BNY Mellon brings industry-leading technology innovation to wire payments system with Azure

Ensuring financial stability and building customer trust

 Trust. Resilience. No margin for error. 

These principles guide the work of banking industry pioneer BNY Mellon, which has origins dating back to 1784 and American founding father Alexander Hamilton. Success is mandatory, because if BNY Mellon systems go down, the impact would be felt throughout the United States and global economies. The bank is a critical piece of the world’s financial infrastructure, processing upwards of USD2.5 trillion in payments daily—a figure which spiked to USD3 trillion at times during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. The company considers itself a technology leader, and it is always seeking ways to improve its processes and services, all while nurturing its most important asset: customer trust.

“Our brand promise is that we are going to power our customers’ success in the financial world, and we’re going to do that by being the most trusted player in the financial system," explains Nader Souri, Head of Technology Banking at BNY Mellon. “We safeguard one-quarter of the world’s assets, and we consider ourselves at the heart of the world capital markets, so we must ensure that resilience is there for proper functioning.”

Moving to the cloud and boosting resilience

Beginning in 2019, BYN Mellon and Microsoft started exploring ways to bring wire transfers to the Microsoft cloud to help ensure that necessary resilience. As an institution with innovation centers around the globe, and as the first bank to initiate real-time payments in the US, it made sense to bring that innovative spirit to everything BNY Mellon does, including selecting the technology they relied on to expand wire payments capability to the cloud. “We want to keep sight of our core values and our core business and make sure they’re aligned with the technologies of tomorrow,” says Souri. 

Adds Kevin Barr, Head of Treasury Services Strategy and Digital Cash at BNY Mellon, “Part and parcel of doing that is working with scaled and innovative companies, like Microsoft, to responsibly adopt digital technologies to allow for faster straight-through processing rates, provide more transparency to clients, enhance the client experience and ultimately drive commercial results.”

The pandemic accelerated the company’s goals toward digitization, as payment volumes spiked and BNY Mellon faced the prospect of adding significant hardware to ensure future resilience. “We were able to operate smoothly and without issue with our current infrastructure, but as part of maintaining and building trust with our clients and enhancing the resiliency of the broader markets we serve, it was incumbent upon us to explore cloud capabilities and find where we could instantaneously expand capacity of our processing systems,” says Barr.

BNY Mellon and Microsoft have a longstanding relationship built on trust, innovation, and shared values. BNY Mellon chose Microsoft Azure as a cloud provider and Microsoft Treasury as the first customer for its cloud project. The companies worked closely on security concerns and optimizing the architecture.

“We collaborate with industry leaders such as Microsoft to go to market and leverage the strengths of both of our institutions and industries,” adds Souri. “Microsoft is a great example of how a company can transform and position itself for success in the future, as we’re doing. It’s a natural fit for the two of us to work together.”

The Azure-enabled payments solution went from concept to reality in about six months, thanks to hard work from the BNY Mellon implementation team and from its Microsoft collaborators. “One of the great things about Azure is its ability to interoperate with our on-premises data centers,” says Barr. “It was critical for us to have a technology provider that understands our need to maintain the on-premises systems while exploring the cloud. Cloud is not separate from our traditional infrastructure—it’s a new part that we’re combining into the whole.”

The Azure-based wire transfer solution utilizes industry-standard transfer mechanisms for messaging, with Azure as the infrastructure for the wires.

Building on success and looking ahead

The Azure-based wire payments solution went live in September 2021. It’s not designed to replace on-premises systems—instead, it is part of a hybrid architecture. “Payment volumes globally continue to rise, so it’s important that we ensure appropriate capacity, giving us and our clients the comfort that we continue to have the resiliency and strength to support the market infrastructure with which we are entrusted,” says Barr.

BNY Mellon is closely monitoring the work with Microsoft Treasury, and the results have been excellent so far, with no surprises and no interruptions to its day-to-day operations and service a risk that is commonly discussed when adopting and implementing new technology. The biggest benefit is that nothing has changed for customers—the cloud fits into existing processes seamlessly, maintaining the bank’s goal of a stellar customer experience that inspires its financial services peers. “Using Azure, we’ve established the necessary redundancy and resilience to supplement our on-premises systems and ensure that we’ll always be there when our customers need us,” says Souri.

“We’ve led the development of real-time payments and we continue to build on that base to further digitize the industry,” says Barr. “We’re collaborating with companies like Microsoft on cloud, taking our legacy and reputation and applying it to a future that will power the global economy going forward.”

The initial goal for the cloud is to provide additional capacity for spikes and overflow, but BNY Mellon sees it opening a world of new possibilities going forward for running payments faster and cheaper. The adoption of Azure will help accelerate its movement toward digital goals. And more Azure-based innovation is in the works. “With the machine learning and AI capabilities of Azure, we are going to market together with Microsoft to transform the operational models of some of the largest investment managers and asset owners of the world,” says Souri

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