Payment Systems Engineering: Real-Time Infrastructure and Enterprise Cloud Architecture

Abstract

Real-time payment architectures are the latest wave, eased by the convergence of cloud-native technologies, continuous transaction processing, and demand from regulators for instant settlement. Batch architectures fall short of consumer and business expectations for immediacy‚ transparency‚ and the always-on availability needed to support the digital economy and new digital use cases. For real-time systems, advanced distributed architectures, messaging, and interoperability frameworks may allow for the execution of transactions across multiple institutions and geographies. These may be supported by cloud infrastructures (e.g., cloud platforms), providing scalability and fault tolerance via microservices, multi-region deployments, and zero-trust security principles to support the execution of transactions in real-time. Additional technical solutions such as distributed ledger technology, artificial intelligence-based fraud prevention, and API-based ecosystem architecture, as well as operational intelligence, are evolving. However, ultra-low latency, global interoperability, demand-based capacity scalability, and distributed consistency guarantees are some of the challenges for the continued evolution of a real-time financial system.