The payments infrastructure is currently bursting at the seams, due to changing customer expectations, rise in real-time payment schemes, very high volumes, and enhanced security needs. The solution built 20 years ago no longer meets the demands of a 24x7x365 real-time payments world. Banks have no choice but to rethink their payments play and decide if it is time to move from payments-as-a-legacy to payments-as-a-differentiator in an increasingly commoditized market.

To get on the right path, banks need to reimagine the payment infrastructure, a critical component of the banking ecosystem. Let’s explore how modernizing payment infrastructure with cloud technology can revolutionize the customer experience.

Composable, resilient, and secure infrastructure

By leveraging AWS services for a modernized payment infrastructure, companies inherit one key advantage: a scalable, resilient, and secure ecosystem. Traditional legacy systems often suffer from siloed architectures, making it difficult to scale for increasing payment volumes, create a single point of failure, and keep up with changes in messaging format and customer needs. Banks can adopt a modular approach by migrating payment infrastructure to the cloud and gaining the ability to compose services and applications flexibly. Amazon Web Services (AWS) enables rapid enhancements to the platform, helping organizations transition from product-centric to customer-centric and improving the overall customer experience. The cloud provides an ideal platform for supporting the evolution of open and embedded financial services.

AWS services also offer inherent resilience, with built-in redundancy and failover mechanisms. These features ensure high availability and reliability, which are both crucial for mission-critical payment systems. With advanced security services from AWS and compliance certifications, such as SOC 2 and ISO 27001, financial institutions can enhance data protection and mitigate cybersecurity risks, instilling trust in their customers.

One avenue for the modernization journey lies in leveraging the power of the cloud, mainly through solutions like the open innovation platform (OIP) and the payments sandbox, which can be deployed on an AWS Outposts Ready product. This innovative approach enables banks to develop in-context solutions rapidly and collaboratively for customer life moments. By doing so, banks can significantly enhance customer engagement through personalized offerings tailored to individual needs and preferences.

Data analytics and AI

Compellingly, using the cloud to modernize payment infrastructure can also facilitate the integration of data analytics and artificial intelligence capabilities. With these tools, and by harnessing vast amounts of transactional data produced every day, banks can gain valuable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and trends.

AI-powered analytics can drive personalized recommendations, fraud detection, and risk management, thus enhancing security and the customer experience (CX). For instance, predictive analytics can anticipate payment anomalies or identify potentially fraudulent activities in real time. In doing so, these tools help banks mitigate risks and identify fraud before the money leaves the system. A seamless transaction results.

Data sovereignty and residency

Data sovereignty and residency are critical considerations, especially within the highly regulated banking sector. Cloud providers offer robust solutions to address these concerns — for example, by allowing banks to store data in specific geographic regions and also comply with local regulations. Additionally, by leveraging AWS edge services, cloud infrastructure can reduce latency and improve system performance.

With the cloud, banks can leverage data residency features to ensure that sensitive customer information remains within designated jurisdictions, thus mitigating compliance risks and regulatory challenges. This capability is particularly significant for multinational banks that operate across various regions and must abide by disparate data protection laws.

End-to-end visibility

Finally, banks that use the cloud to modernize payment infrastructure gain unparalleled end-to-end visibility into transaction flows and operational processes. Cloud-native monitoring and analytics tools offer real-time insights, enabling banks to identify bottlenecks, optimize performance, and enhance operational efficiency.

Banks can gain a holistic view of their payment ecosystem by leveraging comprehensive analytics dashboards, from transaction initiation to settlement. This visibility empowers banks to proactively identify issues, address customer concerns promptly, and deliver seamless payment experiences.

The best of both worlds – AWS technology and Virtusa expertise

Virtusa and AWS have been pivotal players in the quest to help banks of all sizes to evaluate, redesign, build, and modernize their legacy payments infrastructure to highly scalable and resilient target core applications. Virtusa has obtained and maintained the AWS Financial Services Competency designation for over four years.

With payments modernization, banks can achieve the following:

• A proven, future-proof, and scalable core architecture
• Improved customer experience
• Accelerated product innovation, product agility, and faster time to market
• Plug-and-play architecture that enables ideation, prototyping, and collaboration with larger ecosystems (fintech, big tech, and partners)
• New revenue streams and collaborative business models 
• Industry-compliant data models and Banking Industry Architecture Network-aligned architecture and data models
• Access to Virtusa’s innovation factory and marketplace of 100+ fintech partners — experimenting across multiple use cases, product ideas, and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) use cases
• Industry-certified accelerators and tool kits to enable accelerated development with reduced cost of change, run, and maintenance of application

Banking on the future

Modernizing payment infrastructure with cloud technology holds immense promise for banks looking to transform their customer experience. By embracing composable, resilient, and secure infrastructure, harnessing the power of data analytics and AI, ensuring data sovereignty and residency, and achieving end-to-end visibility, banks can unlock new opportunities for innovation and growth.

Cloud-enabled modernization of payment infrastructure is not just about keeping up with industry trends; it's about future-proofing banks for the digital age. By partnering with Virtusa, banks can leverage our expertise and experience in cloud transformation to embark on a journey of innovation and deliver unparalleled customer experiences in the realm of payments.

Together, let's revolutionize banking for the better.

The right combination for the banking industry

Virtusa's AWS Financial Services practice brings over 25 years of financial services domain and engineering expertise to AWS Cloud. Virtusa has expertise and certifications in critical areas such as retail banking, corporate banking, insurance, capital markets, cards and payments, and risk and compliance. Together, AWS and Virtusa support our financial services clients globally to help them navigate a competitive landscape that is undergoing rapid change due to increasing regulations and technological progress.