Speed is table stakes. Orchestration drives scalable growth

Finance

Speed alone is no longer a competitive edge in the online payments game, argues Nadish Lad at Volante Technologies

Real-time payments have moved from innovation to expectation. In the UK alone, the Faster Payment System processed nearly 1.4 billion payments in Q2 2025, reflecting how instant account-to-account transfers have become embedded in everyday economic activity. Similar acceleration is underway across Europe and the United States, where always-on payment rails are reshaping customer expectations.

But speed alone is no longer the competitive edge.

As instant participation becomes widespread, the strategic challenge for banks has shifted from access to orchestration. Real-time rails must operate seamlessly alongside high-value, cross-border and batch systems, while supporting ISO 20022 standards, and compliance with evolving regulatory requirements. The real test is not whether institutions can send instant payments, but whether they can coordinate flows intelligently across multiple rails in a 24/7 operating environment.

Infrastructure is everything

Adding real-time payments is one thing, but how they are implemented 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 solution to this problem is 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.

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.

Scalability without disruption

A unified, integrated payments architecture is now essential but financial institutions that do not currently have this do not need to tear their current infrastructure down and build it again from scratch. As in other sectors, cloud-based platforms have emerged to help organisations modernise with minimal disruption and at the pace and scale they need.

Resilience is equally critical. 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.

Reaping the rewards of orchestration

The advantages of payment orchestration extend far 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.

Speed of payments is no longer enough to differentiate a bank. As instant payments become standard, competitive advantage will come from how intelligently banks manage flow, liquidity and risk behind the scenes. Institutions that embed orchestration at the core of their infrastructure will be better positioned to deliver smoother customer experiences, protect margins and adapt to ongoing regulatory and market change. Payment orchestration is the only path forward. It is a defining factor in the next phase of payments modernisation.

Nadish Lad is Global Head of Product and Strategic Business at Volante Technologies

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and AsiaVision