<h5 class="pt-1"><b>Highlights of our approach included:</b></h5> <ul> <li>Ecosystem review:&nbsp;We reviewed The FA’s existing payments ecosystem, identifying major sources of friction and inefficiency including a lack of visibility into where payments had come from and what they related to, creating the need for manual investigation and reconciliation.<br> <br> </li> <li>Payment gateway selection:&nbsp;We conducted a market evaluation of potential new payment gateway solutions, advising The FA on their merits and maturity before shortlisting two, of which Barclays Smartpay Fuse was selected over PayPal Braintree.&nbsp;<br> <br> </li> <li>Stakeholder management:&nbsp;We worked with multiple stakeholders from The FA, its third parties, football clubs and County FAs to decide the most appropriate technology architecture for the new payment services and to determine the best delivery framework to support a seamless migration.<br> <br> </li> <li>Payments model:&nbsp;We designed an end-to-end registration to reconciliation solution, based on a unified PaaS model. This enabled multiple functions to be brought under a single payment gateway which would also simplify maintenance and upgrades.&nbsp;<br> <br> </li> <li>Payments architecture:&nbsp;We designed a next-generation, cloud-native architecture for the payments solution, ensuring product fit using stakeholder feedback and behavioral science—such as adding “nudges” to invoices to encourage payers to include a reference.&nbsp;<br> <br> </li> <li>Payments automation:&nbsp;We delivered integrated workflows to automate invoicing, reconciliations and accounting, removing the need for manual invoicing and reconciliations.&nbsp;<br> <br> </li> <li>Payments accounting platforms:&nbsp;We worked with The FA’s third-party accounting platforms, Xero and Great Plains (by Advantage), to integrate reporting and reconciliation into the process flows as well as into the end-to-end technical solution.<br> <br> </li> <li>Third-party consumption:&nbsp;We made PaaS available for consumption by The FA’s third-party platforms as part of an end-to-end solution.<br> <br> </li> <li>Pilot and implementation:&nbsp;We identified three CFAs for a pilot migration and used the learnings to guide a phased rollout of the new solution. This approach meant the solution was successfully delivered to The FA, 116 professional clubs and 50 CFAs in just nine months.<br> <br> </li> <li>Simplified Smartpay Fuse onboarding:&nbsp;We developed a standardized and simplified method of onboarding to the Smartpay Fuse payment gateway, reducing onboarding times from months to just two weeks.<br> <br> </li> <li>Onboarding template:&nbsp;We created a template to enable further revenue streams to be onboarded to the payments framework in the future.</li> </ul>