The end of the payments silo? ACI Worldwide makes running SWIFT, CHAPS and Faster Payments on one platform a reality
UK banks have long managed their payment operations across a patchwork of disconnected systems, with separate infrastructure for CHAPS, Faster Payments, and SWIFT messaging.
The arrangement has always been expensive and operationally fragile, and as regulatory demands have grown, increasingly difficult to sustain.
ACI Worldwide has now announced a leading UK retail bank has become the first to deploy ACI Connetic, the company’s cloud-native payments platform built on Microsoft Azure – bringing SWIFT, CHAPS, and Faster Payments together in a single SaaS environment for the first time.
“Banks are facing unprecedented pressure to modernise quickly as payments grow more complex,” said Richard Albery, ACI Worldwide’s Head of Banking for UK and Ireland. “ACI Connetic is more than a new payments product – it’s an operating model built for the digital economy.”
The regulatory clock is running
The timing of ACI’s announcement is particularly telling, with the UK payments landscape in the middle of a compressed transformation, and the compliance burden of running fragmented systems multiplying with each new regulatory mandate.
November 2025 marked the formal end of the MT/MX coexistence period on the SWIFT network, with payment instructions now required to flow in ISO 20022 MX format. But this deadline was not the only change banks have to prepare for.
From November 2026, unstructured postal addresses will be rejected across SWIFT’s CBPR+ messaging, SEPA and CHAPS, which will force banks to overhaul how end-to-end payment data is structured.
Elsewhere, The Bank of England is consulting on extending CHAPS settlement hours, proposing a 1.30am start on business days as a stepping stone toward near-24/7 settlement by the turn of the decade.
Each of these changes demands system updates, testing and re-validation. For a bank running three separate platforms, that work is done three times over.
The National Payments Vision, published by HM Treasury in November 2024, set an explicit ambition for a world-leading, customer-centric payments ecosystem. It is precisely that ambition – and the regulatory activity flowing from it – that is pushing banks toward the kind of infrastructure consolidation ACI Connetic represents.
The weight to this policy is real; even leading e-commerce platforms like Amazon have taken note, citing the National Payments Vision as cause for its launch of Pay by Bank in the UK.
One payments platform, a different operating model
ACI Connetic’s proposition is that consolidation is not simply a cost exercise but can change what a bank actually does.
The platform combines account-to-account payments, card payments and AI-driven fraud prevention in one environment, with open APIs designed to shorten implementation timelines and allow banks to migrate schemes to the cloud one by one, rather than committing to a wholesale infrastructure replacement.
Christian Sarafidis, Chief Executive EMEA Financial Services at Microsoft, said: “Our collaboration with ACI Worldwide helps banks access a cloud-native approach that supports security, compliance, resilience and scalability, while enabling continuous innovation.
“As payments continue to evolve, cloud technology is playing an important role in helping institutions respond to digital commerce, regulatory change and rising customer expectations.”
The live deployment of ACI Connetic shows that payments consolidation in the UK is moving away from regulatory signalling into concrete action, and this is very likely to be the first of many such moves.
While the deployments is the first for ACI Connetic in the UK, the platform is gaining traction internationally too. European and US banks in particular are facing the same convergence of pressures – be it evolving regulations or new fintech competitors – and are looking to shed the fragmentation and complexity they have accumulated over decades of piecemeal infrastructure investment.
