Aite-Novarica Group has launched a research paper supported by Finastra that aimed to display why banks should invest in new technologies to meet market demands. The article can be found on Finastra’s web page, being entitled `The Payments Modernization and Technology: Priorities, Challenges, and Partnerships`.

The publishing reveals how the payments industry keeps evolving and innovating within the commercial banking space, while legacy systems and software are not able to support end-user demands for more efficient payment capabilities and possibilities. Furthermore, according to the survey, almost 10% of the payments volume of half of the financial institutions and banks was taken by fintech companies, which focus on providing a more seamless customer experience to their client base. Thus, the majority of banks around the world have made the decision to invest in modern payment technologies, with 94% of respondents considering multiple levels of investment in the next 2 to 3 years.

Of those, 65% plan to incorporate a significant or moderate level of investment in their payments technology and software during the same period of time. One of the main focuses is given real-time payment, as the survey finds it to be one of the most popularised and large drivers of payment modernisation. Multiple banks and financial institutions globally are in the process of deploying new payment rails, with approximately 72% of respondents having a project completed, one in progress, or the intention to implement one.

Despite these changes, many banks experience implementation challenges as well, with 57% of complainants reporting that the process of adapting legacy infrastructure makes modernisation efforts very hard to meet. As the development process runs, many banks report that they lack the needed resources for incorporating legacy systems and modern technologies. About 70% of financial institutions think that one of the major obstacles to modernisation is given by the difficulties they face with the technical integration of legacy systems.

These opinions highlight the demands and needs of technology partners that will provide the agility and streamlined implementation of services. Other insights include opinions on cross-border payments, and how they represent a challenge for banks because of compliance and security concerns, positive views on the cloud tool as banks are aware of the benefits of moving payments processing to the cloud, as well as about PaaS, which represents a solution that can improve the time to market and offer businesses more robust payment capabilities. The research covered multiple geographies, across North America, Asia-Pacific, and Europe, being undertaken in Q4 2022, and Q1 2023.

  It was also conducted amongst 108 banks and was created to report on the payments strategies, challenges, as well as priorities that the respective banks are expecting in the short or long run. Finastra’s partnerships The global provider of financial software services Finastra collaborated with multiple companies around the world in the last couple of months. The organisation appeared in one of the `Voice of the Industry` articles published by The Paypers in February of 2023.

The research aimed to analyse the most important partnerships that defined and built resilience in the fintech space in Q4 2022, from Open Banking to A2A, embedded finance, and all the strategic decisioning in between. One of the collaborations mentioned in the article was the one between Finastra and AccessPay, which focused on simplifying traditional corporate banking host-to-host connections and delivering corporate bank-to-bank connectivity. The fintech also delved into BNPL with a strategic deal made with Jifiti.

Financial institutions were embedded through Jifiti’s white-labelled platform to embed financing or easily split pay offerings at any merchant’s point-of-sale at scale, online, in-store, or via a call center. .