FIS Says Middle Market CFOs Ready for Real-Time API Payments

Watch more: Digital Shift: FIS’ Melisa Kessous

For middle-market firms, connecting to their banks has long been more patchwork than pipeline. Each financial institution maintains its own file formats, protocols and security requirements.

According to Melisa Kessous, vice president of Product Management for Enterprise Payments and Connectivity at FIS, that fragmentation is a challenge for mid-market organizations because there is a lack of standardization and few resources to bridge the gaps.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are rarely designed to handle multibank integration natively, forcing firms to rely on manual uploads or custom builds, she said.

“Mid-market firms often lack the dedicated treasury IT capacity to maintain these connections,” Kessous said.

The result is fragile, point-to-point links that are expensive to build and even harder to scale or adapt as needs evolve.

Those brittle integrations translate directly into inefficiency. Workflows become siloed, cash positions become less visible, and switching banks becomes pricey.

“It leads to fragile point-to-point integration that are costly to build and even more expensive to scale,” Kessous said. The outcome, she added, is “operational inefficiency, fragmented workflows and high switching costs.”

To counter that, many firms are turning to managed connectivity services from firms such as FIS. The goal is to replace the patchwork of one-off builds with what Kessous termed “a single, reliable layer” that reduces complexity, strengthens security and frees finance teams to focus on strategy rather than technical maintenance.

APIs are now reshaping the entire model.

“APIs are transforming bank connectivity by shifting it from a static file-exchange model to a dynamic real-time service layer,” Kessous said.

Instead of nightly batches, APIs enable secure data exchanges on demand and integrate directly with ERP and treasury systems.

The advantages are speed, automation and transparency, but there are also hurdles.

“Integrating multiple bank APIs requires overcoming challenges in standardization, security and scalability,” she said.

Each bank may publish its own specifications, recreating complexity at a higher layer.

FIS addresses this by adopting common frameworks such as Swift Instant Cash Reporting and ISO 20022 formatting for consistent data exchange. A single, secure API channel can then support multiple banks, providing real-time balances, transaction details and automated reconciliation. For treasury teams, the shift delivers enhanced visibility and automation without the upkeep burden of bespoke connections.

Adoption will ultimately hinge on tangible benefits that legacy processes cannot deliver. Chief financial officers and treasurers “will see the clear and tangible outcomes that traditional batch processes cannot,” Kessous said. Those include improved cash visibility for liquidity management, faster decision-making through real-time data, proactive fraud detection and anomaly monitoring, and lower total cost of ownership by eliminating manual inefficiencies.

“The move to APIs will be driven by the promise of transforming finance from a reactive function into a proactive strategic enabler of business growth,” she said.

Shared-client platforms like the FIS Payment Hub Standard Edition act as a centralized connectivity layer that simplifies and standardizes the integration process between enterprises and their banking partners, Kessous said.

Instead of maintaining multiple one-off links, companies route all payment flows through a single controlled platform. The hub manages message standardization across banking formats, translation to ensure compatibility with diverse systems, and built-in validation and compliance to meet regulatory requirements.

By centralizing those steps, payment hubs “reduce complexity, improve reliability and enable mid-market firms to scale their operations without the technical overhead of managing individual bank connections,” she said.

As connectivity becomes core to financial operations, the CFO’s office is evolving “from a traditional reporting function to a real-time orchestration layer for cash, risk and capital allocation,” Kessous said.

Access to live data and analytics allows finance leaders to manage liquidity proactively, align capital strategy with business objectives and become a strategic enabler of growth.

Kessous said her advice to CFOs is to approach modernization as an evolution, not a one-time overhaul. Prioritize the capabilities that yield the fastest, clearest gains, like cash visibility, automation and secure data access. Then scale toward broader process integration.

Kessous also pointed to what comes next.

“With stablecoins evolving, we’ll see more and more organizations wanting to use stablecoins and connect to stablecoin networks,” she said.

FIS, she added, “is already working and has integration with stablecoin partners” as part of its effort to link traditional payments infrastructure with emerging digital networks. That readiness ensures that as connectivity broadens from banks to blockchains, mid-market firms can participate without rebuilding from scratch.

The middle market may lack the IT depth of global multinationals, but it now has access to the same caliber of connectivity. With APIs, standardized data formats and platform-based hubs, FIS and its peers are collapsing years of fragmentation into a unified, compliant structure.

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