Advanced Financial Technology Architecture and Payments Training Course

Course overview

Payment platforms are expected to deliver real-time availability, resilient transaction processing, accurate reconciliation and controlled access while integrating with banks, card schemes, wallets, fraud services and internal ledgers. For architects, product leaders and technology managers, the challenge is not simply selecting an API or payment rail. It is designing an end-to-end financial technology architecture that handles idempotency, message failures, settlement timing, customer data, regulatory controls and operational recovery without creating unmanageable technical debt.

This five-day course develops the architecture and payment-engineering judgement needed to design and govern modern payment ecosystems. Participants examine payment lifecycle models across card, account-to-account and instant-payment flows; apply domain-driven design to payment services; define ISO 20022 message mappings; design API, event and ledger patterns; and assess security, fraud and resilience controls. They learn to specify idempotent payment APIs, model double-entry postings, manage asynchronous exceptions, select integration patterns, and create measurable non-functional requirements for availability, latency, auditability and recovery.

Teaching combines instructor-led architecture briefings with payment-flow walkthroughs, design critiques, message-analysis labs and team-based case work. Using a realistic digital-bank scenario, participants develop a target-state payment architecture, including context and sequence diagrams, an API contract, event model, ledger-posting rules, control points and a phased implementation roadmap. The final deliverable is an architecture decision pack that can be adapted for a live payments modernisation, vendor evaluation or platform governance review.

The course is suited to professionals who already work with payment products, financial systems, APIs or technology change and need to make defensible architecture decisions across business, risk and engineering stakeholders.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Map end-to-end card, account-to-account and instant-payment lifecycles from initiation through settlement and reconciliation
• Design bounded contexts and service responsibilities for a modular payments platform using domain-driven design
• Specify idempotent payment APIs with validation rules, error models, correlation identifiers and versioning controls
• Model ISO 20022 payment messages and map business fields between external rails and internal canonical formats
• Construct double-entry ledger-posting rules for authorisations, captures, refunds, fees, reversals and settlement
• Select API, event-streaming and batch-integration patterns using latency, consistency, failure and audit criteria
• Define security, fraud, resilience and operational-control requirements for regulated payment services
• Produce an architecture decision pack containing diagrams, interface specifications, control matrices and a delivery roadmap

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• Payments Architects — who must design resilient platforms across payment rails, providers and internal ledgers
• Solution Architects — who translate payment product requirements into service boundaries, integrations and non-functional requirements
• Financial Technology Product Managers — who need to assess architecture trade-offs affecting payment capability and delivery risk
• Engineering Leads — who lead teams building payment APIs, event-driven services and transaction-processing components
• Technology Risk and Controls Managers — who evaluate operational resilience, security and audit controls in payment systems
• Payments Operations Leaders — who need architecture visibility to improve exception handling, reconciliation and incident recovery

Requirements and prerequisites

Participants should have practical experience of financial-services technology, payment products, enterprise integration or software delivery. The course assumes familiarity with REST APIs, JSON payloads, basic database concepts, system integration and common payment terms such as authorisation, clearing, settlement, refund and reconciliation. Experience reading architecture diagrams or working with card, bank-transfer or wallet processes is strongly recommended. Participants should be comfortable discussing trade-offs with technical teams, but they do not need to write production code. Prior hands-on knowledge of ISO 20022, Apache Kafka, Postman or a specific cloud provider is not required; these are introduced in context.

Training methodology

The instructor uses a digital-bank payments modernisation case throughout the week, moving from payment-flow analysis to target-state architecture. Short technical briefings are followed by guided labs in which participants inspect ISO 20022 fields, test API behaviours in Postman, model Kafka-style events and define ledger postings. Teams critique architecture options against failure, settlement, security and regulatory scenarios. Each day produces an artefact that feeds the final architecture decision pack, and the course closes with peer review and an individual application plan for a current workplace initiative.

Course outline

Day 1: Payment ecosystems and architecture foundations

• Payment lifecycle stages from initiation to settlement and reconciliation
• Card, account-to-account, wallet and instant-payment rail operating models
• Payment participants, scheme rules, sponsor banks and third-party provider roles
• Domain-driven design bounded contexts for payment capabilities
• Canonical payment data models and transaction state machines
• Architecture quality attributes for latency, availability, consistency and auditability
• Context diagrams and payment-service responsibility mapping

Workshop: Participants map a digital-bank payment journey and produce a bounded-context diagram with ownership, dependencies and critical transaction states.

Day 2: Payment APIs, messages and integration patterns

• REST payment API resource design and lifecycle endpoints
• Idempotency keys, request fingerprints and duplicate-submission controls
• OpenAPI contract design, versioning and backward-compatibility rules
• ISO 20022 pain, pacs and camt message families
• Field mapping between external payment messages and internal canonical models
• Synchronous API orchestration versus asynchronous event choreography
• Apache Kafka topics, consumer offsets and event schema evolution

Workshop: Participants specify an idempotent payment-initiation API, map its fields to an ISO 20022 message and define the resulting domain events.

Day 3: Ledgers, settlement and operational integrity

• Double-entry ledger principles for payment platforms
• Available balance, ledger balance and pending-funds calculations
• Authorisation, capture, reversal, refund and chargeback posting patterns
• Clearing files, settlement positions and netting logic
• Reconciliation design across processor, bank, scheme and internal records
• Exception queues, suspense accounts and break-management workflows
• Correlation identifiers and immutable audit-trail design

Workshop: Participants build posting rules and a reconciliation control flow for a card payment containing a partial reversal and settlement discrepancy.

Day 4: Security, fraud and resilient payment operations

• PCI DSS scope reduction through tokenisation and service segmentation
• Strong customer authentication and step-up authentication decision points
• Fraud signals, velocity controls and real-time decision-service integration
• Encryption, key management and secrets-handling patterns
• Timeouts, retries, dead-letter queues and compensating transactions
• Active-active resilience, recovery objectives and dependency failure modes
• Observability using transaction tracing, business metrics and operational alerts

Workshop: Participants conduct a failure-mode and control analysis for a payment service outage and produce a prioritised resilience and risk-control matrix.

Day 5: Target-state design and delivery governance

• Target-state payment-platform reference architecture
• Architecture decision records and trade-off documentation
• Build, buy and partner evaluation criteria for payment capabilities
• Migration patterns for legacy payment engines and customer data
• Non-functional requirements and service-level objective definition
• Technology-roadmap sequencing, dependencies and delivery risks
• Architecture governance, design assurance and production-readiness gates

Workshop: Participants assemble and present an architecture decision pack containing target diagrams, API and event specifications, control requirements and a phased delivery roadmap.

Tools & standards covered

ISO 20022, OpenAPI Specification, Apache Kafka, Postman

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions