Customer Story
How a payments framework built on Akka serves dozens of global banking organizations and processes billions of payment transactions.
Icon Solutions chose Akka to build its Icon Payments Framework (IPF) — a low-code payment orchestration platform that sits at the heart of the payments architecture for tier-1 global banks including Citi, UBS, NatWest, Bank of Ireland, BNP Paribas, PNC, and dozens more.
Akka ROI Scorecard
framework — banks build custom payment solutions using the IPF SDK and optional modules.
— Akka handles the hard parts so Icon focuses on building payment value, not infrastructure plumbing.
of payment transactions processed without missing a beat for tier-1 global institutions.
Business outcome: payment orchestration for Citi, UBS, NatWest, and BNP Paribas.
Global banks face a dilemma: they want to reduce the cost of ownership and increase flexibility to create unique differentiated payments offerings — which implies moving away from legacy technology platforms and prescriptive vendor solutions. But simultaneously they lack the in-house capabilities to safely and cost-effectively build robust, secure, and future-proofed solutions.
Icon Solutions set out to provide the payments industry with a modern solution that was flexible enough to adjust to each organization’s individual needs, meet modern cloud-native IT standards, and deliver powerful, secure payment orchestration that its clients could rely on.
“With IPF, we were interested in building a fundamentally different approach to payments systems. Akka really gave us a powerful foundation to do just that, right out of the box,” says Donal Fleming, Chief Technology Officer at Icon Solutions.
Akka provided the platform for a stable, resilient foundation capable of scaling with Icon’s customer base while remaining flexible enough to support the customization that banking clients require. The result: flexibility and customized flows for each bank’s specific needs, modern, secure, cloud-native architecture, mission-critical reliability compliant with NIST and SOC 2, and scale to handle billions of transactions.
“Probably the best thing I can say about Akka is that it just works. I don’t have to think about it much. I just focus on building the value-add that I need, and Akka does the rest,” says Fleming.
Speed to production. A low-code framework that allows banks to develop custom payment processing solutions using the IPF SDK — built by their own teams, Icon, or ecosystem partners.
Scale. Billions of payment transactions processed for tier-1 institutions. Akka scales both vertically and horizontally, automatically adding nodes as transaction volume grows.
Cost to operate. Modern cloud-native architecture that reduces total cost of ownership compared to legacy payment platforms, while maintaining NIST and SOC 2 compliance.
Business impact. New and flexible revenue generating and cost optimization payment solutions for dozens of global banking institutions that evolve with changing market needs and regulatory requirements.
Payment orchestration is evolving toward autonomous, intelligent processing. On the Akka Agentic AI Platform, each payment becomes a governed agent that routes itself through the optimal clearing and settlement path, performs real-time compliance checks against sanctions lists and regulatory requirements, and adapts to changing market conditions — all within the bank’s policy framework.
These payment agents can negotiate settlement timing, optimize cross-border routing to minimize fees, and automatically handle exceptions that today require manual intervention. With durable state and event sourcing, every payment decision is fully auditable — essential for institutions operating under strict regulatory oversight. Enterprises build on the Akka Agentic AI Platform directly, or have a system delivered and operated through Akka Specify.
