For decades, financial institutions embarking on payments modernization have found themselves at a frustrating crossroads, forced to choose between two equally unappealing paths. The “buy” option often meant purchasing rigid, one-size-fits-all vendor solutions that stifled innovation and required costly workarounds to meet unique business needs. On the other hand, the “build” option involved committing to massively expensive, time-consuming in-house development projects that frequently became obsolete before launch and created significant maintenance burdens. This long-standing dilemma has been a primary source of friction, slowing the pace of digital transformation across the industry. However, the introduction of a new automated development environment by a global leader in Payments as a Service (PaaS) is poised to dismantle this binary choice entirely. By introducing a “Buy-and-Extend” paradigm, this new low-code studio empowers institutions to design, deploy, and maintain their own complex payment workflows with unprecedented autonomy, heralding a potential end to the classic debate and offering a more agile, cost-effective path forward.
A New Paradigm in Payments Modernization
Addressing Core Modernization Hurdles
The challenge of updating payment systems is deeply rooted in the technical complexity and inertia of legacy infrastructure. Industry research underscores the scale of this problem, revealing that 51% of banks are struggling under the weight of technical debt within their application integration layer, a critical component for connecting disparate systems. Furthermore, an even greater number, 57%, identify system integration as the single greatest hurdle in their modernization efforts. These are not minor inconveniences; they represent fundamental barriers to progress that make projects notoriously slow to implement and expensive to update. The traditional “build” approach, while offering customization, often exacerbates this issue by creating bespoke, siloed systems that are difficult to maintain and scale. Conversely, the “buy” approach frequently fails to address integration challenges adequately, forcing institutions to adapt their processes to the software rather than the other way around. This new low-code solution directly confronts these obstacles by providing a platform designed to simplify integration and reduce technical debt, offering a viable alternative to the compromises of the past.
The ‘Buy-and-Extend’ Model in Practice
The newly introduced “Buy-and-Extend” model is enabled by a low-code studio that is fully integrated into an existing cloud-native payments platform, eliminating the need for additional complex infrastructure. This environment shifts development from a code-heavy process to a visual, configuration-driven one, making it accessible to a wider range of users, including business analysts and product managers, not just seasoned developers. At its core, the studio provides an interactive editor and a comprehensive library of reusable templates and pre-built patterns. These tools empower teams to visually model payment workflows, adapt system interfaces, configure intricate business logic, and manage reference data with remarkable efficiency. While it automates many of the repetitive and complex aspects of development, it crucially maintains human oversight and control, ensuring that the final output aligns perfectly with strategic business objectives. This approach effectively combines the speed, reliability, and compliance of a proven off-the-shelf platform with the flexibility and control previously only achievable through custom, in-house builds.
Redefining Agility and Control for Financial Institutions
Fostering Innovation and Accelerating Time to Market
A primary advantage of this new paradigm is the dramatic acceleration of service delivery, fundamentally changing the competitive landscape for financial institutions. According to the company’s Chief Product, Engineering, and Delivery Officer, banks are no longer forced to choose between speed and control; they can now launch new services and payment products “in weeks, not months.” This newfound agility allows institutions to respond swiftly to shifting market demands, regulatory changes, and emerging customer expectations without being encumbered by lengthy development cycles or vendor-dictated roadmaps. The low-code environment grants banks the autonomy to innovate confidently, experimenting with and deploying uniquely differentiated services that cater to specific market niches. By removing the traditional barriers of high cost and long timelines, the platform democratizes innovation, empowering institutions to pursue strategic initiatives that would have been prohibitively complex or risky under the old build-or-buy framework. This ultimately translates to a stronger competitive position and an enhanced ability to capture new revenue streams.
A Foundation for Scalable and Compliant Payments
The industry consensus suggested that this evolution represented a significant and compelling path forward for payment transformation. An analysis by a leading industry expert described the approach as a way for institutions to gain a full-featured payments hub while using low-code capabilities to create secure, scalable, and highly differentiated services. The introduction of the low-code studio was more than just a technological update; it established a holistic platform approach that freed banks from the compromises associated with both monolithic legacy systems and a fragmented landscape of disparate fintech point solutions. This comprehensive model offered the freedom to innovate confidently, backed by a resilient and compliant infrastructure. Ultimately, the development set a new industry benchmark for agility and operational efficiency. It definitively proved that financial institutions no longer had to sacrifice control for speed, providing a robust framework that adeptly balanced rapid innovation with the stringent demands of security, scalability, and regulatory compliance in the modern payments ecosystem.
