CHARLOTTE, NC — Cross River Bank’s custom core will be fully deployed on Amazon Web Services by the end of March.

The Fort Lee, N.J.-based bank is moving its custom core off a private cloud for increased transaction per second (TPS) power and scalability, both horizontally and vertically, Jesse Honigberg, senior vice president and technology chief of staff, said during a panel discussion at the Bank Automation Summit.

“We’re running a private cloud right now and it’s just not working,” Honigberg said. “So we’re hitting just throughput limits as we run into some big challenges.”

The $5 billion Cross River offers real-time payments (RTP) through the RTP Network by The Clearing House. The bank anticipates a greater demand for TPS bandwidth with more options for real time.

Visa has recorded TPS of around 20,000 per second, Honigberg said, though reports say that the financial services corporation can average 1,700 TPS but support up to 65,000 TPS.

“If real-time payments start replacing that, and you have to think logically that every single merchant is going to want to get off the Visa network and pay a fraction — 10 cents versus 2% — that network and the providers and the gateways that network need to be able to handle Visa-level traffic,” he said. “We’re really thinking about that and then, because we all know core — it’s 24/7, 365.”

That said, Honigberg did not necessarily recommend a core conversion ahead of RTP.

“I’m the victim of four, five core conversions … and I think that moving your core in order to enable real-time payments, it’s kind of like having heart surgery when you have high cholesterol,” Honigberg said. “It’s probably just easier to start exercising. And you may eventually need heart surgery. But you know, exercise is a great first step.”

Instead, he suggested that banks focus on ways to deliver the client experience that is needed for FedNow, such as installing middleware or a gateway to configure RTP on the back end.

Areas of impact

The panel discussion turned to other potential areas of impact, such as the need for liquidity management. RTP will help multiple fraud vectors and create the need for real-time fraud systems and capabilities, said Radha Suvarna, head of enterprise payments strategy and innovation at Citizens. There is also the question of the business model for RTP, he added.

“There are income streams that currently rely on the friction in the payments, and the friction goes out what’s going to happen,” Suvarna said. “Either you can lean in and try and disrupt yourself in an organized manner to be prepared for what’s coming or you can just sit back and let something happen to you, and then we chose the first approach.”