Today at Sibos and Money 2020, Finastra revealed its instant payments offering in the cloud for small and mid-sized banks. The Fusion Global PAYplus packaged solution will enable tier three and four financial institutions in the EU and US to access the benefits that the cloud delivers, without the cost and on-premise infrastructure requirements that may previously have been a barrier to entry.

Based on Microsoft Azure, the pre-defined offering will be generally available in Q2 2019. It will enable central updates, ensuring all users benefit from the latest changes or new product functionalities immediately, including SWIFT and clearing scheme updates. Banks will be able to get up and running in just a few months with standardized pricing and onboarding processes in this SaaS model. This will provide a clear, future-proof cost structure and flexibility in a market where volumes are currently hard to predict.

“The adoption of immediate payments is moving at a rapid pace and is becoming increasingly ubiquitous. It is driven by customer expectations of banking services that provide a user experience aligned to what they encounter in other areas of their lives. Immediate payments are the essential underpinning for clients’ digital transformations,” said Sagive.Greenspan, SVP, General Manager, Payments at Finastra. “We will enable small and mid-sized banks to step up to the plate and really compete in the cloud environment. Where the largest banks would likely prefer our private cloud solution, small and mid-sized banks crave cost-effective packaged solutions which are quick to deploy and avoid legacy platform complications, but still deliver a state-of-the-art product. We’re responding to this increasing demand for hosted payments solutions with a compelling offering built on our deep domain expertise, in combination with Microsoft.”

Small and mid-sized banks require an agile platform that works out of the box, rather than taking a long time to see project value. The Fusion Global PAYplus packaged cloud solution will serve the growing  need for immediate payments processing, including high throughput all day, every day and end-to-end transaction times of seconds. Financial institutions will be able to tap into a proven service, without extensive development and implementation timeframes or costs, and it will ease the move from a CapEx to an OpEx environment.

Janet Lewis, Vice President of Worldwide Financial Services at Microsoft Corp. said, “Finastra’s requirements for instant payments – sub-second response times, 24x7x365 availability, and secure transmission – are ideally suited to the capabilities of Microsoft Azure. We are pleased that European payment service providers will now be able to access Finastra’s instant payments solution in a manner that reduces cost of ownership and simplifies solution updates – all while ensuring the specific security, privacy and compliance needs of instant payments are met.” 

In an increasingly open and collaborative payments landscape, real-time processing capability is essential to support initiatives such as Open Banking and the ever-growing range ofvalue added services on offer from Fintechs and other players. Users of the Fusion Global PAYplus packaged cloud solution will also benefit from Finastra’s open innovation vision and the FusionFabric.cloud ecosystem. As the company continues to open its architecture for third parties to develop upon, it is committed to developing open APIs for this solution. This will enable banks to draw on third party services, including compliance, AML, and fraud, to round out their payments offerings.

A recent whitepaper from Finastra and Accenture outlines how payments is a fundamental component of today’s API ecosystem. Gareth Wilson, Managing Director, Global Payments at Accenture, said, “Consumers and businesses alike are demanding real-time, connected experiences, driving banks to deliver next generation API services. Advanced payments-related APIs will be essential in helping banks drive innovation and transformation, enabling banks to deliver new services.”