Bpifrance: Vault Payments

At a glance

Project year 

2024

Bank type 

Tier 2

Cloud partner 

SaaS

Geography 

France

Challenges

Bpifrance, the largest French public investment bank, is on a journey to modernise its payments architecture to process all payment rails for the entire bank on a single platform.

Bpifrance faced a fragmented payments ecosystem formed by legacy applications processing different payment types in silos. This complexity greatly hindered the quick integration of new payment methods, delayed time to market, and made it difficult to maintain complete visibility over transactions. To overcome these challenges, Bpifrance chose Vault Payments, leveraging its flexibility and ability to process all payment types on a single platform.

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The solution

Bpifrance adopted Vault Payments as the foundation for its transformation. The platform enables the bank to consolidate its payment infrastructure and accelerate the deployment of new rails.

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With Vault Payments, Bpifrance launched its new TIPS Instant Payments rail in six months, meeting regulatory timelines and demonstrating the tangible impact of our next-generation payments platform.

Our story

As the first bank in France to partner with Thought Machine, Bpifrance has been leading the way in modernising the SME banking segment—this partnership demonstrates the successful deployment of a next-generation payments processor, resulting in highly configurable payments logic, owned entirely by the bank, and quicker implementation times.

The partnership began in 2022 when Bpifrance selected Vault Core as its core banking platform, increasing operational speed fivefold and enabling the rapid launch of a commercial loan product. Building on this success, the bank adopted Vault Payments to overhaul its payments infrastructure, achieving live production in just six months.

The first milestone was the successful deployment of TIPS Instant Payments, allowing Bpifrance to meet the EU’s SEPA Instant Payments compliance deadline of January 9, 2025, with time to spare. The bank plans to migrate SEPA Credit Transfers, SEPA Direct Debits, T2 RTGS and Swift from its legacy systems onto Vault Payments––simplifying the bank’s architecture, improving data visibility, and optimising payment workflows.

Independently shaping the future of SME financing in France‍

Vault Payments gives banks complete control and vendor independence in developing, testing, and deploying bespoke payment flows that comply with scheme, regulatory, and bank requirements. Traditionally, modifying a payment flow in legacy systems requires submitting a change request to the vendor, which often takes months and incurs additional costs. Vault Payments acts as a framework, enabling banks to build and adapt their payment flows independently while offering pre-built, scheme-compliant flows for those without the technical capability.

Bpifrance leveraged this flexibility to develop and implement SEPA Instant payments over TIPS independently, tailoring the flows to their unique business needs. With our guidance and training, they achieved full ownership of their payment processes, shaping the future of SME financing in France.

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Seamless integration, smarter automation and faster payments‍

Vault Payment’s integration platform provides connectivity services to integrate the bank’s technology stack and other external services as part of bespoke payment flows with minimal development. This significantly reduces integration timelines and ensures end-to-end data integrity.

Bpifrance used this platform capability to meet regulatory deadlines and simplified the scheme certification process, reducing it to just a few weeks. The integration also improved the straight-through processing rate by enabling bespoke flows and automated solutions, such as a component that automatically retries status inquiry submissions and manages payment settlement.

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Performance and flexibility are baked into the platform

The European Central Bank is expected to mandate end-to-end processing of outbound instant payments within strict timeframes, starting in October 2025. Bpifrance is prepared to meet this requirement with Vault Payments' highly performant and flexible architecture, which processes transactions in mere milliseconds—leaving ample room within the SLA for additional processing and optimisation.

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Interoperability between payment types

By centralising its payment ecosystem around Vault Payments, Bpifrance can dynamically select the optimal payment type for each use case. This allows the bank to employ the most cost-effective option in any scenario and increase customer satisfaction.

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Complete ISO 20022 dataset for richer analytics

With Vault Payments, Bpifrance gains full visibility over the entire payment lifecycle, including all messages with automatic instruction matching and access to the complete ISO 20022 dataset for each transaction. This enables easier investigations, richer analytics, and more informed decision-making, further strengthening the bank’s ability to innovate in payments.