Payment modernization can no longer be approached simply as the adoption of new technologies. As customers expect faster transactions, more integrated experiences, and new ways to interact with financial services, institutions must balance the need to evolve quickly with the imperative to preserve what keeps the business running: continuity, security, control, and trust.
This was one of the central themes of the panel “From Legacy to Innovation: How to Modernize Payments Without Increasing Risk,” held during the 5B Digital Summit 2026 in Guatemala. The discussion was moderated by Francisco Marambio, Chief Commercial Officer at CLAI PAYMENTS® Technologies, alongside Juan José Salamanca of Ernst & Young and Alberto Cofiño of Banco Promérica Guatemala.
The ninth edition of the 5B Digital Summit brought together leaders from across the region to discuss the forces reshaping the financial ecosystem, with particular attention to ecosystem development, trust, and customer experience. Within that context, the panel addressed a question that is becoming increasingly important for financial institutions: how can they build a more flexible payments operation without turning transformation itself into a new source of risk?
Innovar sin perder el control
Real-time payments, interoperability, and the integration of financial services into broader ecosystems are changing expectations around what financial institutions need to deliver.
The challenge is no longer simply to process a transaction. Institutions must support new use cases, connect with a broader range of participants, and provide experiences that are increasingly immediate and seamless. This opens the door to capabilities such as instant payments, remittances, bill payments, request-to-pay services, fintech integrations, and connections with other ecosystems. Yet every new capability also raises questions around security, regulation, operations, and integration.
The challenge, therefore, is not simply to introduce innovation, but to do so without compromising the stability of services that already perform reliably. Markets may evolve rapidly, but the infrastructure supporting mission-critical financial operations cannot always change at the same pace.
Legacy Architecture as a Constraint on Evolution
One of the key obstacles identified during the discussion was the continued dependence on legacy architectures, particularly the banking core.
Many core systems were designed to address the needs of a different era in financial services. Over time, new capabilities, integrations, and processes have been layered on top of them, turning these systems into critical components of an increasingly broad operating environment.
The challenge emerges when the core begins to concentrate capabilities that do not necessarily need to evolve at the same pace.
Modern transactional operations must incorporate new payment rails, channels, participants, and services, each with different rates of change. Making every evolution dependent on the core can increase complexity, extend implementation timelines, and amplify the impact of each innovation on the existing infrastructure.
For that reason, one of the alternatives discussed was to decouple payment orchestration from the core through modular, composable architectures.
The principle is straightforward: not everything needs to change at the same time. A modular architecture allows institutions to introduce new capabilities without repeatedly modifying the operational core or building every function from the ground up.
Innovation Starts with the Business
Decoupling the architecture, however, should not become an objective in itself.
Modernization should begin with a business question: what problem needs to be solved?
If the objective is to improve an experience, introduce a new payment method, enable a real-time service, or connect to a new ecosystem, the architecture should be designed around that requirement and the pace at which the capability will need to evolve.
Technology serves as an enabler of a more intuitive, secure, and immediate financial experience. Institutions that fail to keep pace with these expectations risk losing relevance to competitors that can respond faster.
But the ability to evolve requires more than technology alone. Strategy, governance, processes, data, and customer centricity are all necessary to make innovation sustainable over time.
Payment modernization is therefore not exclusively a technology initiative. It also requires institutions to rethink how they prioritize initiatives, manage risk, and respond to changing market needs.
Infrastructure That Moves with the Business
The discussion at the 5B Digital Summit led to an important conclusion: technology infrastructure should not become the constraint on business strategy.
Modernization does not necessarily mean replacing everything that already exists. It means finding a more flexible way to build on what works, separating the capabilities that need to evolve quickly from those that need to remain stable.
This ability will become increasingly important as new payment rails, interaction models, and participants continue to emerge across financial ecosystems. The question will no longer be only which technology to adopt, but how prepared the architecture is to accommodate capabilities that do not yet exist.
In this context, AZ7® enables financial institutions to decouple payment orchestration from the banking core and manage the connections, transaction flows, and capabilities required by a continuously evolving transactional operation through a modular architecture.
This approach is complemented by EVERYCARD®, which supports card lifecycle management and enables issuing capabilities to evolve within an architecture designed to respond to new business requirements.
Modernization, then, is not about replacing what already works. It is about building an infrastructure in which payment orchestration and card management can evolve with greater agility, stronger control, and less operational friction, in line with each institution’s priorities.
Modernizing payments should not mean starting over. It should mean having the architecture required to keep moving forward.
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