BNY Mellon Migrates Wire Payments into Microsoft Azure

The global investment platform BNY Mellon announced yesterday that it has formed a longstanding partnership with Microsoft, to move its infrastructure supporting wire payments into Microsoft Azure, the public cloud computing platform.

According to the announcement, as part of this advancement, BNY Mellon has developed a treasury cash management relationship with Microsoft Treasury built on the Azure cloud payment system. The relationship establishes the capability to secure high value wire payments that are critical to the orderly functioning of markets over cloud technology.

While cloud-based payments are not designed to replace on-premises wires, they represent an important channel for capacity expansion during episodes of market volatility and could act as a pressure valve in the case of a risk event or some other disruption impacting processing centers. Furthermore, cloud-based wires increase industry bandwidth almost immediately, versus the six-month time horizon it would take to build a comparable physical payment processing center. 

 "The events of 2020 demonstrated the need to accelerate digitization and helping clients in their digital journey. BNY Mellon's cloud-enabled capabilities are critical to the strategy," said Saket Sharma, Chief Information and Digital Officer for BNY Mellon Treasury Services. "Working closely with Microsoft Azure and our collaborators in Microsoft Treasury, this is further testament to our ambitions to digitize the entire payments industry, making it faster, more transparent, and more resilient for all market participants."

The two companies’ collaboration began at SIBOS 2019, when BNY Mellon and Microsoft set out to determine how wire payments infrastructure could be hosted in Azure as the first step in a larger cloud-based digitization effort for payments.