Technology Record - Issue 22: Autumn 2021

124 www. t e c h n o l o g y r e c o r d . c om F E ATUR E modernise their mission-critical payment sys- tems, driven by the need to operate more effi- ciently as well as a growing need for speed, agility and innovation in bringing new payment offer- ings to market,” said Jeremy Wilmot, chief prod- uct officer at ACI Worldwide, in a press release. “Cloud modernisation is a top strategic priority at ACI, and we are excited about this expanded alliance with Microsoft – together delivering and operating an unmatched payments platform and ultimately helping our customers grow their business by focusing on differentiation.” Meanwhile, Finastra’s FusionFabric.cloud open innovation platform, built on the Microsoft Azure cloud, has reportedly ignited the global financial services industry, lead- ing the way in which applications are written, deployed and consumed. “We want to provide financial institutions with an open platform that allows them to innovate much faster and leverage the vast amounts of data at their disposal for greater insight,” said Eli Rosner, chief product and technology officer at Finastra, in a Microsoft case study. “Now they can engage with their customers, optimise their operations, empower their employees, and transform the products that they deliver to their customers – in a secure and compliant way.” “We are helping our partners to innovate, and that’s resulted in some quite incredible solutions that are helping banks to innovate too,” says Hazou. Microsoft’s multi-industry experience has undoubtedly played a role in its success. “We have a lot of innovation going on in retail and across supply chains, for example, where pay- ments are a central feature. We’re helping to cre- ate a modern workplace for everyone – and our efforts are paying off.” And as payments evolve further, Hazou believes Microsoft and its partners will ensure that tradi- tional banks can keep up. “Payments are changing from something you do to something embedded as a consequence of other activities,” he says. “Payments are also growing up in volume and in value. They are becoming ubiquitous. “But while the role of the bank is changing, they have got the domain expertise in pay- ments that will continue to make them leaders in this space. By choosing Microsoft and its partners to modernise their payments, they will be able to compete against non-bank com- petitors coming into this space and retain their traditional franchise.” We asked a selection of Microsoft partners about how they are helping today’s financial services organisations to modernise their payments systems Partner perspectives “Large banks still run their core processing in custom COBOL code and antiquated databases on IBM mainframes. In addition to technological risks, cost issues, the need for agility and delayed time to market, old underlying technologies are challenging and expensive to integrate. Extracting critical data to data warehouses leads to duplication and non-real- time behaviour, and keeping the data on the mainframe isn’t a viable option. Asysco helps migrate mainframe systems and applications as low risk and efficiently as possible to cloud-centric, agile and cost-effective infrastructure, enabling underlying data to become immediately available in real time. Integrating with risk solutions, whether software-as-a-service- based or other, is significantly easier, and payment processing is innovative and effective. This results in a fit-for-purpose application infrastructure that provides the best possible starting position for further innovation with no more legacy limitations, risks or high cost, to provide customers with a truly optimised, future-proof environment.” Laura Daley North America Sales Director at Asysco