As banks grapple with faster payment expectations, new rails, and rising demands for transparency, many are rethinking the infrastructure that underpins their payments and trade businesses. 

Ahead of the Trade Treasury Payments Award ceremony in Jersey City, USA, TTP spoke with Vladimir Popovic, Head of North America Banks, Global Payments & Trade at BNY, about how BNY, this year’s recipient of the Best Transaction Bank – Global Award, is helping partner banks modernise without rebuilding from scratch.

Popovic notes that clients want the same core outcomes, regardless of the rail. “Our customers are looking for speed, security, transparency, and reliability in their payment flows,” he said.

To deliver that consistently across ACH, wires, real-time, and cross-border payments, BNY has moved its payments and trade capabilities onto a shared infrastructure platform. The idea is to make it easier to onboard new rails, adapt to changing standards, and roll out improvements to clients with minimal disruption.

“We’ve put our payments and trade business on a shared infrastructure platform,” Popovic said. “Within that shared infrastructure platform, we’re able to onboard new rails with minimal disruption, we’re able to change standards as the industry requires and meet regulatory changes.”

For partner banks, that model simplifies their path to growth. Instead of building systems independently, they can plug into common APIs for payment tracking, liquidity visibility, and working capital insights, and then scale their services as demand increases.

The same approach is being applied to cross-border. In a recent project with a European bank, BNY embedded a complete international payments solution directly into the client’s digital channels.

“What that included was live FX rates… fees that were known ahead of time… and payment tracking,” Popovic said, adding that the bank also gained access to “over 160 different markets and 120 different currencies.”

He noted that the improved experience helped the bank compete more effectively with fintechs, even enticing back some clients that had previously switched to a fintech vendor.

Trade operations present a similar challenge. With high costs and complexity, many institutions are opting to outsource rather than build internally. “Trade outsourcing is very complex and expensive,” he said. “Instead of capital expenditure from a build perspective, they translate that into variable costs.”

Recognition, Popovic added, ultimately comes back to execution. “Receiving the award for Best Transaction Bank is a testament to the trust that our customers have in us,” he said. “And it’s also a recognition that we’re good at delivering speed, transparency, safety, and reliability.”