Roping in the Cloud to Enhance Your Payments Experience

There is no end to what all human beings can do, and yet there is little we do better than growing on a consistent basis. This tendency to improve under all circumstances has already fetched us some huge milestones, with technology appearing as a major member of the stated group. The main reason why we hold technology in such a high regard is predicated upon its skill-set, which ushered us towards a reality that nobody could have ever imagined otherwise. Nevertheless, if we take up a closer look, it should become clear how the whole runner was also very much inspired by the way applied those skills across a real-world environment. The latter component was, in fact, what gave the creation a spectrum-wide presence, and consequentially, kickstarted a tech revolution. This revolution, as we discovered, will go on to scale up the human experience from every conceivable direction, but even after achieving such a monumental feat, technology will somehow continue to bring all the right goods to the table. The same has grown to become a lot more evident in recent times, and truth be told, a new development around the banking space can only make that trend bigger and better moving forward.

Mechanics Cooperative Bank, a Massachusetts-based financial institution with more than $645 million in assets, has officially selected Finastra’s propriety solution, Finastra Payments To Go, to introduce new business payments services and enhance the overall customer experience. On a more practical note, this solution, assuming everything goes just like how it is envisioned, will help the bank in leveraging cloud technology, as it will deliver all those tools that are required to introduce Real-Time Payments services (RTP) through the Clearing House (TCH). Talk about why the bank would want that, it is because services like RTP TCH have shown a clear ability to provide you with “easy, frictionless, and more affordable” access to the payment rail. Hence, by pursuing Finastra Payments To Go, Mechanics Cooperative Bank can feasibly conceive a wide range of innovative and seamless payment services, and therefore, capture a larger customer base. Interestingly enough, both the organizations already have a history of working together, but with this latest move; they look poised for a much more solid collaboration in the near future and beyond.

“Finastra has been our core technology partner for several years, helping us deliver the financial solutions our customers rely on. When it was time to enhance our payments services, we saw Finastra and Payments To Go as the obvious choice to help us adopt an agile and cloud-based payments hub,” said Joseph T. Baptista Jr., President and CEO of Mechanics Cooperative Bank. “This partnership enables us to not just meet customer demand, but to also exceed expectations.”

Now, while an improved customer experience certainly headlines the whole thing, there was one another factor that convinced the Mechanics Cooperative Bank to expand its partnership with Finastra, and it was the latter’s participation in the FedNow pilot program. You see, FedNow program is designed to support the development, testing, and adoption of the stated solution. So, as a strategic partner, the bank can become one of the first financial institutions to integrate the service following its impending launch.

“Our payments solution enables financial institutions such as Mechanics Cooperative Bank to introduce new payments services quickly and efficiently while leveraging the strength of the cloud,” said Barry Rodrigues, EVP of Finastra’s Payments Business Unit. “Through Finastra’s multi-rail payments hub as a service solution, the bank will be able to meet the many new challenges of emerging technologies while differentiating itself amongst its competitors.”

Going by the available details, the Finastra Payments To Go solution will come pre-configured with rapid, secure, and scalable SaaS-deployment in the cloud on Microsoft Azure.