The expansion of real-time payments is forcing banks to rethink how their payments infrastructure operates. Instant transactions must now run alongside high-value, cross-border and batch payment systems, all while institutions adapt to evolving regulatory expectations and the richer data requirements introduced by ISO 20022. Coordinating these flows in a 24/7 operating environment has become a critical operational challenge.
This pressure is intensifying as real-time payments rapidly scale. In the UK, the Faster Payment System processed nearly 1.4 billion transactions in Q2 2025 alone, highlighting how instant transfers are now embedded in everyday economic activity. Similar developments are taking place across Europe and the United States as always-on payment networks become standard.
As participation becomes widespread, however, the strategic question is no longer whether banks can process instant payments. Instead, the focus shifts to how effectively institutions orchestrate transactions across the entire payments ecosystem.
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Building the foundations for coordinated payments
Introducing real-time payments is one thing but implementing them effectively is another matter entirely. Banks that approach real-time payments as a standalone capability risk degrading processes, rather than enhancing them. In a 24/7 operating environment, layering instant rails onto fragmented legacy systems amplifies complexity. This forces a choice between instant payments and other crucial capabilities, such as smart routing. Over time, that trade-off erodes efficiency, limits strategic flexibility, and embeds structural bottlenecks into core infrastructure.
The answer lies in payments orchestration — consolidating all payment processing in one place. Creating a broad, interoperable payments architecture allows banks to add new capabilities, such as real-time payments, while still operating across multiple payment rails. Such multi-rail agility is crucial if banks are to maintain dynamic routing and keep costs down. An integrated architecture is also essential in ensuring consistent compliance and enabling unified liquidity management, similarly allowing banks to better manage cost pressures and deliver smooth, reliable customer experiences.
An ISO 20022-ready infrastructure ensures that richer data can be processed and applied consistently across rails, strengthening transparency and decisioning. By bringing flows together under a coordinated framework, banks gain real-time visibility across their payments ecosystem. Institutions that fail to embed orchestration at this foundational level risk becoming operationally reactive, rather than strategically in control.
Modernisation at scale
While a unified, integrated payments architecture has become essential, financial institutions without one do not need to tear down their existing infrastructure and rebuild it entirely. As in other sectors, cloud-based platforms have emerged to help organisations modernise with minimal disruption and at the pace and scale they need.
Equally important is resilience. As payments become increasingly cloud-native, reliance on a single provider creates concentration risk. Multi-cloud architectures reduce this dependency, enabling continuity across cloud environments and helping ensure payment processing remains uninterrupted during major outages, a necessity in a 24/7 real-time economy.
This is Payments as a Service (PaaS): enabling banks to embrace the latest payments solutions and accelerate modernisation, without legacy disruption. Good platforms will be low-code, meaning no custom builds are required and new services can be launched faster, and be fully scalable (including auto-scaling capabilities) so services can handle peak volumes and adapt and grow alongside business needs. Equally, strong PaaS platforms will use secure, open APIs to seamlessly plug into an existing payments ecosystem and enhance processing instantly and safely.
It is also important that chosen platforms have built-in compliance with the latest global standards and regulatory mandates, such as ISO 20022, so organisations can instantly adapt to new rules and expectations, as they arise. This allows institutions to modernise progressively, preserving prior infrastructure investments while introducing orchestration at the core.
Turning orchestration into competitive advantage
Payments orchestration delivers benefits that extend well beyond technical efficiency. When payments are coordinated through a unified architecture, banks gain greater control over cost, risk and performance across every rail they operate. A unified payments hub reduces fragmentation and enables dynamic routing and real-time decisioning, lowering cost-to-serve while improving operational resilience. It also reduces reliance on heavy upfront infrastructure investment, easing internal IT burden and freeing resources for innovation rather than maintenance.
Volante’s Big Survey 2025 shows that nearly all banks across EMEA plan to replace at least one existing payments system within the next year, with more than half expecting to act within six months — underscoring the urgency of modernising payments infrastructure.
Risk oversight becomes more robust and proactive. Bringing all payment processes together in one place allows organisations unprecedented transaction transparency and risk visibility, across their entire ecosystem, enabling them to pre-empt issues and reduce levels of risk. Sophisticated PaaS platforms have alert systems built into their customer dashboards to help organisations manage this process, making risk minimisation part of everyday work.
Banks now operate in a payments ecosystem that runs continuously across multiple rails, requiring constant coordination of liquidity, risk and operational performance. As instant payments become the norm, the real differentiator will not be speed, but how intelligently institutions orchestrate the flows behind it.
Nadish Lad, Global Head of Product and Strategic Business at Volante Technologies
