In a significant development for the global payments industry, BNY Mellon has collaborated with Microsoft to migrate infrastructure supporting wire payments into Microsoft Azure. As part of this advancement, BNY Mellon has developed a treasury cash management relationship with Microsoft Treasury built on the Azure cloud payment system.

This cash management relationship establishes the capability to secure high value wire payments that are critical to the orderly functioning of markets over cloud technology. BNY Mellon is driving forward the resiliency of the bank’s payments platform and the broader financial market infrastructure that it serves. The migration into the cloud also represents the latest step in BNY Mellon’s drive to digitize the payments industry with premier technology clients, like Microsoft. BNY Mellon is building on its strong existing relationship with Microsoft in which each company has served as a client and service provider to the other over years of collaboration.

Wire payments are the backbone of the global payments network, enabling institutions to move trillions of dollars around the world each day. Until now, the infrastructure supporting these high-value payments has relied upon on-premises processing centers, and while they remain the bedrock of payments functionality, sharply elevated payments activity during the height of the pandemic-related trading volatility focused attention on how best to enhance the resiliency of critical market infrastructure.   

Migrating wire payments into Azure is the most efficient way to expand capacity while simultaneously increasing industry resiliency by introducing an alternative workflow outside of physically hosted servers in processing centers. Collaboration began at SIBOS 2019, when BNY Mellon and Microsoft set out to determine how wire payments infrastructure could be hosted in Azure as the first step in a larger cloud-based digitization effort for payments.

While cloud-based payments are not designed to replace on-premises wires, they represent an important channel for capacity expansion during episodes of market volatility and could act as a pressure valve in the case of a risk event or some other disruption impacting processing centers. Furthermore, cloud-based wires increase industry bandwidth almost immediately, versus the six-month time horizon it would take to build a comparable physical payment processing center.   

“The events of 2020 demonstrated the need to accelerate digitization and helping clients in their digital journey. BNY Mellon’s cloud-enabled capabilities are critical to the strategy,” says Saket Sharma, Chief Information and Digital Officer for BNY Mellon Treasury Services. “Working closely with Microsoft Azure and our collaborators in Microsoft Treasury, this is further testament to our ambitions to digitize the entire payments industry, making it faster, more transparent, and more resilient for all market participants.”

“BNY Mellon’s successful migration of Microsoft Treasury’s wire payments into the cloud, using Microsoft Azure, is an exciting milestone in the modernization of payments,” says Bill Borden, corporate vice president of Worldwide Financial Services at Microsoft Corp. “We look forward to further combining Microsoft’s and BNY Mellon’s cloud, engineering and payments expertise to bring innovation to the broader financial services market, with the scalability, reliability and security it needs.”

Cloud-based wire payments is just the latest innovation BNY Mellon has introduced into the global payments infrastructure. Last month, the firm announced that Verizon is the first corporate client to utilize its Real-Time E-Bills & Payments service for retail customer bill pay. In July, BNY Mellon announced it was the first US bank to support SWIFT Go, a new service for low-value cross-border payments.