ACI Worldwide (ACI) has been providing mission-critical payment infrastructure for banks, processors and merchants for decades. On Day 3 of Sibos Frankfurt 2025, Phil Bruno, ACI’s chief strategy and growth officer, explained how the company is refreshing its technology stack and using artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing and programmable assets to help financial institutions meet surging demand for instant and cross-border payments while maintaining compliance and resilience. Cloud-native hub for all payment types Bruno said ACI has “just launched our new payments hub called ACI Connetic” which is “fully cloud native” and supports “many different payment types,” including high-value real-time gross settlement (RTGS), low-value instant payments and card payments for acquirers and issuers. By consolidating functions into one platform, banks can retire multiple legacy systems, deploy new services faster and lower total cost of ownership. This reflects the broader migration in payments infrastructure: replacing monolithic, on-premise systems with cloud-based microservices to cope with rising volumes, new compliance obligations and demands for 24/7 uptime. Global reach and instant payment networks ACI processes “10% of Swift payments cross border” and is “the central infrastructure in 12 countries” while working with “26 instant payment networks globally”. This scale gives it a vantage point across both mature and emerging markets. As governments push real-time domestic systems and the G20 drives improvements in cross-border payments, ACI can offer banks proven connectivity and operational support rather than requiring them to build each link from scratch. Intelligent payments orchestration Bruno described orchestration as “the ability to do many cross-border transactions in instant payments” rather than routing each one in isolation. ACI uses “agentic repair” to predict failures and stop them before they occur, similar to predictive maintenance in other industries. This intelligent orchestration can select the optimal path for a payment based on endpoint data, service-level agreements and cost, making payments both faster and more predictable. Stablecoins, tokenised deposits and programmability He argued that “the programmability aspect of stablecoins is what will drive many of the use cases” such as trade finance, cash concentration, escrow and conditional distributions. Tokenised deposits are “regulatory compliant” but lack some of stablecoins’ utility. Bruno sees a “three horse race” among cross-border instant payments, stablecoins and tokenised deposits, and believes programmability will determine which model ultimately prevails. ACI is designing its hub to support whichever rails regulators and markets endorse. Compliance, trust and resilience Bruno stressed that innovation must be matched by security. ACI’s “payments intelligence” capability evolved from its fraud and financial protection area and now provides “full compliance capability” to help institutions meet anti-money laundering, sanctions and operational risk requirements. With central banks tightening oversight of critical service providers, this built-in compliance is a differentiator and reassures banks relying on ACI for core infrastructure. Orchestrating the future of payments Bruno’s comments show ACI positioning itself as a global orchestrator rather than a point-solution vendor. By combining a cloud-native hub with intelligent routing, predictive repair and programmability, it offers banks a way to modernise infrastructure and adopt new rails without fragmenting operations or increasing risk. He also underlined that programmability and compliance must evolve together. Whether stablecoins, tokenised deposits or instant payments win the “three horse race,” ACI’s focus on resilience, interoperability and orchestration should allow its clients to adopt whichever rails regulators and markets ultimately favour — and to do so safely and at scale.
