PARIS, France, June 30. Banks must accelerate
the modernization of their infrastructure, the Senior Vice
President and Head of Value-Added Services for Visa in the CEMEA
(Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa), Walter
Lironi said, Trend's
special correspondent reports from the event.
Walter Lironi made the statement during an information session
at the Visa Payments Forum in Paris
According to him, the financial sector is undergoing several
fundamental shifts at once: changing consumer expectations,
technological transformation, and the rise of new types of
risks.
“Generation Z expects commerce to be available where they are—on
social media. They expect every transaction to be a one-click
process, as seamless as possible. And, of course, they expect these
processes to be secure,” Lironi noted.
He emphasized that the increasing complexity of payment
ecosystems and the growing number of payment channels and methods
are making it increasingly difficult to meet these
expectations.
Moreover, Lironi pointed out the expansion of the risk
landscape, ranging from traditional transactional threats to
cybercrime and more sophisticated fraud schemes.
“In the past, risk existed only at the moment of the
transaction. Today, it extends much further—including cybercrime,”
he said.
Lironi also noted that the modernization of financial
institutions’ infrastructure cannot be delayed.
“If you’re a financial institution today, you can’t wait to
modernize. Otherwise, you risk going out of business in the near
future,” he said.
According to him, outdated banking systems based on monolithic
architecture and batch data processing are unable to meet modern
requirements for speed, security, and service personalization.
He noted that modernization improves the effectiveness of risk
and fraud management, as intelligent mechanisms are integrated
directly at the transaction level rather than added on top.
In addition, modern platforms provide greater system resilience
and scalability, whereas banks with outdated architecture face an
increase in the number of outages and longer recovery times.
“We see that banks with outdated systems experience up to five
times as many outages and significantly longer recovery times,”
Lironi emphasized.
He also added that modern digital platforms enable companies to
innovate three times faster and tap into new revenue streams more
quickly, including the embedded finance market, which is estimated
to reach more than $7 trillion by 2030.
During his presentation, Lironi outlined Visa’s approach to
modernizing banking infrastructure, which includes three key areas:
infrastructure transformation, the creation of intelligent user
services, and the strengthening of security systems.
He noted that many banks still use “monolithic” systems that are
difficult to adapt to new requirements.
As a solution, Visa is developing the Pismo cloud platform, an
API-first core banking system that is already operational in more
than 20 countries and serves over 200 million accounts.
“Pismo enables banks to modernize their infrastructure gradually
and securely, starting with individual use cases and scaling
solutions,” he noted.
He specifically emphasized that Visa is also developing a
payment acceptance platform that enables medium and large merchants
to connect to a global infrastructure with access to 190 countries,
more than 150 acquirers, and over 50 currencies through a single
connection.
Concluding his remarks, Lironi noted that Visa will continue to
invest in the development of modernization tools, including
solutions for issuers and acquirers, to accelerate the digital
transformation of the payments industry.
