This on-demand webinar, hosted by The Banker in partnership with Bottomline, explored how banks can deliver faster, more seamless multi-rail payments while maintaining strong compliance, fraud controls, and operational resilience. The discussion brought together leaders from Barclays, JP Morgan, Zempler Bank, and Bottomline to address the growing tension between payment speed, complexity, and risk management.
Key Industry Pressures
Payments are becoming faster, more data-rich, and increasingly interconnected across multiple rails and jurisdictions. At the same time, banks face rising fraud risk, tougher sanctions and AML requirements, ongoing ISO 20022 migration challenges, and heightened customer expectations for transparency and reliability.
The core challenge is no longer whether payments can move faster, but whether risk management, compliance, and controls can operate at the same speed.
Speed Versus Control
Real-time and instant payment schemes are now widely available, shifting the industry focus from movement speed to decisioning speed. Sub-10-second settlement windows place significant strain on legacy systems and manual processes.
Banks are increasingly embedding controls earlier in the payment journey, moving away from sequential, in-flight checks toward pre-validation and predictive risk assessment. This approach reduces friction while improving fraud prevention and straight-through processing.
ISO 20022: Benefits Still Emerging
While most institutions have met ISO 20022 technical compliance deadlines, many migrations have been treated as regulatory exercises rather than transformation opportunities. As a result, most of the value from richer, structured data has yet to be fully realized.
Where institutions have adopted ISO-native approaches, benefits are already visible, including reduced false positives, improved sanctions screening accuracy, and better visibility into underlying payers and beneficiaries. However, the full impact depends on widespread adoption across the banking ecosystem.
A key upcoming milestone is the removal of unstructured address fields, which will force improved data quality but significantly reduce unnecessary screening alerts and payment delays.
Cross-Border and Real-Time Payments
Cross-border payments introduce additional operational challenges due to differing regulatory regimes, liquidity constraints, and limited global pre-validation capabilities. When payments move faster across jurisdictions, errors and fraud become far harder to reverse.
The discussion highlighted an important distinction between retail and corporate use cases. Retail customers prioritize immediacy, while corporate clients value certainty, timing control, and principal protection over real-time settlement.
Technology Reducing Fraud and Friction
Advanced analytics, machine learning, and AI are playing a critical role in reducing fraud while minimizing customer disruption. One example highlighted a 90 percent reduction in fraud through the use of machine-learning models embedded directly within payment decision engines.
These models rely heavily on high-quality data, making ISO 20022 a key enabler. However, panelists repeatedly emphasized that poor data quality undermines even the most advanced technology.
Customer Experience and Operational Resilience
Banks can be safer without being slower, but only when controls are intelligently designed and positioned earlier in the payment lifecycle. While added friction can frustrate customers, rejected or failed payments cause even greater dissatisfaction and loss of trust.
Multi-rail connectivity improves resilience by allowing banks to reroute payments during outages, manage liquidity more effectively, and maintain continuity when systems or correspondent partners fail.
Looking Ahead
The future of payments depends on unified, cloud-based, multi-rail architectures that hide complexity from customers. Increasingly, clients care about outcomes such as cost, certainty, and timing, rather than the payment rail itself.
While innovations such as stablecoins and tokenized deposits may accelerate settlement, correspondent banking and liquidity dependencies are expected to evolve rather than disappear.
Ultimately, the next phase of payments innovation will be defined not by speed alone, but by intelligent orchestration—combining rich data, embedded compliance, and flexible infrastructure to deliver secure, resilient, and customer-centric payments at scale.
