Why banks are consolidating payment systems now

New research from IDC exposes the core problem. According to the IDC Link, “Institutions are consolidating fragmented systems and controls and monitoring into unified payment hubs that streamline operations and eliminate duplication.”¹

Here’s what that fragmentation looks like in practice. Banks typically run multiple separate payment systems, each with its own fraud detection, compliance monitoring, and operational overhead. These systems sit in silos, unable to share intelligence or learn from each other.

Every time a bank launches a new payment type, it bolts on another system. New market? Another system. New regulation? Go update each system separately. The operational burden compounds exponentially.

That’s the economic argument in one sentence. Stop duplicating your risk infrastructure across multiple systems when you could run one intelligent platform that works across all payment types.

We hear this from clients constantly,” said Madeline Aufseeser, Director of Analyst Relations and Market Intelligence at ACI Worldwide. “They’re spending more time managing the connections between systems than actually innovating on payments. When you consolidate to a unified platform, you stop paying the integration tax and start investing in capabilities that actually differentiate you in the market.”

Three things are making this urgent:

• Regulatory complexity: Every jurisdiction adds requirements. Every new payment type brings compliance obligations. Managing this across fragmented systems means implementing changes multiple times across each platform. The burden is multiplying faster than institutions can adapt.
• Executive pressure: Boards want cost reduction and global expansion simultaneously. You can’t deliver both with fragmented infrastructure that costs billions to maintain.
• Competitive dynamics: The banks that moved early are already seeing the benefits. Lower operational costs. Faster time-to-market for new payment types. Better fraud detection that learns across all transaction types instead of operating in silos. The gap between leaders and laggards is widening.

The IDC research identifies the architectural shift happening across the industry. As the report notes, “Cloud-native design and shared data frameworks enable the reuse of compliance and risk models across multiple payment rails, reducing adaptation costs and enhancing audit readiness.”¹

In other words, build it once, use it everywhere. The opposite of what most banks do today.

This isn’t just a technology shift. It’s an economic imperative. Forward-thinking institutions are consolidating to unified orchestration platforms. Instead of separate systems for cards, real-time payments, and cross-border transactions, they’re moving to a single architecture that handles everything.

The approach embeds fraud detection, compliance, and risk management directly into payment workflows rather than bolting them on as afterthoughts. When your fraud models can learn from every transaction type simultaneously, you catch more threats. When your compliance logic applies consistently across all payment rails, you reduce audit risk.

The IDC Link conclusion is blunt:

Translation: The institutions that figure this out first will have years of competitive advantage. Those that don’t will drown in operational complexity while their competitors pull ahead.

That’s the endgame. One intelligent system. All payment types. All markets. All compliance requirements. Managed centrally with AI-driven intelligence that learns from every transaction across the entire network. Most banks aren’t there yet. But the window for addressing these structural inefficiencies is narrowing fast. Every quarter you wait, the competitive gap widens. Every new payment type you bolt onto your legacy stack makes the eventual migration more expensive.

The industry’s evolution is clear. Payment orchestration, intelligent fraud detection, and embedded compliance aren’t optional anymore. They’re table stakes.

The question isn’t whether to consolidate. It’s whether you’ll do it proactively on your timeline, or reactively when competitive pressure forces your hand.

The institutions still running fragmented payment systems are paying the innovation tax every day. And that tax keeps getting more expensive.