As expectations for instant, secure payments continue to rise, legacy infrastructure built for batch processing is struggling to keep pace. This article explores the challenges banks and fintechs face in modernising their systems, and how cloud-native, resilient architectures are enabling the real-time economy.

On Monday 20th October, AWS experienced a significant outage in its US-East-1 (Northern Virginia) region - a vivid reminder of how deeply the modern internet depends on cloud infrastructure. The impact reached far beyond the US: ripple effects were felt globally, including in the UK, where many well-known platforms went dark for hours. 

Form3 has embarked on a journey with IBM Cloud for Financial Services – an industry-specific platform that aims to help reduce risk throughout the industry by helping financial institutions address their resiliency, performance, security and regulatory compliance obligations.

At Form3, we are focused on building the future of financial technology. As we continue to grow, it’s critical that we evolve our leadership team to ensure we are strongly positioned to achieve our strategic initiatives and execute against our long-term vision. Today, I want to share some important changes within our executive team that reflect this direction.

When the Federal Reserve launched FedNow in July 2023, it did so with a clear goal: to make instant, always-on payments a core capability of the U.S. banking system. Two years in, the progress is measurable—but so are the questions. How close are we to ubiquity? How well is FedNow positioned to coexist with (and complement) other rails? And what does success look like in a market as complex and decentralized as the United States? 

This past weekend marked a major moment in the evolution of U.S. payments: the successful ISO 20022 migration of the Fedwire Funds Service. After years of planning and preparation, the cutover went smoothly—an impressive feat given the complexity of the change and the scale of the ecosystem involved. But while the industry collectively takes a well-earned breath, it’s important to recognize what this milestone really represents: the start of a new chapter, not the end of the journey.

Legacy payments are falling short. As customer demand for real-time, seamless experiences grows, and the subscription economy expands, real-time account-to-account (A2A) payments are fast becoming the new standard. In our joint whitepaper, Form3 and GoCardless explore how banks and businesses can modernise their infrastructure, reduce costs, and future-proof their payments by embracing agility and the right partnerships.

On Thursday 12th June Google’s Cloud outage impacted services across nearly every region for approximately two hours, disrupting operations for many global users. Kevin Holditch, VP of Engineering at Form3 discusses how Form3’s multi-cloud platform handles these outages to ensure zero disruption to real-time processing for its customers.