How Elastic Powers Real-Time Payments Infrastructure

The global payments landscape is undergoing a fundamental transformation. With approximately 80 countries either live or implementing instant payment systems, financial institutions face unprecedented pressure to modernise their infrastructure.

Cloud-native architecture has emerged as the critical enabler. Financial services organisations are moving beyond simple lift-and-shift strategies to completely re-architect their payment applications.

Nilesh Dusane, Global Head of Institutional Payments at AWS, explains the evolution. Financial institutions can now build custom solutions and embedded payment capabilities whilst dramatically accelerating time to market.

"What we are seeing our customers do is change the way they're using cloud," Nilesh reveals. "Over the last three, four years, we are seeing our customers re-architect their payment applications using cloud native services."

Elastic and AWS: enabling structured data innovation

The introduction of ISO 20022 messaging standards has fundamentally changed what institutions can achieve. Payments infrastructure now handles rich, structured data rather than basic transaction information.

Nilesh explains the implications. "We are going from unstructured data to structured data, and that opens up a whole new host of possibilities for our end customers."

Financial institutions are extracting value from payment data in ways previously impossible. Structured information flowing through payment pipes enables value-added services built on top of core transaction processing.

Context-aware payments represent a significant opportunity. Institutions can now execute payments within the broader context of customer activities, creating more intelligent and personalised experiences.

Joe highlights Elastic's role in making this data actionable. "Anybody can ingest tonnes of data and put it in some place and barrel it like oil. But data really needs to be the fuel that we burn."

The company's technology delivers relevant data in milliseconds. Speed alone, however, proves insufficient without accuracy and relevance in the results returned.

Cross-border payments and compliance challenges

Instant payment rails are transforming international transactions. Local instant payment systems can now link together, enabling real-time cross-border settlements that were impossible a decade ago.

Nilesh describes the complexity. "By linking different market infrastructures or by linking different payment networks cross-border, instant cross-border payment becomes a reality."

Compliance requirements add layers of sophistication. Institutions must conduct sanction screening and anti-money laundering checks whilst maintaining the speed customers demand.

Data lakes containing comprehensive payment information become crucial. Organisations must analyse multiple data sources simultaneously to make informed risk decisions without adding unnecessary friction.

Elastic's serverless platform, powered by AWS, addresses these scaling challenges. The infrastructure automatically adjusts capacity based on transaction volumes, enabling institutions to focus on innovation rather than architecture.

"Our serverless platform is stateless," Joe says. "It makes them agile, and it makes them cost-effective. If I can spin something up and scale with data volumes, and then I can scale it back down when I need to, that's what serverless is about."

Modern payment systems comprise numerous interconnected services. When issues arise, identifying the problem source and the responsible party becomes complex and time-consuming.

Joe explains Elastic's solution. "At the base layer, we have logs, metrics and traces that we can analyse in milliseconds. In order to analyse a payment system that settles trillions of dollars worth of payments, you need to be able to analyse that data in milliseconds."

The future belongs to agentic AI

Artificial intelligence is already generating recommendations for payment processes. Institutions are becoming comfortable with AI suggesting optimal approaches based on historical data and current conditions.

Nilesh anticipates the next evolution. Over the coming years, organisations will increasingly trust AI systems to take autonomous actions rather than simply providing recommendations.

"With agent AI, we'll start getting comfortable in using these technologies to take actions on our behalf," Nilesh continues. "That's exciting. It's exciting time to be in payments."

Elastic is positioning itself within this AI-driven future. The company combines observability data, cybersecurity information and payment transaction data to enable sophisticated fraud detection and prevention.

Joe describes how agentic AI can search across multiple data sources. The technology retrieves information from different repositories and incorporates findings into large language model responses in milliseconds.

Cultural adoption of AI will determine success. Leaders who enable employees to leverage AI as a tool, rather than treating it as isolated corporate projects, will gain competitive advantages.

"If it's a specific corpus of data that is payment or cyber or fraud data, we can start to use AI as a tool to be able to compliment what normal human beings would do," Joe explains.

Elastic is positioning itself within this AI-driven future. The company combines observability data, cybersecurity information and payment transaction data to enable sophisticated fraud detection and prevention.

Joe describes how agentic AI can search across multiple data sources. The technology retrieves information from different repositories and incorporates findings into large language model responses in milliseconds.

Cultural adoption of AI will determine success. Leaders who enable employees to leverage AI as a tool, rather than treating it as isolated corporate projects, will gain competitive advantages.

"If it's a specific corpus of data that is payment or cyber or fraud data, we can start to use AI as a tool to be able to compliment what normal human beings would do," Joe explains.

Read Elastic's latest blog titled 'Money20/20 USA 2025: Fintech’s inflection point has arrived'.