Enhancing Open Banking with IFX Payments and tell.money

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IFX Payments partners with tell.money for compliance

  • IFX Payments has partnered with tell.money to evolve its Open Banking capabilities and strengthen long-term regulatory infrastructure.
  • IFX selected tell.money’s fully managed platform to improve operational efficiency and reduce internal maintenance overhead.
  • The move targets future-ready, scalable, resilient infrastructure as Open Banking requirements develop across the UK and Europe.
  • Both firms frame compliance as an enabler of innovation, not a blocker.

IFX Partners to Advance Open Banking
– What was announced: IFX Payments selected tell.money’s fully managed Open Banking platform to evolve its Open Banking capabilities and strengthen long-term regulatory infrastructure across the UK and Europe.
– Why it matters operationally (as stated): the goal is to enhance operational efficiency and reduce internal maintenance overhead.
– Key on-the-record rationale:
– Rosie McConnell (Product Director, IFX Payments): “As the regulatory landscape evolves, it made sense to bring in a specialist partner… allowing us to strengthen our framework without extra complexity.”
– David Monty (CEO, tell.money): tell.money is supporting IFX with a solution that “works now, and is ready for what’s next.”
– Where this comes from: Open Banking Expo coverage and tell.money’s announcement post (both published in 2026).
– https://www.openbankingexpo.com/news/ifx-payments-selects-tell-money-to-advance-open-banking-infrastructure/
– https://tell.money/ifx-payments-selects-tell-money-to-evolve-open-banking/

Strategic Partnership Between IFX Payments and tell.money

IFX Payments, a global fintech focused on intelligent cross-border payment and treasury solutions, has chosen tell.money as a specialist partner to advance its Open Banking infrastructure. The partnership is positioned as a strategic step: not simply a technology swap, but a deliberate investment in how IFX sustains compliance and operational readiness as rules and expectations continue to evolve.

At the center of the decision is tell.money’s “fully managed” Open Banking platform. For IFX, that matters because Open Banking is not a one-off implementation; it is an ongoing operational commitment. Interfaces, monitoring, and regulatory alignment require continuous upkeep, and the cost is not only financial—it also pulls engineering and product attention away from core client-facing payment and treasury services.

The collaboration is also framed as long-term. IFX is effectively outsourcing a portion of the compliance infrastructure burden to a provider whose product is built specifically for Open Banking obligations, with the aim of increasing resilience and scalability. In a market where cross-border payments and treasury services must remain seamless, the promise is that infrastructure modernization can happen without adding “extra complexity” to internal teams.

What Fully Managed Means
In Open Banking, “fully managed” typically means the provider runs and maintains the compliance-critical plumbing that would otherwise sit with your internal platform team, such as:
– Dedicated interface/API operations (availability, performance, versioning)
– Ongoing regulatory monitoring (tracking rule/standard changes and mapping them to platform requirements)
– Change delivery (patches, upgrades, deprecations, documentation updates)
– Resilience measures (monitoring, incident response routines, and—where applicable—fallback patterns)
That doesn’t remove accountability from the regulated firm, but it can reduce day-to-day build-and-maintain load and make compliance change more predictable.

Goals of the Collaboration

Enhancing Regulatory Compliance

A primary driver is regulatory alignment as Open Banking requirements continue to develop. IFX’s stated intent is to strengthen its long-term regulatory infrastructure—suggesting a focus on durability, not just meeting today’s baseline obligations.

tell.money’s platform is designed to simplify compliance with Open Banking regulations, including PSD2-related requirements. In practice, that means IFX is leaning on a specialist provider to help ensure its Open Banking framework remains aligned as expectations change, rather than repeatedly rebuilding or heavily modifying internal systems.

Rosie McConnell, product director at IFX Payments, captured the rationale in plain terms: as the regulatory landscape evolves, “it made sense to bring in a specialist partner,” emphasizing that tell.money offered “credibility, clarity, and simplicity” and allowed IFX to strengthen its framework “without extra complexity.” That framing matters: it signals that compliance work is being treated as a product-quality and operational-risk issue, not merely a legal checkbox.

Investing in Scalable Infrastructure

IFX describes the partnership as part of its continued investment in “scalable, compliant infrastructure.” The selection of a fully managed platform points to a scaling strategy that prioritizes repeatability and operational leverage: as volumes, client demands, or geographic requirements expand, the underlying Open Banking components should not become a bottleneck.

tell.money positions its platform as built for scalability and resilience, supporting institutions operating at scale and adapting to future regulatory developments. For IFX, which operates in cross-border payments and treasury, scalability is not only about throughput—it is also about sustaining consistent service quality while meeting compliance expectations across jurisdictions.

The practical implication is a shift in where IFX wants its teams spending time. Instead of allocating internal capacity to maintaining Open Banking infrastructure, IFX is aiming to redirect effort toward delivering seamless global payment services to clients—while the platform provider maintains and evolves the compliance layer.

Supporting Innovation

Both companies explicitly link compliance to innovation, arguing that regulatory compliance should “enable, not inhibit” innovation. This is a common tension in financial services: compliance obligations can slow delivery cycles, but they can also create trusted rails that make new services viable.

By using tell.money’s managed platform, IFX is effectively attempting to decouple innovation in its core offerings from the operational drag of maintaining Open Banking compliance infrastructure. The bet is that a specialist partner can absorb more of the ongoing change—monitoring, updates, and regulatory alignment—so IFX can focus on product and service improvements in cross-border payments and treasury.

tell.money’s platform is described as offering tools used in Open Banking contexts, including Dedicated Interface APIs and regulatory monitoring solutions. Those capabilities, packaged as a managed service, are meant to reduce friction for teams that would otherwise need to build, operate, and continuously adjust these components internally.

Strengthening Operational Resilience

Resilience is a recurring theme in the partnership description: IFX is investing in infrastructure that supports “ongoing regulatory alignment, resilience, and scalability.” In Open Banking, resilience is not only about uptime; it is also about the ability to keep operating compliantly as requirements shift.

tell.money highlights features such as real-time monitoring and fallback support, which are designed to help maintain operational stability. For IFX, the value proposition is continuity: fewer disruptions from regulatory change, fewer internal firefights around maintenance, and a stronger foundation for long-term service delivery.

David Monty, CEO of tell.money, reinforced the positioning by describing IFX as a respected player that takes “infrastructure and compliance seriously,” adding that tell.money is supporting IFX with a solution that “works now, and is ready for what’s next.” The emphasis is preparedness—building an Open Banking layer that can evolve without destabilizing the broader payments business.

From Goals to Outcomes
Goal → What changes day-to-day → What “good” looks like
– Compliance alignment → Fewer bespoke internal rebuilds when standards shift → predictable updates, clear audit trail of changes, fewer last-minute remediation cycles
– Scalability → Open Banking components don’t become the constraint as volumes/clients grow → stable performance under load, repeatable onboarding patterns, fewer platform bottlenecks
– Innovation velocity → Product teams spend less time on compliance plumbing → more release capacity for client-facing payment/treasury features
– Resilience → Faster detection and recovery when dependencies fail → monitored interfaces, rehearsed incident routines, and continuity when requirements evolve

Operational Efficiency Through tell.money’s Platform

IFX’s selection of tell.money is explicitly tied to operational efficiency. In Open Banking, the “hidden” workload often sits in the operational layer: keeping interfaces compliant, monitoring performance, responding to changes, and ensuring that the infrastructure remains robust as external expectations evolve.

tell.money’s platform is positioned as fully managed, which typically implies that the provider takes on a meaningful share of the operational burden—maintenance, updates, and ongoing alignment—so the client organization can run leaner internally. For IFX, that translates into a clearer division of labor: IFX focuses on delivering cross-border payment and treasury solutions, while tell.money focuses on the Open Banking infrastructure layer.

The platform capabilities described across sources include Dedicated Interface APIs for AIS (Account Information Services) and PIS (Payment Initiation Services) access, along with real-time monitoring and fallback support, as described by tell.money. These are core building blocks for Open Banking participation under PSD2-related frameworks, and they are also areas where operational complexity can accumulate quickly if managed in-house.

Another named capability is Confirmation of Payee (CoP), a feature intended to enhance payment security by verifying account names during transactions and reducing fraud risk; this is presented as part of tell.money’s platform offering rather than a specific IFX deployment detail. While the partnership announcement does not detail how IFX will deploy CoP specifically, its inclusion in tell.money’s platform description signals a broader focus on security and trust—key components of operational efficiency in regulated payments, where preventing errors and fraud reduces downstream cost and disruption.

Overall, the operational story is straightforward: IFX is buying time and focus. By reducing the maintenance load tied to Open Banking infrastructure, the company aims to keep teams concentrated on client outcomes—seamless global payment services—while still strengthening the compliance framework that underpins those services.

Managed Open Banking Operating Loop
A practical “managed Open Banking” operating loop (and where efficiency is won or lost):
1) Monitor & detect
– Expectation: continuous API availability/performance monitoring and alerting.
– Watch-outs: noisy alerts or unclear ownership can erase the time savings.
2) Interpret change
– Expectation: regulatory/standard updates are translated into concrete platform requirements.
– Watch-outs: ambiguous interpretations create rework; insist on clear change notes and timelines.
3) Implement & validate
– Expectation: updates are delivered with regression testing against AIS/PIS flows and interface requirements.
– Watch-outs: breaking changes without deprecation windows push work back onto internal teams.
4) Release & communicate
– Expectation: planned releases, versioning, and client-facing comms reduce surprise.
– Watch-outs: poor release notes increase incident risk and support load.
5) Fallback & incident handling
– Expectation: defined fallback/support paths and incident routines keep services stable.
– Watch-outs: “fallback exists” is not the same as “fallback is exercised”; resilience needs rehearsal.

Expert Insights on the Partnership

Rosie McConnell’s Perspective

Rosie McConnell, product director at IFX Payments, framed the partnership as a pragmatic response to regulatory change. Her central point was that evolving regulation makes specialization valuable: “As the regulatory landscape evolves, it made sense to bring in a specialist partner.”

McConnell’s emphasis on “credibility, clarity, and simplicity” is revealing. In regulated infrastructure decisions, credibility often means confidence that a vendor understands the rules and can keep pace with them. Clarity suggests transparent implementation and operational expectations. Simplicity, meanwhile, is often the hardest outcome to achieve in Open Banking, where compliance requirements can introduce layers of process and technical complexity.

Her final note—strengthening IFX’s framework “without extra complexity”—signals that IFX is trying to avoid a common trap: adding compliance tooling that increases internal burden. Instead, the partnership is positioned as a way to improve the compliance posture while keeping internal operations streamlined.

“As the regulatory landscape evolves, it made sense to bring in a specialist partner. tell.money offered the credibility, clarity, and simplicity we were looking for, allowing us to strengthen our framework without extra complexity.”
Rosie McConnell, Product Director, IFX Payments

David Monty’s Commentary

David Monty, CEO of tell.money, used his remarks to validate IFX’s market standing and to position tell.money as a forward-looking infrastructure partner. He described IFX Payments as “highly respected” and highlighted that the company takes “infrastructure and compliance seriously”—a nod to the operational maturity required to run cross-border payment and treasury services.

Monty’s key message is readiness over time: tell.money is providing “a solution that works now, and is ready for what’s next.” In Open Banking, “what’s next” is often a mix of evolving regulatory interpretation, new technical expectations, and heightened scrutiny around resilience and security. His statement aligns with the partnership’s broader theme: future-ready infrastructure that reduces disruption as requirements change.

The subtext is also competitive. If compliance and infrastructure are treated as strategic assets rather than cost centers, then a managed platform that stays current can become a differentiator—enabling faster iteration in core products while maintaining regulatory alignment.

“IFX Payments is a highly respected player in the financial services space, and it’s clear they take infrastructure and compliance seriously. We’re proud to support them with a solution that works now, and is ready for what’s next.”
David Monty, CEO, tell.money

Managed Platform Tradeoffs
What these quotes imply in practice (benefits and the “price” you pay):
– Simplicity vs control: a managed platform can reduce internal complexity, but you trade some direct control over release timing and implementation details.
– Speed vs dependency: you may ship faster in core products, but you become more dependent on the provider’s roadmap and incident response.
– Clarity vs integration effort: vendor clarity helps, yet you still need clean internal ownership for integration points (auth, customer support, risk, and change management).
– “Ready for what’s next” vs verification: future-readiness is valuable, but it only holds if updates are transparent, testable, and communicated early enough for your downstream teams.

Implications for the Financial Services Landscape

The IFX–tell.money partnership reflects a broader pattern in financial services: as Open Banking obligations mature, more firms are turning to specialist providers to handle compliance-heavy infrastructure. This is not simply outsourcing for cost reasons; it is also a response to the pace of change and the operational risk of falling behind.

For fintechs and payment providers operating across jurisdictions, Open Banking compliance can become a continuous program rather than a project. The implication is that infrastructure choices increasingly shape product velocity. If internal teams are consumed by maintenance and regulatory updates, innovation slows. If those burdens are shifted to a managed platform, teams can focus on differentiated services—such as cross-border payments and treasury capabilities—while still meeting compliance expectations.

The partnership also reinforces the idea that compliance can be positioned as an enabler. Both companies explicitly argue that regulatory compliance should support innovation. In practical terms, that means building infrastructure that is resilient and scalable enough to support new services without repeatedly re-architecting the compliance layer.

There is also a signaling effect. When a global fintech like IFX selects a specialist Open Banking platform, it validates the market for dedicated compliance infrastructure providers. For tell.money, supporting a respected payments player strengthens its reputation as a trusted provider for institutions that need to operate at scale.

Finally, the inclusion of capabilities such as Confirmation of Payee underscores the growing emphasis on security and fraud prevention as part of the Open Banking and payments ecosystem. As these features become more central, infrastructure decisions will increasingly be judged on their ability to reduce risk while maintaining seamless user and client experiences.

Decision dimension Build/operate in-house Use a managed Open Banking platform
Regulatory change handling You interpret changes, plan work, implement, test, and evidence it Provider ships updates; you validate, integrate, and govern adoption
Engineering focus More time on interface upkeep, monitoring, and compliance plumbing More time on core product (payments/treasury) and client outcomes
Operational risk Direct control, but higher risk of internal backlog and missed updates Reduced maintenance load, but dependency on vendor execution and comms
Resilience & monitoring You design/run monitoring and incident routines Often bundled monitoring/support; still needs clear joint incident playbooks
Cost profile Higher fixed team cost; potentially lower vendor fees More vendor spend; potentially lower internal overhead (varies by scale)
Differentiation You can tailor deeply, but must maintain it forever Faster time-to-capability; differentiation shifts to how you use the rails

The partnership lands in a period where Open Banking compliance expectations are described as continuing to develop. While specific upcoming rules are not detailed here, the direction is clear: firms expect ongoing change, and they are investing accordingly.

One trend is the continued operationalization of PSD2-related requirements, including secure access for AIS and PIS through dedicated interfaces. As these interfaces become more embedded in financial services, the bar rises for reliability, monitoring, and resilience—especially for firms serving clients with complex cross-border needs.

Another trend is the growing importance of security and fraud prevention features, such as Confirmation of Payee. As payment flows become faster and more interconnected, verification mechanisms that reduce misdirected payments and fraud risk become more valuable—and, in many cases, increasingly expected.

A third trend is the shift toward managed infrastructure and specialist providers. The logic is straightforward: if compliance is continuous and complex, then maintaining it internally can become a distraction from core business priorities. tell.money’s pitch—real-time monitoring, fallback support, and a platform designed to adapt—fits this direction of travel.

In that context, IFX’s decision can be read as a blueprint for how payment and treasury providers may approach Open Banking going forward: treat compliance infrastructure as a strategic foundation, partner with specialists to keep it current, and preserve internal capacity for client-facing innovation.

Open Banking Compliance Watchpoints
If you’re tracking “what changes next” in Open Banking compliance, keep an eye on:
– UK and EU rule/standard updates that affect dedicated interfaces (availability, performance, versioning expectations)
– Evidence of continuous monitoring (not just dashboards—clear alerting, ownership, and incident routines)
– How fallback/support is defined and exercised (runbooks, escalation paths, post-incident learning)
– Fraud and misdirection controls (e.g., Confirmation of Payee capabilities and how they’re operationalized)
– Change communication quality (release notes, deprecation windows, test environments, and timelines)
– Cross-jurisdiction consistency (how updates are handled when operating across the UK and Europe)

The Future of Open Banking: A Strategic Partnership

IFX Payments’ partnership with tell.money is ultimately a bet on specialization as regulation evolves. By selecting a platform designed to simplify compliance and support ongoing regulatory alignment, IFX is aiming to reduce the risk that changing requirements create operational disruption or force repeated internal rebuilds.

The partnership’s language—resilient, scalable—reflects a mindset that regulatory landscapes are not static. For firms operating across the UK and Europe, the ability to adapt quickly and confidently is becoming part of the competitive baseline.

Enhancing Operational Efficiency

Operational efficiency is the most immediate payoff IFX highlights: a fully managed platform that reduces internal maintenance overhead. In a business built around seamless cross-border payments and treasury services, that efficiency is not abstract—it is time, attention, and engineering capacity redirected toward client outcomes.

If the collaboration delivers as described, it will demonstrate a practical model for Open Banking participation: treat compliance infrastructure as a managed capability, keep internal teams focused on differentiated services, and use strong specialist foundations to scale with confidence.

Perspective note: This analysis is written from the viewpoint of Martin Weidemann (weidemann.tech), drawing on hands-on work building and scaling regulated fintech and payments systems where operational maintenance, compliance alignment, and product velocity must be balanced.

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