ACI and Security Bank’s unified, cloud-ready payment platform powers 35% transaction growth, triples processing capacity
ACI Worldwide (NASDAQ: ACIW), a global leader in payments technology, and Security Bank Corporation, a leading universal bank in the Philippines, have been named winners of the Best Payment Technology Initiative in Asia Pacific at The Asian Banker (TAB) Global Financial Technology Innovation Awards 2026.
The recognition highlights the two organizations’ transformation of Security Bank’s payments infrastructure through the consolidation of fragmented systems into a unified, scalable platform.
The modernized architecture supports both low- and high-value ISO 20022 real-time payments, enabling end-to-end automation across all channels.
What sets the initiative apart is its enterprise-wide scope and forward-looking design. Security Bank and ACI re-engineered the bank’s entire payments orchestration layer across all business lines, creating a single platform designed to support continuous innovation, regulatory compliance, and ecosystem expansion.
The platform integrates transaction processing, monitoring, investigation, and reporting into a unified operational environment. This has significantly reduced manual intervention while improving straight-through processing.
Payments transformation drives agility, resilience, growth
IMAGE CREDIT: Freepik
At a time when digital commerce is accelerating, and expectations for speed, reliability, and security continue to rise, the initiative sets a new benchmark for how banks can transform payments into a strategic growth engine.
“While many payment transformation efforts focus on infrastructure modernization, this initiative delivers clear business value. By simplifying operations, accelerating time to market, and enabling new revenue models, it moves beyond modernization to create a competitive advantage for the bank,” said Leslie Choo, Senior Vice President and Managing Director for APAC at ACI Worldwide, said in a press release.
“In partnership with Security Bank, we transformed the payments backbone, replacing fragmented layers with a unified, intelligent orchestration layer. This goes beyond speed, giving Security Bank the control, agility, and resilience to lead in a digital economy and raise the bar for the region,” he added.
The initiative reflects Security Bank’s proactive approach to addressing long-standing industry challenges, including fragmented systems, limited scalability, and inconsistent customer experiences. The new platform unifies payment processing across multiple payment rails, enabling standardized workflows, greater automation, and full operational visibility across the payment lifecycle.
Built on a modern microservices-based architecture and deployed in a cloud-native environment, the platform is ISO 20022-native, ensuring interoperability and readiness for evolving regulatory requirements while maintaining compatibility with legacy systems.
Unified payments platform boosts speed, scalability, and resilience
Photo shows, from left: Nicole Ranna Feliciano, Product Management and Payments Channel Head, Security Bank Corporation; Ong Chee Cheng, VP, Head of ASEAN, ACI Worldwide; and Matthew Grech, VP, Head of Services, Asia Pacific, ACI Worldwide
“This transformation goes to the heart of how we serve our customers and grow as a bank,” said John Cary Ong, Executive Vice President and Wholesale Banking Segment Head at Security Bank Corporation.
“Payments are no longer a back-end utility. They are a front-line experience and a competitive differentiator. Together with ACI, we have built a modern payments platform that allows us to move at the speed of our customers, scale with confidence, and innovate without being constrained by legacy systems,” he further stated.
Delivered through a highly collaborative partnership between Security Bank and ACI, the initiative combined deep domain expertise, agile execution, and strong executive sponsorship. A phased rollout approach enabled rapid time-to-value, with InstaPay going live within 10 months and scaling to more than 10 million transactions per month shortly thereafter.
The impact has been both immediate and sustained. Transaction volumes across domestic payment rails increased by 35% year-on-year, while the platform tripled transaction processing capacity and achieved 99.99% uptime, underscoring its scalability and operational resilience.
