Any payment, anytime, anywhere: The case for a framework-led approach

Bank-to-bank payments might sound like a solved problem. Money moves from one account to another — how complicated can it be? Well, if you're a banking technology leader reading this while stress-eating at your desk, you already know the answer: extremely. The payments landscape has never been more fragmented, more regulated, or more strategically important. And the stakes of getting it wrong — through outages, failed transactions, or compliance gaps — have never been higher.

The Rail Explosion Is Real

Not long ago, a bank's payments architecture revolved around a handful of well-understood rails. RTGS or wire transfers for high-value, time-critical payments. ACH for batch, lower-value flows. It was almost quaint. That world no longer exists in isolation.

Today, banks must support real-time payment rails (RTP and FedNow in the US, Faster Payments in the UK, SEPA Instant in Europe), request-for-payment flows, direct debits, consumer-facing overlays like Zelle, cross-border payments via Visa or Mastercard, and digital currencies — stablecoins, tokenised deposits, deposit tokens¹, and in some cases CBDCs. You know, just a few things.

The challenge for technology leaders is not just connecting to each of these rails individually. It's building a payments infrastructure that can intelligently work across all of them — today and well into the future.

From Horizontal Rails to Vertical Value Chains

Here is where many traditional payment architectures start to show their age. Legacy systems were organised horizontally — separate silos for domestic payments, cross-border flows, high-value wires, and low-value ACH. Each rail had its own processing stack, its own compliance logic, its own operational team, and presumably its own strongly held opinions about how things should be done.

The modern answer is to flip this model entirely. Rather than building out horizontal flows for each payment type, banks should shift towards vertical, service-aligned flows that span the full value chain — initiation, execution, clearing and settlement — for any payment type. Cross-border payments stop being a dramatic special case requiring their own custom infrastructure and become just another payment with specific routing and settlement requirements. Boring, in the best possible way.

Resiliency and Smart Routing Go Hand in Hand

Resiliency in this context means more than redundant servers and a disaster recovery plan. It means the ability to dynamically reroute payments across rails when one is unavailable, degraded, or simply not the best fit — like a payments sat-nav that calmly recalculates instead of driving you into a lake.

Truly intelligent routing combines qualification (figuring out the payment type, understanding who sent it, who's receiving it, and the most efficient way to clear and settle it) with validation (does the instruction have enough information and what rules apply). A bank with consolidated infrastructure and a smart routing engine can optimise for cost, speed, liquidity, and counterparty requirements simultaneously — at the transaction level, in real time. A bank with fragmented, rail-specific systems simply cannot. It can, however, build a lot of character through adversity.

Orchestration Across the Full Value Chain

A payment is not a single event. It is a chain — from initiation and qualification, through compliance screening and routing, to execution, settlement, and reconciliation. Most legacy architectures handle these stages in silos, stitched together with custom integrations that accumulate technical debt.

A modern payments solution must own the full value chain through a single orchestration layer capable of managing payment lifecycle events, interacting with multiple settlement networks, handling exceptions and investigations, and surfacing real-time status to downstream systems and clients. When this is done well, straight-through processing rates improve, operational costs fall, and the bank is far better positioned to introduce new products quickly. When it's not done well, you get to find out at 2am on a Sunday.

ISO 20022: The Data Opportunity Still Waiting to Be Realised

With most clearing and settlement infrastructures having migrated from SWIFT MT to MX, ISO 20022 is now the global standard for payment messaging. It's rich, it's powerful, and for most institutions, it's broadly gathering dust.

Uneven interpretations across banks and jurisdictions, ERPs that haven't yet been upgraded to initiate ISO 20022 payments, and organisations that have modernised only around the edges — all of these contribute to a persistent data quality and fragmentation problem. The real opportunity ISO 20022 unlocks — richer reconciliation, smarter fraud detection, better analytics, and genuinely personalised client services — requires consolidated underlying infrastructure to be fully realised. Otherwise, you've done the hard work of upgrading your messaging standard mostly so your data can get trapped in a different format.

AI and Agentic Payments: The Next Frontier

AI's role in payments is rapidly expanding beyond fraud detection and sanctions screening. In the payments context, AI is increasingly being applied to intelligent routing, predictive liquidity forecasting, payment reconciliation, and the analysis of scheme documentation. There are still humans in the loop, but you get the general direction in which we are heading.

Looking ahead, agentic AI — where AI agents autonomously manage complex workflows — combined with robust payment orchestration capabilities will allow institutions to streamline processing, respond to clients faster, and deploy new value-added services rapidly. But here's the catch: AI is only as good as the data it's fed. Banks with fragmented infrastructure and inconsistent data models will find AI's impact limited. Those with a unified, ISO 20022-native platform will extract far greater value. It turns out garbage in, garbage out is still very much a thing, even with fancy AI.

Framework vs. Platform: Why Architecture Is the Strategic Choice

Given all of this complexity, the most important question a technology leader can ask is not which payment platform to buy — it's whether a platform is even the right mental model. Bold, we know. Sit with it for a moment.

Traditional payment platforms have delivered proven connectivity to SWIFT and major domestic rails for decades. But they were built for a different era — one of batch processing, proprietary interfaces, and a reassuringly stable set of rails. Their near-monolithic architectures make it expensive and slow to support new rails, digital asset networks, or evolving message formats. Licensing costs are high, upgrade cycles are long, and banks frequently find themselves waiting on vendor roadmaps while the market strolls cheerfully past them.

A payments framework approach — as exemplified by Icon Solutions' IPF (Icon Payment Framework) — takes a fundamentally different stance. The key insight is that consolidation doesn't have to mean a terrifying, organisation-wide rip-and-replace. Instead, a framework-led, gradual approach starts with a carefully chosen minimum viable product, proves value early, and expands in waves — adding rails, increasing throughput, and enriching orchestration logic as the core pattern is validated. Less "burn it all down," more "steady, purposeful progress with early wins." Your stakeholders will appreciate the distinction.

Concretely, IPF delivers:

• No vendor lock-in, built on open standards and open-source foundations that give banks actual control over their own infrastructure — a refreshing concept.
• Modular deployment, allowing banks to adopt IPF for individual processing layers without displacing existing systems. Baby steps are still steps.
• Cloud-native design, enabling the elastic scalability that high-volume real-time processing demands, and which on-premise infrastructure enthusiasts are slowly learning to accept.
• API-first architecture, making it straightforward to connect channels, core banking platforms, third-party services, and emerging digital asset rails.
• ISO 20022-native data models, streamlining scheme integrations and unlocking the richer data that analytics and value-added services require.
• Lower total cost of ownership, with a more predictable cost model over a 5-to-10-year horizon. Your CFO might actually smile.

The framework approach also preserves the flexibility to collaborate with third parties on the bank's own terms — not at the mercy of a single vendor's ecosystem or roadmap. Which is to say, you get to have opinions again.

The Bottom Line

The payments infrastructure decisions banks make today will determine their competitive position for the next decade. Real-time payment volumes will double by 2028. Digital currencies are already moving from pilots to production. ISO 20022 will gradually deliver on its data promise — but only for institutions that have built the underlying infrastructure to actually use it. The rest will have a very nice message format and not much else.

The banks that will lead are those investing now in orchestration, consolidation, resilience, and open architecture. The question for technology leaders is not whether to modernise. It's how to move fast enough — and smartly enough — that you're shaping the future of payments rather than breathlessly trying to catch up with it. The future is calling. It would like to initiate a payment, via three different rails, in real time, please.

^{1. The key difference between a 'tokenized deposit' and a 'deposit token' | American Banker By Noelle Acheson.}