Accelerating Global Bank's Multi-country Instant Payment Rollout with LTM'S Architecture-as-a-Service

Client

The client is one of the world’s largest financial institutions. It offers a diverse portfolio of financial services, including retail banking, credit cards, loans, and wealth management. It serves millions of retail and commercial banking customers and has consistently aimed to improve operational efficiency and customer experience.

Market context

Instant payments are becoming the preferred mode for both retail and corporate customers, driven by the need for faster transactions, real-time confirmations, and improved customer experiences. Regulatory bodies in different countries are introducing strict compliance standards to ensure interoperability, security, and transparency in payment processing. Banks operating across multiple geographies face the added challenge of meeting these country-specific regulations within tight timelines. To remain competitive and responsive to market demands, the ability to roll out instant payment capabilities quickly, securely, and at scale is essential. At the same time, outdated legacy systems and fragmented architectures hinder speed, scalability, and integration, making modernization a critical priority.

Challenges

The client’s payment systems, built on outdated mainframe technology, made scaling, integration, and modification difficult. This resulted in high maintenance costs, frequent outages, and operational inefficiencies. With the system capability limited to just 20 Transactions-Per-Second (TPS), it could not meet rising transaction demands, lacked advanced data analytics capabilities, and created complex integration issues with modern platforms. The urgency to modernize grew further as the bank prepared to deploy instant payment systems across multiple countries in the Asia Pacific (APAC) and Middle East & North Africa (MENA) regions, each with its own regulatory requirements, payment schemes, and infrastructure conditions. Meeting these needs within tight deadlines, while ensuring compliance and operational stability, required a complete architectural overhaul.

Beyond technology limitations, the bank faced both external and internal risks. Externally, there were regulatory compliance risks in payments-related parameters that could expose the institution to penalties or service disruptions if left unaddressed. Internally, payment monitoring and observability inefficiencies created gaps in end-to-end transaction tracking, reducing transparency and heightening the risk of errors and delays. These challenges highlight the urgent need for a modern, resilient, and compliant payments architecture.

LTM Solution

LTM leveraged the comprehensive Architecture-as-a-Service (AaaS) model to deliver payment monitoring, operations, global architecture, quality assurance, and engineering services over a two-year engagement. This model provided the bank with a flexible, scalable, and secure architectural framework to support instant payments across multiple geographies. Key elements of the solution included:

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and microservices

• Leveraged domain-driven design to build the payment functions (fraud check, routing, validation, real-time payments) as discrete services.
• Modernized payments using the Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN) framework aligned services and accelerators like ISO 20022.
• APIs enabled seamless integration with partners, schemes, and fintechs.
• Improved security, scalability, and maintainability.
  
  

Event-driven architecture for real-time payments

• Used Kafka and similar platforms for streaming and orchestration.
• Enabled instant fund transfers, fraud detection, and customer notifications.
  
  

Payment data platforms on the cloud

• Centralized transaction data for all payment types using Google Cloud.
• Supported payment status reports, payment enquiries, operational monitoring, insight generation, and regulatory reporting.

Cloud-native and scalable infrastructure

• Deployed scalable infrastructure, faster deployment cycles, and multi-cloud support for future growth.
• Standardized Tokenization, Open Authorization (OAuth), encryption, and Identity Access Management (IAM) across platforms.
• Ensured built-in compliance with ISO20022, PCI DSS, PSD2, AML, and sanctions screening.

Resilience and observability

• Delivered circuit breakers, throttling, and health checks to ensure continuous uptime.
• Leveraged observability tools, like Splunk and Prometheus, to monitor performance and detect anomalies. Rolled out payment observability for monitoring and tracking payment failures and irregularities.

Business Benefits

• Improved processing time of instant payments and throughput from 20 TPS to 500 TPS.
• Achieved over 91% reduction in corporate payment processing times by processing 100,000 payments in 5 minutes.
• Met diverse country-wise payment regulations and adapted to regulatory changes within stringent timelines, such as National Payments Corporation of India’s (NPCI’s) updated Unified Payment Interface (UPI) payment regulations.
• Rolled out multi-country instant payment solutions with local builds in 4–5 months.
• Ensured business continuity with a robust, high-availability, and resilient solution.
• Improved resilience by enabling auto-repair for rejected payments.

Conclusion

Using LTIMindtree’s Architecture-as-a-Service model, the bank successfully modernized its payments infrastructure, meeting regulatory demands and rapidly deploying instant payment services across multiple countries. The new architecture enhanced scalability, compliance, and operational efficiency, positioning the bank to respond quickly to evolving market needs.

Testimonial

LTM portfolio leader: Pradeep Mishra, Chief Technology Officer, BFS BU

"Architecture-as-a-Service" was a strategic accelerator in our clients’ instant payment modernisation journey. It enabled them to overcome legacy constraints, embed agility and governance, and deliver scalable, resilient solutions across geographies. With a 25x improvement in TPS, rapid multi-country rollout, and real-time processing of corporate payments, our clients have gained a clear competitive edge in the instant payments space.

For more information, please get in touch with: Info@ltm.com