The payments industry has a growing division of labour, and it isn’t between national banks, payment operators, commercial banks and fin-techs. It is between the people who build infrastructure and the people who make slides about it.
Every major regulatory shift—ISO 20022 migration, SEPA Instant mandates, Request to Pay, Open Finance—spawns an entire ecosystem of boutique advisory firms. Headquartered in regulatory hubs like Brussels or London, these consultancies package European Payments Council rulebooks and central bank directives into polished strategy decks for C-level executives.
To the engineers, architects, and technical leads actually tasked with making these specifications work in production, the entire exercise can feel like an industry running on hot air.
The hot air
Firms in this space rarely write code, tune database locks, or configure message queues. You will not find them profiling memory leaks during peak settlement windows or resolving concurrency deadlocks at 2:00 AM.
Instead, their core deliverable is synthesis:
- Translating Schemas into Buzzwords: Executives rarely read XSD schemas, RTGS operating manuals, or EPC clearing rulebooks. Advisory firms read the specifications and translate them into “strategic horizons,” “gap analyses,” and “target operating models.”
- Executive Education: Running multi-day workshops for board members and senior directors to explain what ISO 20022 actually means for their operating margins.
- Corporate Insulation: Much of the advisory spend isn’t about acquiring new knowledge; it is about risk offloading. When a core modernization timeline slips or an infrastructure budget balloons, having a Brussels-backed “independent strategic assessment” provides immediate political air cover.
The Value Disconnect
The tension between the executive suite and technical delivery teams usually comes down to one question: Where does the real expertise live?
A well-placed speaker on a conference panel can command respect by talking about “interoperability paradigms” and “frictionless ecosystems.” But knowing that an ISO message exists is worlds apart from handling truncation rules, ensuring atomic commits across distributed nodes, or migrating legacy MT settlement logic without dropping a single payment.
When the advisory engagement ends, the firm hands over a 200-page PDF of high-level recommendations and walks away. The actual complexity—the edge cases, schema validations, and legacy core integrations—lands directly back on the engineering teams on the ground.
Strategic alignment has its place in navigating policy and politics. But until an advisory deck can process a live batch or settle a high-value transaction, true institutional resilience will always belong to the teams building and maintaining the engines underneath.
The Advice
My advice to everyone is that if you need expertise try to look at your supplier first. Do not fall for the “hot air” advisor. Or look for a company that actually builds stuff, has a history of actually implementing systems.
PS: Post written out of frustration that before each big conference in the industry I am flooded with “collaboration offers” and “opportunities” from this hot air consultants trying to “extract information” from people that actually have the knowledge.