Richard Humphreys |
At this week’s Sibos event in Sydney, Australia, financial technology firm Finastra has unveiled its instant payments offering in the cloud for small and mid-sized banks.
The Fusion Global PAYplus packaged solution, which is built on the Microsoft Azure cloud, 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.
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 standardised 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, senior vice president and general manager of 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.”
Janet Lewis, vice president of Worldwide Financial Services at Microsoft, 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.”