The True Price of Keeping Payments Running

The payments industry faces a critical question: is it more economical to maintain aging infrastructure or modernize?

Legacy systems often appear cheaper initially because their depreciation has already occurred. However, the reality involves ongoing expenses for scarce specialists, manual processes, and workarounds that accumulate over time.

The Hidden Bill

When a mid-sized issuer processes 10 million debit attempts monthly, even seemingly minor inefficiencies create significant financial gaps. For example:

• Averaging just 0.50% avoidable false declines results in 50,000 lost transactions\n* At $30 per transaction, this equals $1.5 million of approved spend disappearing each month\n* For a European issuer, that translates to roughly $42,000 in annual interchange revenue loss before factoring in customer frustration or support costs

This doesn’t account for the additional expenses of regulatory updates requiring bespoke engineering projects or the impact on product launch timelines.

Resilience as a Business Imperative

The past few years have demonstrated that technology resilience isn’t theoretical. The UK Treasury Committee found 158 banking IT outages between January 2023 and February 2025, totaling over 803 hours across major institutions.

Barclays alone experienced an outage where 56% of online payments failed, with expected compensation costs ranging from £5–7.5 million. The ECB’s TARGET Services also suffered a significant incident after storage hardware failure suspended payment processing for hours.

These events highlight that functional legacy systems can pose inherent risks to operational stability and future adaptability.

Modernization Benefits Beyond Transactions

Modular, API-led platforms offer several advantages:

• Independent component upgrades without affecting the entire system\n* Seamless integration with digital channels like wallets and instant-payment rails\n* Scalability without requiring complete architectural overhauls\n* The ability to add new services—virtual cards, tokenization, BNPL—through configuration rather than coding

This shifts engineering focus from maintaining the old to building new revenue streams.

Phased Migration Approach

BPC’s “Pass Through” methodology allows institutions to migrate progressively without downtime. This approach has been used in successful implementations across Europe, including:

• Artea Bank in Lithuania moved its entire issuing platform while maintaining full service continuity\n* Banca Transilvania in Romania replaced legacy infrastructure to support over 8 million cards and enable new payment authentication methods\n* DSK Bank in Bulgaria migrated millions of accounts to euro-denominated payments with zero customer disruption and enhanced fraud protection

By taking a phased approach, banks can minimize risk while maximizing the benefits of modernization.