Beyond Payment Rails: Reimagining Payments Through a Unified Core

Produced in partnership with Finzly, this whitepaper examines why rail-centric payment architecture has become a structural barrier to competitiveness, and how a unified payment core turns payments from an operational utility into a revenue-generating platform.

Global banks are on track to invest $57 billion in legacy payment systems by 2028, with costs rising 7.8% a year. Up to 70% of IT budgets already goes to running and maintaining existing infrastructure, largely because validation, compliance, routing and processing are rebuilt for every rail. Each new rail, from RTP and FedNow to tokenized deposits and stablecoins, adds another vendor, another integration and another layer of licensing and maintenance cost.

The whitepaper explains why payment hubs, built to orchestrate rails, unify access but not execution. It sets out the unified payment core as the alternative: one intake layer, one normalized data model and single-pass processing that routes intelligently to any rail. It covers the operational case, including a single operations console that targets the 30-40% of effort mid-sized banks spend on manual reconciliation and exception handling, and the revenue case, from ISO 20022 enriched data services to Banking-as-a-Service, a market expected to exceed $60-70 billion by 2030.

The report closes with the journey of a leading US commercial bank that adopted a phased surround-and-shrink migration, reaching 99%+ straight-through processing and more than 60% reduction in operational costs without disrupting client services.

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