SouthState Bank Partners with Volante Technologies to Develop New Innovative Real-Time Payments Products

U.S. regional bank will unify customer experience and drive growth with instant payments as a service

Volante Technologies, the global leader in cloud payments and financial messaging, announced that it is empowering SouthState Bank (SouthState) to deliver faster and more flexible payment options to its one million customers via The Clearing House RTP platform and Federal Reserve Financial Services’ FedNow Service.

For the past three years, SouthState ranked on the Forbes’ 100 Best Banks in America. Across 240+ locations, the regional bank offers a variety of solutions, including consumer banking, mortgage, small business banking, commercial banking, wealth management and correspondent banking.

The partnership with Volante is part of the bank’s multi-year banking-as-a-service strategy to broaden its payment offerings and help clients conduct business in a more efficient and secure ecosystem.

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“As we are looking to enable payments as a service for FedNow and RTP, we needed the right technology partner for our banking-as-a-service offering,” said Chris Nichols, Director of Capital Markets, SouthState.

“Volante Technologies will enable us to deliver on these business benefits and help us innovate through a single platform, creating economies of scale that we anticipate being able to pass on to our customers. Moreover, with Volante’s Payments as a Service, we will be able to innovate our products and services as the market demands it,” Nichols said.

To execute on its plans and go after new customer segments, SouthState selected Volante’s Real-time Payments as a Service, a cloud-native solution that is ISO 20022-fluent and microservices-based. Low-code oriented, it supports real-time 24/7/365 and provides multi-rail payments operations with an accelerated time to market, enabling SouthState to pick and choose components based on its use case.

The solution enables the bank to consolidate functions such as fraud, risk, and sanctions screening across all services. This reduces ancillary support service requirements, meaning the bank can deliver more with less, and lower the cost to the customer. All these factors combine to make the solution nimbler and more adaptable, giving SouthState plenty of room for incremental transformation.

“New technology approaches in cloud deployments, as well as payments as a service, have changed the accessibility model for payments modernization and how banks need to approach the implementation of a payments hub,” said Erika Baumann, Research Director, Aite-Novarica Group.

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“As real-time payments have become just as important as legacy payment rails in many regions, smaller banks must be able to meet customer demand for access to faster payments and the tools and automation that go along with them. Payment modernization efforts are table stakes,” she continued.

“Furthermore, a payments hub can help create operational efficiencies, reduce redundancies, and automate manual processes—all very important for banks and their customers to be competitive,” Baumann concluded.

“Given the uncertainty around the macroeconomic outlook, financial institutions that are able to focus on customer priorities, increased efficiency, and differentiation through value-added services provision will be best placed to survive and thrive,” said Deepak Gupta, SVP & Global Head, Payments as a Service, Volante Technologies.

“Payments as a Service is becoming the preferred way for banks to adopt new payment types across North America and EMEA. In 2023, we expect more banks to adopt PaaS for payments processing to free up resources for innovation. We also anticipate banks to increasingly turn to real-time payments as a point of differentiation,” Gupta continued.

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