BNY Mellon announced a collaboration with Microsoft to migrate infrastructure supporting wire payments into Microsoft Azure. As part of this advancement, BNY Mellon has developed a treasury cash management relationship with Microsoft Treasury built on the Azure cloud payment system.
This cash management relationship establishes the capability to secure high value wire payments that are critical to the orderly functioning of markets over cloud technology. BNY Mellon is driving forward the resiliency of the bank’s payments platform and the broader financial market infrastructure that it serves. The migration into the cloud also represents the latest step in BNY Mellon’s drive to digitize the payments industry with technology clients, like Microsoft.
Sharply elevated payments activity during the height of the pandemic-related trading volatility focused attention on how best to enhance the resiliency of critical market infrastructure. Migrating wire payments into Azure is the most efficient way to expand capacity while simultaneously increasing industry resiliency by introducing an alternative workflow outside of physically hosted servers in processing centers.
While cloud-based payments are not designed to replace on-premises wires, they represent an important channel for capacity expansion during episodes of market volatility and could act as a pressure valve in the case of a risk event or some other disruption impacting processing centers. Furthermore, cloud-based wires increase industry bandwidth almost immediately, versus the six-month time horizon it would take to build a comparable physical payment processing center.
“The events of 2020 demonstrated the need to accelerate digitization and helping clients in their digital journey. BNY Mellon’s cloud-enabled capabilities are critical to the strategy,” said Saket Sharma, chief information and digital officer for BNY Mellon Treasury Services, in a statement. “Working closely with Microsoft Azure and our collaborators in Microsoft Treasury, this is further testament to our ambitions to digitize the entire payments industry, making it faster, more transparent, and more resilient for all market participants.”
“BNY Mellon’s successful migration of Microsoft Treasury’s wire payments into the cloud, using Microsoft Azure, is an exciting milestone in the modernization of payments,” said Bill Borden, corporate vice president of Worldwide Financial Services at Microsoft, in a statement.
Collaboration began at SIBOS 2019, when BNY Mellon and Microsoft set out to determine how wire payments infrastructure could be hosted in Azure as the first step in a larger cloud-based digitization effort for payments.