Secure payment processing with cloud innovation

Financial services organizations must be agile and innovative to remain competitive. Industry leaders are increasingly looking to the cloud for solutions that provide the seamless and instantaneous payment experience customers expect along with secure payment processing.

Security is top of mind as banks, lenders, insurers, fintechs, and other financial service providers embrace cloud solutions. Leaders face unique challenges balancing innovation, efficiency, and security in a heavily regulated industry.    

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace recently hosted a webinar to examine how organizations use cloud solutions to enable transaction security. Speakers from Pismo and Futurex joined the webinar to share how their collaboration provides cloud-based secure payment processing for financial services organizations globally.

This post highlights key webinar takeaways, including an overview of Pismo and Futurex’s partnership, factors promoting cloud security solutions, and Q&A excerpts. View the Manage payment processing securely with cloud innovation webinar for the entire discussion.

Payment security and the cloud in 2023

Early in the webinar, panelist Ryan Smith, Vice President of Global Business Development for Futurex, spoke on the payment security trends his company is seeing. Futurex provides hardened data encryption security solutions to organizations with on-premises, cloud, or hybrid computing environments.

“We’re experiencing an uptake of cloud security solutions,” Ryan said. “Organizations’ priorities are shifting from planning cloud initiatives to actual implementation and rollout.” He cited several factors behind increased cloud adoption for payment security workloads, including:

• Cloud-centric considerations in the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) – Financial services organizations and the regulatory bodies governing them are increasingly comfortable moving workloads and payments into the cloud.
• Multi-tenancy technology in the hardware security module (HSM) space – HSMs utilize physical security measures, logical security controls, and strong encryption to protect sensitive data in transit, in use, and at rest. Due to security constraints, HSMs have historically resided on-premises only, making it challenging to move payment workloads to the cloud. Multi-tenancy technology offers innovation, economies of scale, and deployment ease to help organizations achieve secure cloud payment processing.
• Cryptographic modernization initiatives – The majority of financial transactions require cryptography on the backend. New technologies are tackling latency and providing flexible key management options.

Pismo works with Futurex to achieve a fully cloud-native platform

Pismo provides an all-in-one processing platform for banking and payments. The fintech’s customers include large banks, lenders, and other fintechs.

Before connecting with Futurex in AWS Marketplace, Pismo struggled with the complex compliance regulations required of financial transactions in the cloud. “We initially expected to develop a fully cloud-native platform,” said Thiago Lopes, Information Security Manager for Pismo. “But we couldn’t find a cloud HSM service that complies with PCI and other industry data standards. We spent many years with physical HSMs, which brought us a lot of technological challenges.”

Futurex provided Pismo with a suite of cloud-based payment HSMs. The cloud HSM solution enables Pismo to secure transactions, protect account data, and authenticate payment devices in a compliant cloud environment.

Futurex’s cloud HSM solution includes:

• Native AWS Cloud integration
• Secure environments for development, user acceptance testing, and production
• On-demand provisioning of HSM resources
• Geographically diverse data centers to manage data residency
• Data centers located near AWS data centers to minimize latency
• Flexible key loading methods, including Bring Your Own Key (BYOK), key agent services, and HSM-generated keys

“Not only did Futurex allow us to move completely to the cloud, but the solution also increased our resilience and transaction response velocity,” enthused Thiago.

Ryan sees Futurex’s value for Pismo—and other financial services organizations—in simple terms. “We help organizations reallocate internal resources to more valuable functions,” he said. “Pismo is able to focus on its core technologies and stay ahead of the trends.”

Q&A

After sharing their success story, Ryan and Thiago answered several follow-up questions. Read on for excerpts from the 20-minute Q&A discussion.

Q: How do you see the role of the cloud evolving in your space?  

A: Ryan Smith, Vice President of Global Business Development, Futurex

 “I see the cloud becoming a pivotal part of the digital payment space. It’s already gained acceptance and use. Banks, regulatory bodies, and government agencies see its advantages and don’t want to impede innovation. Organizations will offload more of their IT infrastructures onto the cloud to free resources and focus on their core business models. This will allow even more innovation and speed within the payment space over the next five to ten years. And that’s pretty darn exciting.”

Q: How are you preparing for your industry’s future challenges?   

A: Thiago Lopes, Information Security Manager, Pismo

“It’s impossible to live alone in this payment and digital bank ecosystem. That’s why it’s important to choose the right partners. When we have the right partners, we can help our customers overcome their challenges. We are very focused on this here at Pismo, which is why we are working with AWS and Futurex. They help us provide the innovative, scalable, reliable, and compliant solutions our customers are seeking day after day.”

A: Ryan Smith, Vice President of Global Business Development, Futurex

“As Thiago said, this is an ecosystem, and everybody has their part. We have to balance that blend between providing dynamic solutions quickly while understanding and meeting new regulatory requirements.”

About AWS Marketplace and next steps

AWS Marketplace has a wide variety of solutions to help financial services organizations modernize their infrastructures. AWS Marketplace is a curated digital catalog that makes it easy for customers to find, buy, deploy, and manage third-party software, services, and data. It offers quick, easy, and secure deployment, flexible consumption and contract models, and streamlined procurement and billing operations. More than 330,000 organizations, large and small, use AWS Marketplace monthly to accelerate digital transformation and improve efficiencies across their enterprises.

Independent research from Forrester estimates it takes half the time to find, buy, and deploy a solution through AWS Marketplace compared to other sales channels.

How can you begin addressing security challenges like the ones discussed in the webinar?

Visit Financial Services Solutions in AWS Marketplace to learn more about the financial services industry (FSI) cloud solutions available in AWS Marketplace.

View Manage payment processing securely with cloud innovation to learn more about the topics discussed in this post.

Author bio

Shaheen Kanda is the Financial Services and Insurance leader for AWS Technology Partnerships. Before joining AWS, she founded two fintech startups and spent a decade working as a leveraged finance banker in New York City.