In a conversation with Fintech Business Asia, Leslie Choo, Senior Vice President and Managing Director – Asia Pacific at ACI Worldwide, discusses how the company's collaboration with Security Bank Corporation is transforming payment operations through a unified, cloud-native platform. Choo shares insights into the shift from legacy payment systems to intelligent payment orchestration, the growing importance of ISO 20022, and how banks can turn payments from a back-office function into a competitive advantage in the digital economy.

Q: What were the biggest technological and operational challenges ACI Worldwide aimed to solve through this payments modernization initiative?

A: Many leading financial institutions across the region are navigating a payments infrastructure that has evolved organically over the years, resulting in a complex, multi-layered architecture spanning different payment rails and lines of business. Transaction processing, monitoring, investigation, and reporting distributed across separate environments make it increasingly difficult to scale efficiently, manage costs, and deliver a consistent customer experience.

Technical challenges fall into three areas. First, throughput. Legacy mainframe and monolithic platforms scale vertically and hit ceilings that are expensive to overcome. Second, message format. Older platforms speak proprietary or constrained formats and lose the data richness that modern correspondents, schemes, and regulators now require. Third, change velocity. When every new payment type or rail addition requires months of regression testing on a tightly coupled core, a bank cannot keep pace with regulators or with its customers.

The operational challenges are equally consequential. Reconciliation, exception handling, and dispute resolution still consume disproportionate effort at most institutions. Regional schemes are moving fast: DuitNow, BI-FAST, PayNow, PromptPay, UPI, NPP, and the Philippines' InstaPay, PDDTS and PESONet, alongside the global ISO 20022 migration. Each of these places new demands on a bank's payments engine.

What ACI set out to deliver was a single, cloud-native processing core capable of running multiple payment rails and payment types on shared infrastructure, with the ability to scale elastically, integrate natively with domestic and cross-border schemes, and provide the bank with a foundation that can absorb the next wave of change without another rebuild.

Q: How does ACI's cloud-native architecture help banks scale real-time payments more efficiently?

A: The ACI solution is built on cloud native principles, with a focus on modular design, scalability and continuous delivery. This allows banks to adapt quickly to market demands, introduce new capabilities with greater speed and run operations more efficiently.

The result is not just modern infrastructure, but a platform that supports faster innovation, reduces complexity and creates the operational agility banks need to stay ahead in a rapidly evolving payments landscape.

Three properties follow from that.

First, elastic scaling. Volume spikes in the region are uneven and seasonal. Payroll cycles, government disbursements, remittance surges and major e-commerce events can compress weeks of transactions into hours.

Second, faster release velocity. New payment types, new fraud rules, and new scheme mandates can be introduced through automated pipelines without taking the entire payments engine offline.

Third, resilience. With active-active deployment and rolling upgrades across availability zones, this results in continuous service rather than scheduled maintenance windows.

For real-time payments specifically, the relevance is acute. Real-time schemes settle in seconds and operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There is no batch cycle to absorb a problem.

The other benefit, often understated, is the total cost of ownership. Capacity follows demand rather than peak forecast and the infrastructure footprint is smaller.

Q: The new platform supports ISO 20022-native processing. How important is ISO 20022 interoperability in the future of global and cross-border payments?

A: ISO 20022 has become foundational to modern payments messaging. The headline benefit is richer, structured data. The deeper shift is what that data enables across the entire payments value chain.

Legacy formats were built for the constraints of a different era. They are efficient, but they come at the cost of detail. ISO 20022 changes that by carrying structured remittance information, purpose codes, originator and beneficiary identifiers, party roles, and the contextual data that downstream systems have long needed but rarely received in full.

ISO 20022 interoperability matters for three key reasons:

The first is the payment scheme landscape. Real-time payment systems across the region are either ISO 20022-native or actively migrating to the standard. DuitNow, BI-FAST, UPI, PayNow, PromptPay, Australia’s NPP, and the Philippines’ domestic schemes are all aligned with ISO 20022 to varying degrees.

For banks, this shift is significant. Processing payments through an ISO 20022 native engine allows them to connect to multiple schemes without the friction and risk of translation layers. The result is a simpler architecture, greater consistency in data handling, and faster, more efficient routing across networks.

The second is cross-border ambition. The Bank for International Settlements and regional central banks are advancing cross-border real-time interoperability, including frameworks designed to link domestic instant payment systems. ISO 20022 is the connective tissue of that work. Banks that cannot generate and ingest the standard in their full structured form will be limited in the partnerships they can pursue.

We have seen many successes in ASEAN and the wider APAC region on bilateral cross-border real-time payments, while multi-lateral cross-border real-time payment schemes like Nexus are in the development stage.

The third is fraud and financial crime. Sanctions screening, payment screening, and transaction monitoring all perform better with structured data. The industry has spent two decades trying to extract intent from free-text remittance lines. ISO 20022 makes intent legible. The benefits of compliance and fraud are direct.

The risk for institutions is treating ISO 20022 as a technical translation exercise. The institutions getting the most value are the ones rebuilding their data models, customer journeys, and operational processes to use the richer data, not just to carry it.

Q: ACI highlighted a 35% increase in transaction volumes and tripled processing capacity. Which innovations were most critical in achieving these results?

A: That is a result we are genuinely proud of, and it speaks to a fundamental shift in how modern payment systems are architected.

The starting point was consolidation. We consolidated fragmented systems into a unified, scalable payments platform that converges low and high-value ISO 20022 real-time payment processing and automation across all channels. This fundamentally changes the scalability equation. Instead of maintaining and scaling multiple infrastructures in parallel, you have one intelligent orchestration layer that unifies everything.

The second decision was around architecture. The platform is built on a modern, cloud-native environment and is ISO 20022-native, ensuring interoperability and readiness for evolving regulatory requirements while maintaining compatibility with legacy systems. Cloud-native deployment enables the platform to scale dynamically when volumes spike, whether that is a payroll cycle, a public holiday, or simply the continued growth of InstaPay adoption across the Philippines.

The third was automation. A significant portion of the efficiency gains came from eliminating manual intervention from the payment lifecycle. The platform unifies transaction processing, monitoring, investigation, and reporting into a single operational environment, enabling standardized workflows, greater automation, and full operational visibility.

Alongside the volume numbers is the uptime figure. The platform achieved 99.99% uptime while absorbing that volume growth and tripling processing capacity, demonstrating exceptional scalability and operational resilience.

Q: How is ACI helping financial institutions balance payment speed, automation, and cybersecurity as digital transaction volumes continue to rise?

A: Historically, speed and security were often treated as competing priorities. Modern payment architectures increasingly allow institutions to strengthen both simultaneously, because the controls are embedded in the transaction path rather than bolted on top of it.

Three principles guide ACI's approach to helping financial institutions maintain this balance.

The first is layered controls in real time. ACI solution applies behavioral analytics, machine learning models, and rules-based screening to every transaction as it moves through the payment flow. Decisioning occurs within the payment's latency budget, meaning a real-time transfer can still settle in seconds while being screened against the bank's full risk model. The alternative, screening asynchronously after the payment has cleared, is no longer acceptable to schemes or regulators in the region.

The second is data shared across functions. The same ISO 20022 enrichment that powers customer experience also powers detection. When originator, beneficiary, purpose, and counterparty data are structured and consistent, fraud models perform better and false positives drop. The bank reduces friction for legitimate customers and concentrates its intervention on real risk. Speed and accuracy improve together.

The third is automation of operational response. When a transaction is flagged, the question is whether the response should be automated or require a human in the loop. Given the volume of activity moving through a modern payments engine, automated case handling with intelligent triage and clear escalation paths is the only sustainable model. ACI's approach is to give the bank control over which actions to automate and which to review, with full auditability for the regulator.

The cybersecurity dimension extends beyond fraud. Resilience, identity, and access management are part of the same picture. Real-time payments concentrate value in instantaneous, irreversible transactions, making the platform's integrity a primary concern. The platform itself must be hardened, observable, and defensible. ACI builds that posture in as the default rather than as an option.

Q: Looking ahead, how do you see AI, intelligent orchestration, and embedded finance shaping the next generation of enterprise payments infrastructure in Asia Pacific?

A: Asia Pacific is one of the most dynamic payments markets in the world, and the infrastructure underpinning it needs to match that ambition. AI, intelligent orchestration, and embedded finance are converging to make payments infrastructure more adaptive and seamlessly integrated into business workflows, rather than operating as a separate system.

Last year, ACI launched the ACI Connetic solution, which brings this vision to life by unifying account-to-account payments, card payments, and AI-driven fraud prevention on a cloud-native platform – making it simpler, faster, and more cost-effective for banks and financial institutions to modernize their payments infrastructure.

With ACI Connetic, AI-driven fraud prevention is built into the same unified platform as account-to-account and card payments from the ground up. In a region where real-time transaction volumes are among the highest globally, that embedded intelligence is what separates resilient infrastructure from reactive infrastructure.

Intelligent orchestration is what makes cross-border and instant payments work at enterprise scale. Rather than routing transactions in isolation across fragmented systems, orchestration coordinates complex payment flows with full visibility throughout the entire lifecycle. That translates directly into less manual intervention, higher straight-through processing rates, and greater confidence for finance teams operating across multiple corridors and currencies.

Embedded finance is where this all comes together. When banks consolidate onto a centralized, cloud-native platform, they can deploy new payment services faster than ever possible on legacy architecture. That speed enables payments to be woven seamlessly into enterprise workflows, supply chains, and customer experiences across the region.

The bottom line is that ACI Connetic was built to be the new standard for how financial institutions operate in the digital economy, and Asia Pacific is exactly where that standard is most urgently needed.