What is payments infrastructure?

In a market driven by rapid innovation, new competition, and demands from increasingly digital customers, even the most capable payments organizations are challenged to adapt to, and thrive in, an always-on, real-time world. Payments infrastructure that once offered a competitive advantage is now increasingly inefficient, restrictive, and complicated to integrate. Advances in cloud technology and artificial intelligence enable companies to provide differentiated features at a lower price point, and plans to modernize payments infrastructure are now a top priority for many organizations.

Payments modernization is about improving the way money is moved around the world. It encompasses real-time processing, data-rich messaging, and new standards that make it easier to connect and exchange information. It is also about adopting cloud technology and applying new ways to make the payments organization more efficient.

While existing payments infrastructure has served most companies well for many years, the multiple demands of increased payments volumes, customer expectations for shorter settlement times, and ongoing pressure to reduce payments costs mean that organizations must transform and modernize the way they host, run, and process payments.

Fee erosion is squeezing margins and causing many organizations to look for ways to reduce operating costs. Beyond this, new payments networks are pushing the world to always-on, real-time money movement. And criminals are evolving as well—continuing to find new ways to conceal illicit activity. This is all happening in the context of new non-bank competitors who are disrupting the existing value chain for payments. To meet these challenges organizations are reevaluating their payments infrastructure to thrive in this new environment.

Cloud technology makes it possible for payments organizations to run their infrastructure more efficiently and adapt quickly to market changes. Companies can automatically adjust capacity as payments volume increases or decreases, and they can embrace real-time processing with data streaming to unlock the power of payments data with machine learning. The cloud also makes it easier to connect and exchange data externally and tap into emerging digital ecosystems.

As the world’s leader in enterprise open source, Red Hat helps communities create the future of cloud technology and enable companies to innovate, promote interoperability, and simplify technology to compete more successfully in the marketplace.

Red Hat customers have the freedom to move payments services across the infrastructure that makes the most sense for their business. They can deploy on-site or off-site from providers such as Alibaba, Amazon, Google, IBM, and Microsoft—allowing them to reduce costs and operational complexity while realizing the efficiencies associated with a modern cloud platform. And they can run traditional cloud-native applications across payments infrastructure using a consistent cloud experience, letting them progressively modernize applications over time.