In the age of real-time payments, compliance pressures, and digital disruption, the financial industry faces a paradox where the faster money moves, the more difficult it becomes to keep infrastructure stable.
Focusing on this transformation, Trade Finance Global’s Mahika Ravi Shankar spoke to Erik De Belder, Director of North America and the UK at Vyntra. They discussed how the data-focused fintech company is helping banks gain real-time visibility over their transaction flows.
“Real-time payments is something we as consumers want, but also enterprises want,” said De Belder, emphasising that it’s here to stay.
According to the 2023 McKinsey Global Payments Report, electronic payment volumes have grown nearly three times faster than revenue since 2018. This trend reflects the scale of adoption, as well as the structural challenge that it presents: instant transactions continue to rise, while traditional revenue models are struggling to keep up.
This disconnect places pressure onto financial institutions who become obliged to modernise their infrastructure, reduce operational inefficiencies, and find new ways to extract value.
Operational resilience in real-time
Establishing resilience across operational, business, and technical systems is now imperative for banks. When payments are moving in milliseconds, even the smallest disruption can cause vast consequences.
Operational resilience, described by the Bank of England as the ability of financial institutions to “absorb and adapt to shocks and disruptions,” has become fundamental to this challenge. According to De Belder, it is a crucial part of the industry’s ongoing demand to modernise.
“It’s a paradigm shift,” he said. “On the one hand, we try to modernise and simplify, but we add complexity in doing so.”
For most banks, fully replacing outdated infrastructure is unrealistic. Instead, they continue to rely on legacy systems, which are older software and hardware systems, still deeply embedded in core banking operations.
A 2024 report from 10x Banking reveals that 55% of banks identify their legacy systems as their key roadblock to modernisation. It highlights the challenge banks face in integrating AI technologies, citing their core banking system as the primary obstacle.
Since a full replacement of these systems could be too costly or risky, many banks are in an ongoing process of layering modern infrastructure on top of legacy systems to keep up with new demands.
This approach, known as technology layering, is becoming increasingly common. As De Belder put it, “Everyone in the business is trying to modernise… or at least put a layer on top of the legacy.”
Data visibility
This reliance on legacy infrastructure makes real-time access to transaction data essential. While it does not replace legacy systems, it gives banks a clearer and faster view of what is happening. It allows them to detect and respond to issues quickly, reducing the risk of service disruptions. Gaining transparency thereby acts as a form of insurance against systemic failure.
“It’s all about transaction data. More specifically, it’s all about the accessibility of that transaction data, preferably in real-time,” said De Belder. “The workability of using that transaction data intelligently and monetising it.”
The need for such capabilities is only growing. Capgemini’s World Payments Report 2025 reveals that instant payments are expected to make up 22% of all non-cash transactions globally by 2028. This projected growth reinforces the urgency for banks to develop real-time monitoring and resilience strategies that can match the rising demand.
Scaling resilience through ecosystems
But resilience isn’t something banks can build alone. As payments grow faster and more global, real-time systems rely on the strength of the whole financial ecosystem.
“It is a joint effort of communities, both domestic and cross-border, to make those systems real-time and resilient,” said De Belder, underscoring the need for institutional, infrastructural, and international alignment.
Having shared infrastructure not only supports collaboration, it also reduces cost and complexity. When infrastructure gets mutualised and is developed and maintained collectively, banks avoid duplicating development efforts and share innovation costs. Mutualisation helps simplify regulatory compliance, operational productivity and resilience, while stimulating innovation at scale.
“Cost-efficiency, of course, banks can do a lot themselves,” said De Belder. “But I think it’s also the role of the market infrastructure. It is mutualised anyway, so the goal is to make things as cost-effective as possible.”
A distributed future
Looking ahead, De Belder anticipates a shift towards simplified cloud-native infrastructures and distributed ledger technologies (DLT). “There will be a strong evolution or an acceleration in cloud and distributed ledger technologies,” he said.
DLT, the foundation of blockchain, allows transaction records to be stored across multiple nodes simultaneously, which provides heightened transparency and reliability.
This transition is not merely about replacing old systems. It is about creating modern ecosystems that are resilient, agile, and cost-effective, without compromising security and oversight.
“We need to have this conversation again in 2030 and see where we are,” said De Belder, hinting at a long-term shift and signalling that today’s challenges will evolve into tomorrow’s competitive advantages.
