Payments Academy

Payment Operations

D11 Operations, exceptions and reconciliation · 7 lessons

Version 1.0 | Last reviewed 2026-11-05

Learner explains payment operations, including daily processing, cut-offs, monitoring, incident handling, and reporting, and builds a daily operations checklist for a payment team. Learner demonstrates this skill using realistic banking examples, explaining each step clearly and using correct terminology throughout.

Payment operations: running the payment factory day after day.

What You Can Do After This Chapter

Learning objective. Learner explains payment operations, including daily processing, cut-offs, monitoring, incident handling, and reporting, and builds a daily operations checklist for a payment team. Learner demonstrates this skill using realistic banking examples, explaining each step clearly and using correct terminology throughout.

Practical assessment. Learner builds a daily operations checklist for a team processing 50,000 payments per day, covering start-of-day checks, intraday monitoring, cut-off actions, and end-of-day reconciliation. Learner then handles two incidents, a stuck queue of 500 payments and a failed file from a clearing house, writing the triage steps, the customer impact, and the escalation for each. Learner submits the work with all calculations, sources, and assumptions stated clearly, and checks the result against the chapter checklist before final submission.

Expected deliverables.

Completion criterion. Learner covers start, intraday, cut-off, and end-of-day duties, triages both incidents with correct steps, and states customer impact and escalation clearly. Completion is judged on accuracy, completeness, and clear reasoning throughout the submitted work.

In this chapter
  1. A Day in Payment Operations
  2. Cut-Off Management and Processing Calendars
  3. End-of-Day Processing, Close and Start-of-Day Checks
  4. Intraday Liquidity Operations and Monitoring
  5. Operational Controls, Queues and Exception Handling
  6. Incident Management, Outages and Business Continuity
  7. Exercise: Run the Operations Shift

Start Lesson 1: A Day in Payment Operations →