EXCLUSIVE— Banks are juggling a lot of change when it comes to the world of payments, but in order to be successful, banks should avoid getting bogged down in one specific technology trend, BNY Mellon told Bank Innovation.

Michael Bellacosa, head of global payments product management with BNY Mellon, told Bank Innovation in an emailed statement that a constant in the payments space (currently experiencing “an enormous wave of innovation,” he said), is “the level of uncertainty among the corporate and bank clients we serve.”

Bellacosa said:

As a bank for FIs and businesses, we’re looking at individual technologies through the lens of creating a seamless experience for our clients. They shouldn’t have to handle this complexity on their own. So above and beyond any individual tech trend, what’s going to matter even more is the technology that bridges them all together into a coherent way to originate, receive, and settle payment transactions. We want our clients to be able to focus on their business needs and specific use cases, rather than on the technology.

When it comes to payments, BNY Mellon has made several strides to improve its realtime payment capabilities. The company recently partnered with software provider Volante this January for a real-time payment solution utilizing Volante’s VolPay Hub. Bellacosa said of the bank’s work with Volante:

The technology helps us deliver on three main client needs: 24/7 365 processing, instant immediate payment settlement, and reporting.

RTP will support a wide range of payment use cases. Given our customer base of corporates and other banks, it made a lot of sense to take a key role in the design of the RTP network and in implementing a solution. It allowed us to originate the very first live transaction on the network on November 13, 2017.

That platform is now live, with current volumes “modest as the network begins to build momentum,” Bellacosa said. The bank does “expect millions of transactions to be flowing as committed banks have joined,” he noted.

BNY Mellon’s work with payments also includes partnering with Zelle, the P2P network designed to combat popular services outside of traditional banks (such as Venmo for consumer payments), a partnership that “eliminates the cost and hassle associated with physical checks and traditional payment options, which take longer and cost more to process,” Bellacosa said.

To learn more about real-time and corporate payments, join us on March 5-6, 2018 at the Parc 55 in San Francisco for Bank Innovation 2018. Click here to request an invitation.