Silvergate Bank transforms transactions with Finastra

Digital payments and cryptocurrencies are revolutionising the financial services industry and opening new avenues for businesses and individual investors to build their portfolios and exchange currencies. Headquartered in La Jolla, California, Silvergate Bank is a major provider of innovative financial infrastructure solutions and services for over 800 fintech and digital currency companies and investors. 

For many years Silvergate used multiple payments systems to track, manage and process transactions and relied on its legacy FEDwire processing system to settle many of its payments. Recognising the limited speed of its traditional transaction processing, Silvergate first established its own Microsoft Azure infrastructure to host its client-facing application programming interface (API) gateway. To further leverage this new infrastructure and provide a superior customer experience in a fully compliant environment, Silvergate selected Finastra’s Fusion Global PAYplus to complement its progressive approach to open APIs.  

With a future-proof payments hub now in place, Silvergate is continuing to migrate its existing SWIFT and automated clearing house infrastructure. “Our clients don’t send us a FEDwire or SWIFT payment; they send us a request with basic routing detail and expect us to do the settlement maths,” says Chris Lane, senior vice president of service management at Silvergate. “Fusion Global PAYPlus replaces our reliance on time-consuming manual calculations with an automated payment verification process that has greatly increased our transaction speed, flexibility, and ability to scale.”

Now that it has deployed Fusion Global PAYplus on Microsoft Azure, Silvergate receives regular system updates automatically, helping it stay compliant with the latest regulations and clearing house connections as they evolve. “Being able to host Fusion Global PAYplus in the Microsoft Azure cloud is a game-changer, as it gives us new functionality and enables us to scale up our solutions quickly when payment volumes increase,” says Peter Braunz, senior vice president and head of innovation at Silvergate.

Silvergate’s digital currency customers now enjoy much faster wire processing, which affords them greater flexibility in executing their particular trading strategies. “Silvergate Bank is proud to be one of the first US-based banks to process FEDwire transactions via APIs and looks forward to continuing to work with Finastra and Microsoft to enhance its digital payment services,” says Braunz. 

This article was originally published in the Spring 2020 issue of The Record. Subscribe for FREE here to get the next issues delivered directly to your inbox.