ACI Worldwide (NASDAQ: ACIW), an original innovator in global payments technology, has announced that Solaris, Europe's leading embedded finance platform, has gone live on schedule on ACI Connetic, the company's unified cloud-native platform for intelligent payments orchestration.

The milestone marks the successful completion of the first phase of Solaris's payments modernization initiative. By consolidating its SEPA Instant payments infrastructure onto ACI Connetic, Solaris has strengthened its ability to scale, innovate and adapt in a rapidly evolving payments landscape. The go-live also paves the way for continued modernization of the company's payments infrastructure, as Solaris expands its adoption of ACI Connetic under its long-term transformation strategy.

The move reflects a broader shift in European payments, where instant has become the baseline for euro transactions and banks need infrastructure built to run it around the clock and at scale. Under the EU Instant Payments Regulation, adopted in 2024, payment service providers in the eurozone must receive instant credit transfers, send them at no higher price than a standard transfer, and offer a verification-of-payee check of the payee's name against the account before the payer authorizes a transfer, with the receiving requirement applying from January 2025 and the sending and payee-verification requirements following from October 2025. These rules turn SEPA Instant from a premium service into everyday volume that runs continuously, settles in seconds and carries fraud checks within the same processing window.

ACI Connetic is designed to absorb that load within a single cloud-native architecture that combines payments processing, fraud prevention, payments intelligence and orchestration, enabling a bank to add capacity and launch new services without stitching separate systems together.

Solaris holds a full German banking license and operates accounts, cards, lending and payments for fintechs, digital brands and multinationals that build financial products into their own customer experiences. Because those partners rely on Solaris to move money on their behalf, instant payments form part of the core service they purchase — and with instant now the regulatory baseline for euro transactions, this go-live shapes the payment those partners can offer their own customers. Solaris selected ACI Connetic as the foundation of its payments modernization strategy and, together with majority shareholder SBI Group, has set out plans to develop its platform into pan-European financial infrastructure, making the pace of subsequent modernization phases the marker to watch as that strategy unfolds.

"Banks across Europe are rebuilding their payments around instant, and the ones moving fastest are making it a platform decision," said Thomas Warsop, president and CEO of ACI Worldwide. "Solaris runs payments for an entire ecosystem of partners, so it needs infrastructure that grows with them. Bringing SEPA Instant onto ACI Connetic gives Solaris that foundation for its next phase of growth."

"Going live on ACI Connetic is an important milestone in evolving our platform infrastructure," said Steffen Jentsch, CEO of Solaris. "As Solaris matures into a Financial-Platform-as-a-Service provider, ACI Connetic gives us the scalable, robust foundation we need to deploy AI-driven, highly resilient payment processes that meet the highest European regulatory standards our partners and their customers expect."

Source: Global FinTech Series