ACI Worldwide has expanded its ACI Connetic cloud-native payments platform with advanced financial messaging capabilities designed to help banks modernize payment infrastructure, simplify cross-border processing and prepare for increasingly AI-driven payment environments.
The new capability allows financial institutions to translate, validate, enrich and route payment messages in real time across formats and networks including Swift MT, ISO 20022, SEPA and instant payment systems.
ACI is positioning financial messaging as a critical layer connecting legacy banking infrastructure with newer real-time payment networks.
By standardizing and enriching payment information as transactions move across systems, the technology is intended to give banks higher-quality data that can support analytics, automated decision-making and emerging AI applications.
The expansion comes as banks continue migrating toward ISO 20022 and face growing pressure to support increasingly complex domestic and international payment rails.
Swift says more than 98% of payment instructions on its network now use ISO 20022, although 61.2% of payments in April still contained unstructured debtor addresses, according to information provided by ACI. Cross-border real-time payments are also moving closer, with The Clearing House planning RTP pilots during the first half of 2027.
ACI Connetic is designed to centralize financial messaging as an enterprise-wide capability rather than embedding message handling separately within individual payment-processing systems.
The architecture allows banks to decouple messaging from core payment processing, which ACI said can reduce operational complexity, improve resilience and provide greater real-time visibility across payment flows.
The richer payment information created through that process could also become increasingly important as financial institutions deploy AI.
Higher-quality structured data can help AI systems make more reliable decisions around transaction routing, fraud detection, compliance and other payment workflows while giving banks greater ability to maintain approvals and audit trails around automated decisions.
ACI said its technology already has a significant role in global payment infrastructure. Its solutions regularly process more than two-thirds of Fedwire payment traffic and approximately 15% of Swift payment traffic worldwide.
The financial messaging launch follows a broader expansion of ACI Connetic during 2026.
ACI previously announced Connetic support for eight major U.S. payment networks, while banks in markets including the U.K. and Europe are using the platform to consolidate processing across multiple payment schemes and prepare for evolving real-time and regulatory requirements.
ACI sees the combination of cloud-native processing, centralized financial messaging and payment data as the foundation for a new generation of intelligent payments.
The broader objective is to help banks move from simply modernizing aging payment infrastructure toward building systems capable of supporting real-time decision-making and AI-powered financial services.
KEY QUOTES:
“Financial messaging is the connective tissue of modern payments.”
“Built into ACI Connetic, our advanced financial messaging capabilities provide banks with a single, intelligent foundation to manage messages across rails and formats.”
Craig Ramsey, Global Head of Account-to-Account Payments at ACI Worldwide
“Banks aren’t just modernizing infrastructure; they’re preparing for a future defined by intelligent payments, real-time decisioning and AI-driven innovation.”
“The result is an AI-ready payments foundation that enables banks to move faster, operate smarter and deliver the next generation of payment experiences.”
Thomas Warsop, President and CEO of ACI Worldwide
