The ISO 20022 and efficiency imperative for financial institutions
As global payment infrastructures continue to align with the ISO 20022 message standard, financial institutions have had to keep pace to retain seamless access to key schemes. Let’s consider some notable 2025 milestones:
- The Clearing House migrated its CHIPS network to ISO 20022 in April last year.
- The Federal Reserve Bank migrated the Fedwire Funds Service to ISO 20022 in July this year.
- SWIFT has issued a deadline for financial institutions to adopt ISO 20022 message standards for payment initiation messages by November 2025.
For financial institution leaders, adapting their legacy payment infrastructure to operate on this new standard is expensive and painful. Their existing infrastructure is often a fragmented and brittle web of purpose-built monolithic platforms with redundant business logic across them. It’s expensive to operate and difficult to change. While ISO 20022 is front of mind, leaders must also operate against a backdrop of increasing growth headwinds where cost efficiency is a top priority.
We engineered Vault Payments to transform this operational mandate into a strategic opportunity. Our modern payments platform enables financial institutions to adopt the ISO 20022 standard across global rails at pace, minimise long-term operating costs, and future-proof their payment infrastructure.
Universal Cloud-native payments processing platform
Vault Payments is a cloud-native platform that unifies all payment processing. It is a single engine designed to process any payment type, from any scheme, anywhere in the world. Instead of managing a different platform for each rail, Vault Payments runs everything on one highly configurable system.
Built for ISO 20022
Vault Payments natively processes payments as ISO 20022 messages, ensuring data is handled as it was exchanged with the scheme with zero data lost. With the entire official repository of versioned ISO 20022 messages embedded in the platform, your teams can rapidly launch and go live with new schemes and transaction types as they are needed.
Deploy and customise Payment Flows at pace
Payment flows in Vault Payments are constructed from highly flexible building blocks. With our Configuration Library, financial institutions can quickly deploy certified scheme-compliant payment flows right out of the box. The flexible nature of these building blocks also empowers financial institutions to quickly and securely update payment flows to adapt to evolving scheme rules, regulations, and business changes. This approach allows teams to rapidly go to market with common payment flows and easily customise them to their specific needs.
Integrate seamlessly
We designed Vault Payments to fit neatly into a financial institution's existing ecosystem. At execution, payment flows can seamlessly interact with your core banking systems and external services like AML or fraud vendors. Vault Payments also natively supports real-time event streaming from its services. These event streams can fit perfectly into a modern, event-driven architecture, enabling downstream use cases like real-time reconciliation, reporting, and machine learning.
Operate and observe
Visibility is crucial for a smooth payment operation. The Vault Payments Application provides your operations teams with a unified interface to manage all payments. You can observe the complete processing journey of each payment, assign tasks across payment operators and teams, and quickly repair failed payments, all from one place. This replaces the need to log into multiple, disparate systems to track a single payment.
Let’s meet at SIBOS 2025
Over the past year, the Vault Payments team has been helping clients across Europe and the US develop and go live with payment flows. These flows span card payments, Instant Payments, Credit Transfers, Direct Debits, Real-Time Gross Settlement, and more.
Our close collaboration with European clients, such as the French national investment bank Bpifrance, continues to drive our innovation in the European payment landscape, supporting Instant CTs, SEPA CTs and SWIFT. Across the Atlantic, we have built end-to-end connectivity to FedLine that enables US clients to connect to the Federal Reserve Bank’s payment schemes.
In addition, clients globally continue to benefit from our card issuing and processing capabilities. With Vault Payments, they can issue virtual and physical cards on the Mastercard and Visa networks, natively enable 3D Secure, configure custom card payment flows, and more.
Our team will be at SIBOS 2025. If you are planning your next-generation payments strategy, we'd love to meet and explore how Vault Payments can drive efficiency for you.
