Explore the essential details of Verification of Payee (VoP) regulation for European banks, including regulatory requirements, benefits, and implementation steps. 

2024 has been a transformative year for the payments industry, marked by significant innovations, regulatory changes, and technological advancements. In this series, we explore the most impactful trends and developments that have shaped the sector. 

The 2025 SEPA Instant Credit Transfer Rulebook introduces major changes, including no transaction limits, hybrid address formats, and reduced execution times. These updates aim to enhance efficiency and security in instant payments. Financial institutions must adapt their systems to comply with the new regulations. 

In this article, we explore DORA’s foundational principles, the challenges it presents to financial entities, and how a multicloud strategy can help institutions overcome these hurdles while positioning themselves as leaders in operational resilience. 

To achieve true operational resilience, financial institutions must adopt an engineering-driven approach. By embedding resilience into cloud infrastructure, leveraging practices like chaos engineering, and fostering a resilience-first culture, firms can meet regulatory demands, ensure service continuity, and strengthen trust in critical payment systems. 

The more forward-looking banks are looking to create a composable set of systems and architecture that allows them to plug-and-play best class components into their infrastructure rather than sourcing from a single provider. They don’t want to be tied to monolithic systems that are so deeply interconnected that making small changes requires the entire environment to be shut down; instead, they want to be able to make tweaks and adjustments any time they need, ripping out things that don’t work and replacing them with newer modules when appropriate. 

Moving payment operations from their own estate to a managed service represents a big change in the operating model of banks and financial institutions. Legacy, in-house technology platforms have traditionally always been under the control of the bank itself, meaning they had full responsibility for all maintenance, scheme testing, and payments processing – for better or worse. 

In today’s 24/7, always-on business culture, consumers demand that critical payments infrastructure is fit-for-purpose. We live in a world where we expect banking transactions to be seamless and fast, especially as we balance the management of both our professional and private lives on the move. If, unfortunately, payments systems do go down, this can have a big impact on consumers, whether that means they are unable to pay their mortgage, buy the groceries or deal with even more extreme situations, like paying for hospital bills when abroad.