rewrite this title Metropolitan Commercial Bank Forges Partnership with Finzly – Finovate

Metropolitan Commercial Bank has partnered with Finzly for its cloud-native, API-first payment platform.

The deployment will consolidate all payment rails—ACH, wires, and real-time payments—on a single system via a modular approach that will enable the bank to phase out legacy operations over time.

Headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, Finzly is a two-time Finovate Best of Show winner.

New York City-based Metropolitan Commercial Bank has called it quits. The full-service commercial bank has retired its legacy ACH mainframe in favor of a new cloud-native, API-first payment platform courtesy of two-time Finovate Best of Show winner Finzly.

“ACH is the most complex of all payment rails, having evolved over more than 50 years,” Finzly Founder and CEO Booshan Rengachari said. “With this, MCB has completed one of the most comprehensive cloud-native payment modernizations in the US today—spanning ACH, wires, instant payments, and international payments on a single platform. It’s a testament to the team at MCB and their achievement in accomplishing what is a bellwether moment for ACH and the industry.”

Digital modernization continues to be a challenge for many institutions still relying on legacy infrastructure. In an effort to avoid the complexity of full ACH cloud modernization, many banks have elected to run a modern ACH platform alongside their legacy systems. The partnership between MCB and Finzly is unique because the bank is the first financial institution to adopt Finzly’s platform as its primary system, completely decommissioning its legacy ACH infrastructure.

Leveraging Finzly’s unified platform will consolidate all payment rails for MCB onto a single system, including ACH, wires, and real-time payments. The platform uses a modular approach that will allow the bank to phase out all legacy operations over time, simplifying operations, boosting resilience, and enabling MCB to provide efficient payment experiences for its corporate commercial clients.

MCB’s partnership with Finzly is part of the institution’s “Modern Banking in Motion” initiative, an infrastructure modernization project that reflects an industry-wide effort to find alternatives to aging payment infrastructures. Regulatory pressures such as new fraud monitoring requirements from Nacha coming into effect this spring—to say nothing of growing public demand for faster payments and real-time visibility—are bringing new urgency to the conversation on digital transformation in banking and payments. In their partnership statement, Finzly and MCB noted an American Banker webinar poll that indicated that 84% of financial institutions believe that the resilience of their current Fedwire and ACH infrastructure should be re-evaluated.

“Finzly has been a strong technology partner for Metropolitan Commercial Bank,” MCB Founder, President, and CEO Mark R. DeFazio said. “Their unified payment platform and modular transformation approach allowed us to retire legacy ACH and wire systems safely, launch real-time payments, and deliver a seamless experience to our clients. This migration has strengthened our operational resilience, improved straight-through processing, and positioned MCB to scale efficiently while continuing to innovate. This new platform will enable MCB to expand its payment business which will meaningfully add to NII and lower cost of deposits.”

Founded in 2012 and headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, Finzly won Best of Show at FinovateWest 2020 and again at FinovateFall later that year. The company offers a digital, real-time, cloud-native operating system that features a payment hub that allows banks to centrally process ACH, FedWire, RTP, SWIFT, and FedNow payments. Last fall, Finzly unveiled its Agentic Galaxy offering, an intelligent fabric of deployable AI agents that helps banks and credit unions innovate faster and create more engaging customer experiences.

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

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