From BACS to CHAPS to ISO 20022, a journey of full-service discovery

With more than 1,000 employees across the UK and Ireland and the responsibility for making multi-million-pound payments for its clients, Browne Jacobson is a law firm that relies on precise, reliable financial operations, with no room for error.

But faced with industry changes, new suppliers, and evolving regulations – the firm found itself searching the market for a specialist financial technology partner who could deliver a full suite of support to ensure their processes weren’t impacted.

The Company

Browne Jacobson is a leading UK and Ireland law firm, employing more than 1,000 people across several offices. The firm represents clients in both the public and private sectors, with a strong commitment to making a difference across business and society.

One of the firm’s specialities is commercial law. This area of law involves big deals that occur rapidly and are subject to strict regulations. As such, choosing the right payment partner is paramount to the firm.

The Challenge

With a focus on automation and speed of payments, Browne Jacobson developed its own in-house client payment solution to manage its payments and the direct connections to its banks.

But what became evident was the complexity of building bespoke solutions in a landscape that changes so quickly, and where changes can be prohibitively expensive.

“We invested a lot of time in our own client payment system and we got it working well, it did what we needed it to do. But there are lots of hurdles, for example, you can only do limited testing based on file structure, so the only way for us to test payments was to make “penny payments” and fine-tune the system based on the results. For every tweak, we’d rely on people in our IT department, in our Finance department, and on expert consultants.”

Having worked with AccessPay for various services already, it became clear that the provider could become a one-stop-shop for all – ISO 20022 migration included.

Helen Jack, Head of Finance Change

Beginning with BACS

Browne Jacobson’s relationship with AccessPay started with support for BACS. The law firm had previously been using a bank-specific solution for BACS payments.

When the bank discontinued support for the software they had been using and proposed a new system, the firm realised that they would require significant changes to their existing file formats, necessitating a major overhaul of their processes.

Faced with the prospect of a complex and time-consuming transition that went beyond a simple file translation, Browne Jacobson began exploring alternative solutions. It was during this search that they discovered AccessPay, recognising it as a potential answer to their payment integration challenges.

Helen Jack, Head of Finance Change explained;

The simplicity of migration sold us, we didn’t have to change our processes and systems that we’d worked so hard to build. Plus, AccessPay gave us the ability to connect to multiple banks, whereas our existing system tied us to one bank only.

In-house built bank integration to AccessPay – the reason why

Helen also touched on how this process worked for all payment types.

“The go-live process for AccessPay for BACS was really simple. The user interface gave us great visibility and the configuration for approvals was so straightforward that it opened our eyes to the benefits of specialist support. Having gone down this route for BACS, we started exploring using AccessPay for CHAPS, Faster Payments, and other services that would be beneficial.”

Soon, Browne Jacobson moved from their in-house client payment solution, which was built to support CHAPS and Faster Payments, switching to AccessPay’s all-in-one solution which would also be an easy off-the-shelf solution for ISO 20022.

The road to ISO 20022

We knew that ISO 20022 was coming, and we knew that we wanted to replace our Practice Management System. These were the catalysts for looking to AccessPay for another service, to save us time and money. Conversations with other potential suppliers were presenting the same issues as before, with difficult translations of our files and expensive changes to make their system work for us – but again we knew that AccessPay could take simple data files and make them bank-ready.

For businesses of any shape or size, the changes required for ISO 20022 are significant. And for Browne Jacobson, even making one of these changes proved challenging enough when handling in-house.

Advice to Law firms preparing for ISO 20022

“Supporting the new Purpose of Payment (POP) codes isn’t necessarily a case of adding one new piece of data to your bank files. The new “MX” files that include POP are much larger than the old “MT” files, and structured completely differently. The bank-ready XML files we built in-house with our old PMS were about 100 lines long to make one single payment.”

We moved our client payments to AccessPay the same day we replaced our PMS. With AccessPay’s system, all we needed to provide was one line of comma-separated values, and then they would do the magic.

As a law firm, it is ideal for us to be able to pass basic data over to a specialist who then make it bank-ready, we don’t have to think about what to put into that massive file and we don’t need to worry about the knock-on impact of making one small change.

ISO 20022 is a hurdle that we all need to get ahead of the game with, but it’s also a huge opportunity for positive change. Things like structured remittance data allows for much richer, granular information to be sent through the entire payments process.

It’s not all cost and work for the sake of new rules and regulations, all that new data will be a great help for finance departments. It’s a process we all need to go through, but in the end, it’s going to make everything a lot better. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that this is a good thing.”