Across the U.S. and Europe, the business payments landscape is in a period of unusually rapid change. New instant payment schemes are rolling out, ISO 20022 is totally reshaping the role of data, and regulators are confronting financial crime more aggressively.
At the same time, corporates and banks are under pressure to deliver more seamless experiences for busy business users expecting real-time, always-on, and fully transparent.
In much the same way that 100-year-old city streets are choked with traffic now that was simply not imagined back then, connected finance and payments are exposing the limits of aging legacy banking infrastructure. Systems that were designed for old-school batch cycles and predictable cutoffs are now supporting 24/7 multi-rail payment flows, complex risk and compliance tasks, plus operational resilience. Those in the know are concerned.
It’s forcing hard questions. Which rails should be used for which use cases? How do finance teams manage liquidity when money moves constantly, while simultaneously running fraud and sanctions checks in seconds instead of days? It has disadvantages.
Yet it’s also opening up new opportunities. Richer payment data, better API connectivity, and instant rails are giving banks and corporates the tools to rethink how they manage everything from supplier payments to treasury operations. FIs that can connect these capabilities coherently across schemes, channels and jurisdictions are positioning themselves to compete not just on speed, but on reliability, intelligence, and security.
That’s part of a complicated ecosystem, as Bottomline’s Edward Ireland said in a recent interview. He’s been using his knowhow by working at the intersection of these forces, helping banks and corporates navigate multi-rail, always-on ecosystems where speed, certainty and security must coexist, and master the “common tongue” of ISO 20022.
Instant Payments: Certainty, Speed (and New Liquidity Headaches)
Ireland said the place to start is with what instant rails are doing right, both technically and commercially. Many of the newer instant schemes are built on modern technology stacks, with robust technical frameworks and API support. He said that means better information flows and “ancillary services” built around the payment itself, not just funds movement.
On the business side, there are two core benefits that explain the appeal of instant payment rails. The first (and most obvious) is speed: money arrives quickly, often in seconds. Ireland said next is certainty: in most schemes, the payment is either accepted or rejected almost immediately, and if it’s accepted, the beneficiary is credited.
Pair these with real use cases, and the value is tangible. Treasurers can place funds on deposit and know they’ve landed the same day, whether that’s overnight or end of day. Supply chains move faster because goods move as soon as payment is confirmed.
“The certainty of payment and the speed of payment” are exactly what such use cases demand, according to Ireland.
But those same characteristics create new liquidity and risk management challenges. In a 24/7 world, incoming funds may hit accounts outside of business hours or on weekends, leaving large balances sitting in accounts too long. Ireland noted that corporates and FIs now have to think more keenly about “how you manage the potential that you receive money overnight or over a weekend” as part of optimizing liquidity.
On the outbound side, instant rails compress decision windows for risk checks. Traditional batch systems like ACH or Bacs offer a multi‑day cycle where banks can resolve queries and clear false positives before settlement. In an instant environment, payment service providers may have as little as five to ten seconds to make that same call.
If anything about a payment is uncertain, it must be rejected. “You tend to get about five times as many rejections,” Ireland said, not because the payments are inherently riskier, but because there is simply no time to investigate edge cases.
That’s why pre-validation is essential. He contended that “the way that you reduce five times as many rejections in an instant payment world is to do more pre-validation,” prescreening payees and data so fewer payments fail under tight time limits and rules.
ISO 20022: From Deadlines to Data Advantages
Last year, many institutions treated ISO 20022 as a deadline-driven compliance exercise. According to Ireland, this year has to be different. The focus now is on “capturing the benefits,” he said, particularly around risk management, reconciliation and connectivity.
Ireland frames ISO’s value around two core themes: more information, and more structure. That’s especially true of structured address and name data, which are central to this year’s implementations. Structured address data enables more accurate sanctions and AML screening, helping to reduce false alarms that disrupt legitimate flows.
“It’s false positives that tend to cause payment failure, rather than genuinely misdirected payments,” Ireland noted. Better structured data helps screening engines quickly distinguish the truly risky from look-alikes that carry less actual risk than may appear.
At the same time, ISO 20022 allows more content in a message, more detail about who is being paid, on whose behalf, for what, and why. According to Ireland, that richer context can support everything from improved reconciliation to better reporting and analytics. It also dovetails with instant payments. If banks use ISO fields correctly, it gives fraud and compliance tools more to work with in the seconds available to detect an attack.
He added that the future this all describes is about mining ISO 20022 payloads for continuous improvements in payment quality, exception reduction, and automation.
Getting On the Right Rails
Despite the momentum behind instant payments, Ireland cautioned against assuming “instant is always better.” In his view, legacy rails like ACH in the U.S. or Bacs in the U.K., offer compelling advantages. They are resilient, reliable and low cost. These are ideal for payroll, recurring payments, and high-volume/low risk flows where speed lacks value.
What’s changing is how banks frame that choice. Rather than asking customers which rail they want, leading institutions are asking what kind of payment they wish to make. Is speed the priority? Cost? Reliability? Value? “It’s really about what you want to do, rather than what type of payment you’re making, then choosing the most appropriate rail,” Ireland said.
What debuted as Hick’s Law in the 1950s was reframed as “the paradox of choice” in the 2000s but they’re effectively the same: “decision time increases logarithmically as the number of available choices increases.” So, having many options makes choosing one more difficult.
In markets like the U.S., that complexity is illustrated by the sheer number of rails: checks, ACH, wires, instant schemes, virtual cards, Fedwire and CHIPS all compete. Institutions that come out ahead, he said, will abstract that complexity behind intelligent routing and advisory, aligning use cases with rails that best balance risk, cost, and user expectations.
Connectivity and Fraud: Building for a 24/7, Multi‑Rail Reality
Behind all of this is connectivity. If every rail a bank implements effectively becomes part of critical infrastructure, then every connection has to be highly secure, highly available, and engineered for fast recovery. To Ireland, “what ‘good’ looks like today are 24/7 fully available rails” with high uptime and faster recovery times. And that’s just baseline. Active-active environments are moving from nice-to-have to standard practice.
In reality, most financial institutions are dealing with a patchwork of connectivity methods across schemes and counterparties. Supporting an ultra-connected payments ecosystem means being comfortable operating a blend of APIs, file transfers, and MQ-based messaging for highspeed, high resilience scenarios, according to Ireland.
Always-on multirail readiness raises the bar for fraud and sanctions controls. As settlement windows shrink, so does the time to detect and stop bad payments. Ireland noted that “one of the critical requirements is to have, as far as possible, real time fraud defenses and real time sanctions screening” that keep up with instant rails, and with legacy systems using APIs to tap into the world’s expanding digital payments networks.
A combination of AI and machine learning is no longer optional. Banks need systems that can provide the best decisions at machine speed without overwhelming operations teams. “You can’t have the best system if it’s producing hundreds of hits that you haven’t got time to look at,” Ireland said.
The goal is to safely drive down alert volumes using the smartest available technology, while feeding those systems with the richer, more structured data that ISO 20022 enables.
For financial institutions and corporates alike, Ireland said the future of business payments rests not just on speed and price, but on how well organizations orchestrate connectivity across rails, data standards, and defenses.
Instant payments may grab the headlines, but he believes it’s the quiet work of building resilient, intelligent connectivity that will define who thrives in a real-time B2B economy.