One of the largest consumer banks in the US had spent close to two years processing about 5,400 wires manually, and the bank knew that pace simply couldn’t continue. It set out to automate the process by modernizing its existing payment platform, but the starting point wasn’t promising. There was no connectivity or automation between the wire origination and payment infrastructure engine, which meant every wire transfer depended on manual coordination between systems that weren’t built to talk to each other. The bank needed to process wire transfers faster and more efficiently, but doing that meant first eliminating the errors and recurring ledger reconciliation issues that came baked into a manual process running at that scale.
Ascendion built an automation layer for all payments going in and out, spanning checks, cash, wire transfers, and more, replacing the disconnected manual process with a single, unified system built to handle the bank’s full payment volume.
A payment layer comprised of fully automated API adapters underpinned the solution, with multiple dry runs conducted to improve resiliency and avoid production failures before they could ever reach a live transaction. The solution phased implementation across different products, like Fedwire and cross-currency, to reduce possible issues and keep minimal impact on the whole system, while ensuring uninterrupted native connectivity with the wire origination system throughout.
Tech Stack:
Created data transparency across all payment channels.
Delivered $1 million saved in operating costs and efficiency dollars.
Achieved a 90% reduction in settlement issues for a daily volume of over 1,200 transactions.
Delivered a 60% reduction in the total cost of ownership (TCO).
