toine van Beusekom adds that the industry is moving away from buying complete, rigid solutions. Instead, banks are operating on a spectrum between building their own systems and buying packaged solutions, depending on their engineering capabilities.

What is the significance of the shift to horizontal operating models?

Traditionally, banks have been organised vertically around specific products like SEPA, FedNow, or international payments. Toine van Beusekom suggests that moving to a horizontal model focused on the value chain, such as order management, execution, and clearing and settlement, allows for more innovation. This shift enables banks to ask whether a transaction is best achieved via traditional rails or DLT, focusing on the value proposition for the client rather than just the last mile of clearing. Liam Jeffs explains that this horizontal thinking is essential as ISO 20022 and account to account payments increase data volumes, requiring banks to handle higher levels of resiliency and lower latency.

How is AI being integrated into the Icon Payments Framework?

Icon Solutions views AI through three distinct pillars to accelerate the payment lifecycle:

• Internal Product Development: Using AI to reduce the time taken to create products from weeks to days within a controlled development lifecycle.
• Requirements Gathering: Helping banks translate business requirements into implementable flows more quickly using IPF as a foundation.
• Runtime Tasks: Applying AI to specific operational tasks, such as converting unstructured addresses into structured formats or performing name and number comparisons.

Toine van Beusekom emphasises that while AI provides significant acceleration, it must be used within specific guardrails to ensure safety and accuracy in a banking environment.

How does the framework handle the demands of modern data standards?

With the embedding of ISO 20022, banks are facing an explosion in data volume and new regulatory requirements for resiliency. Liam Jeffs highlights a recent white paper titled Scale without sacrifice, produced in collaboration with MongoDB. The research proved that IPF can achieve 6,000 TPS (transactions per second) with excellent latency rates. This performance provides banks with the confidence that they can maintain a scalable and resilient solution even as they transition from card based payments to high volume instant payments and account to account transactions.

FF NEWS TAKE:

The move toward modular, framework based modernisation represents a pragmatic middle ground for banks caught between the risks of legacy systems and the complexity of total replacement. By offering a spectrum of build and buy options, Icon Solutions addresses the varying engineering maturities within the global banking sector. The integration of AI into specific runtime tasks and requirements gathering shows a focused application of the technology where it can provide immediate operational efficiency without compromising the underlying stability of the payment rails.