The CPD Certification Service has assessed and certified the PaymentGenes Academy | Foundation Course, giving L&D and team leads an external standard to measure payments training against.
Amsterdam, September 15th
Payments is one of the fastest-moving areas of financial services and one of the least standardised to learn. Teams are trained ad hoc, through vendor decks, internal wikis and whatever a new joiner picks up in their first six months. Until now there has been no independent way for a buyer to verify that a payments course is any good.
That changes with certification.
The CPD Certification Service, which has set continuing professional development standards since 1996 and lists more than 40,000 activities from providers in over 100 countries, has assessed the PaymentGenes Academy | Foundation Course against its criteria and certified it. Participants who complete the course from the September 2026 cohort onward earn 9 formally recognised CPD hours, recorded against their professional development.
PaymentGenes Academy has also joined The CPD Certification Service as a member.
"Certification changes what participants walk away with. From this cohort they leave with 9 CPD hours on their professional record that any employer recognises. The assessment also gave us a structured critique of the curriculum, which is worth as much to us as the mark itself." Jeroen van Dijk, Managing Partner, PaymentGenes Academy
Continuing Professional Development is the learning a professional does after their formal education and initial training. It covers courses, structured programmes and other activities that build capability over the course of a career, recorded in a way that is consistently recognised across employers and, in some regulated roles, formally required.
In practice, CPD provides a clear framework for recognising and documenting ongoing development for both professionals and employers.
Certification is not a badge a provider awards itself. The CPD Certification Service assesses the content, structure, learning outcomes and delivery of an activity against defined standards, and confirms how many CPD hours it represents. Only activities that pass assessment can carry the CPD Certified mark. For a buyer, it means the training has been reviewed by someone with no commercial interest in selling it.
Certified CPD hours give payments professionals verifiable evidence of structured learning that travels with them between roles and employers, and that L&D teams can account for in a development plan.
Certification is the starting point rather than the outcome. PaymentGenes Academy intends to extend the standard across more of its curriculum, and to use the assessment process as an ongoing check on how the material develops as the industry does.
"Our Consultancy work gives us a clear view of how payments knowledge is spread across client organisations. It sits with individuals rather than teams, and it takes years to build. The Foundation Course shortens that path. Certification gives our corporate clients external confirmation that this is an investment worth making." Ward Hagenaar, Managing Partner and Co-Founder, PaymentGenes
PaymentGenes Academy is the learning arm of the PaymentGenes Group, dedicated to elevating the global payments industry through high‑quality education. With courses crafted by industry practitioners, our curriculum blends expert insights, hands-on learning, and real‑world case studies to ensure learners can apply new skills immediately. From foundational knowledge to advanced specialisations, our programs support professionals at every stage of their career, while empowering organisations to build internal capability and drive growth. In an industry characterised by rapid innovation, regulatory changes, and rising complexity, we help people and companies stay ahead.
Whether it is for yourself or your team, tell us what you need and we will come back to you.
Whether it is for yourself or your team, tell us what you need and we will come back to you.
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Even within an organisation of Rabobank's scale and expertise, a challenge had quietly taken hold. The people doing the work knew the bank inside out. What many of them lacked was a structured grounding in the payments ecosystem underpinning it all.
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