Originally published by Skyler Nesheim, Dwolla CTO, in Forbes
During onboarding, we often hear the same problem: Their payments take too long to process. We regularly meet teams still reconciling payouts in spreadsheets or chasing down missing payment files across multiple financial systems. Not only does this impact customer satisfaction and the budget, but it also forces teams to trace payments through systems built on decades of workarounds and manual processes.
If this sounds familiar, you're not alone. While enterprises wrestle with batch processing windows and outdated infrastructure, their competitors are sending money instantly. And with 78% of consumers preferring faster payments, the disconnect between consumer expectations and enterprise capabilities has never been wider.
The Architecture Problem We're All Facing
Legacy payment systems process transactions in batches, operate within banking hours and take days to settle. Add to that the technical debt from layers of middleware, custom integrations and manual reconciliation processes that burn through employees' time instead of moving the business forward.
And even though 66% of businesses would use instant payments if presented as an option, 75% still use paper checks. Meanwhile, the FedNow and RTP networks both process millions of transactions annually with settlement in seconds.
The infrastructure exists; we just need to connect to it intelligently.
Building Modern Payment Architecture
The shift from monolithic systems to API-driven architectures changes everything. Instead of point-to-point connections that become impossible to maintain, modern infrastructure uses orchestration layers that intelligently route transactions based on cost, speed and availability.A payroll batch might go through standard ACH, while an insurance claim payout uses instant rails for customer satisfaction. The system makes these decisions programmatically, removing manual intervention entirely.
Building these systems taught me that the hardest part isn't connecting to payment rails, it's working around existing bank limitations. Most of the real engineering effort shows up in the exception paths, handling downtime, throttling, return codes and all the messy edge cases that define real-world payment operations. Your system needs immediate fallback logic, retry mechanisms and circuit breakers that route around problems automatically.
Open Banking As The Technical Foundation
Open banking provides the plumbing for sophisticated payment operations through secure, tokenized connections with instant access to payment routing details.
The reach is impressive. There are 183 million open banking users globally, a number that's expected to surpass 645 million in 2029. If you had a problem with payments failing due to insufficient funds, you can now confirm the available balance before sending the payment, eliminating those costly returns and frustrated customer calls. That's in addition to an elevated security architecture that uses revocable tokens, multifactor authentication and continuous monitoring, with third parties accessing only minimal required data.
Engineering Through The Complexities
Real-world payment orchestration means making thousands of decisions per second. The magic happens in the orchestration layer. Instead of forcing your team to become experts in every payment rail's quirks, intelligent orchestration handles the complexity behind the scenes. The system knows when to route a payment through RTP versus FedNow, when to fall back to standard ACH and how to handle exceptions without manual intervention.
The real challenge lies in providing visibility into where payments stand at any moment. Modern orchestration provides real-time feedback on payment status, allowing your operations team to answer customer questions immediately rather than waiting for batch reports. This transparency transforms customer service from reactive to proactive.
Fraud prevention also becomes more sophisticated with real-time data. Instead of analyzing patterns after the fact, you're evaluating risk as transactions flow through the system, enabling earlier detection and fewer false positives. The orchestration layer can flag unusual patterns, verify account ownership and enforce business rules without adding friction to legitimate payments.
Scaling For Enterprise Reality
Enterprise payment systems are designed to handle millions of transactions. This demands infrastructure that grows with your business, maintains reliability under pressure and provides complete visibility into your payment operations.
I've learned that scalability goes beyond handling volume to maintaining performance as complexity increases. When you're processing payments for thousands of customers across multiple rails, every transaction needs the same reliability and speed as your first one. Modern infrastructure handles this through intelligent load distribution and automatic scaling, removing the guesswork from capacity planning.
Asynchronous communication, powered by webhooks, allows orchestration to operate at scale. Instead of relying on synchronous calls that bottleneck under load, webhooks distribute payment events to every system that needs them without slowing the core transaction path.
This event-driven model turns your payment flow into a horizontally scalable network where each service reacts independently. Your ledger can update balances, your accounting tools can validate entries, your risk engine can incorporate new signals and customer-facing systems can surface status changes immediately. Everything stays in sync without piling work onto a single component.
Integration flexibility determines how quickly you can modernize. Your payment infrastructure needs to work with the systems you already have, whether that's your existing ERP, accounting software or custom applications. The right approach provides multiple integration options without forcing you to rebuild everything.
Automated reconciliation, intelligent routing and real-time monitoring let your team focus on strategic initiatives rather than fighting fires. That's how you can turn payment operations from a cost center into a competitive advantage.
Making Strategic Technical Decisions
When evaluating payment infrastructure, prioritize API quality, security and scalability. Good APIs reduce both integration time and maintenance burden.
Increasingly, the orchestration layer is becoming an intelligent automation engine, using real-time data and AI to resolve issues, route transactions and surface insights without manual effort, making security and scalability essential to your search.
The convergence of open banking and instant payments represents a fundamental shift in how we think about financial infrastructure. Recognizing this shift and investing in the orchestration layer to manage it means organizations can actually move at the speed their customers expect. Failing to do so means continuing to explain why payments still take three days to clear while competitors move instantly.