Payments leaders want real-time data. Most say they don’t have it.
More than 9 in 10 payments leaders determine real-time data access business critical, and yet, 1 in 3 simultaneously name it their biggest challenge. New research from Silverflow, a payments processor, suggests that the gap between demand and capability is wider than ever.
Conducted at Money 20/20 Europe, the continent’s largest fintech event, the survey included 250 senior payments and fintech leaders from the full payments’ ecosystem — acquiring banks, commerce platforms, payment companies, card networks, PSPs and fintechs.
The breadth of participants pushes their survey beyond a story about banks running clunky legacy systems. One explanation for the responses is that most transactions still pass through multiple independent parties before data reaches any single institution. Each of those companies runs its own system, and version of ‘real-time’ data, meaning even fintechs with modern infrastructure remain dependent on the speed and format of data from upstream partners they can’t control.
Thus, the gap between access and demand is not confined to banks — it reaches every player whose data passes through legacy systems. Data access is shaping up to be the next competitive battleground in payments performance.
Why ‘real-time’ is the operative word.
Robert Kraal of Silverflow puts it bluntly,
“Payments leaders have effectively told us, unprompted, where the next gains are coming from. It’s a rare moment of near-unanimous agreement in an industry as fragmented as payments. If you want to move the needle on performance, you have to start with the data feeding it, in real time, not in a batch file from yesterday.”
Beyond real time access (33%), 32% of respondents rated data integration across systems as the biggest challenge. Together, they point to upstream infrastructural problems still holding the industry back.
From yesterday’s batch file to the balancing act today
In today’s always-on economy, financial institutions and fintechs need more than real-time payments—they need the intelligent infrastructure to capture, process and analyse transaction data as it happens.
Modern payment platforms provide the scalability, resilience and real-time visibility required to optimise operations, enhance customer experiences, strengthen risk management, and enable faster, data-driven decisions across the enterprise, but every institution’s data accessibility is determined by the weakest link in the chain.
Read more about Silverflow here.