Why outdated banking systems are hurting conversions—and how to solve them with A2A

Banks have long been the backbone of financial systems worldwide. But today, they struggle to keep pace with the fast-paced digital economy—and merchants are feeling the consequences.

According to Forrester’s recent Predictions 2025: Banking report, financial institutions face a "double whammy" of declining customer experience (CX) and shrinking profitability. They’re investing heavily in transformation, but progress is slow. Meanwhile, customer expectations are only going in one direction: up.

So, where does that leave merchants?

Waiting. Or worse, losing customers.

Outdated banking systems are costing you conversions

As Forrester points out, most banks still rely on legacy infrastructure that can’t meet real-time demands. Tech debt, regulatory complexity, rising fraud, and fragmented systems all slow things down. And when the payments infrastructure isn't modern, the end-user feels the impact.

Banking CX scores are falling globally, and friction in the customer journey leaves them less patient when they reach the payment step. Core banking migrations are time-consuming and can take years to implement, delaying improvements for many businesses. Additionally, new initiatives, like conversational banking and chatbots, are not very helpful. Forrester notes that only 1% of banking customers currently prefer chatbot interactions due to poor design and functionality.

A2A innovation is already solving what banks can’t

According to Forrester, in 2025, real-time processing will become the global default for most financial transactions, from payments to fraud checks and cross-border transfers.

While traditional banks face long transformation timelines, account-to-account (A2A) payments are already delivering these solutions, live in-market today. The right A2A provider can help you provide faster, simpler, and more secure payment experiences, not years from now.

How Trustly is delivering next-generation A2A payments

While banks are years away from delivering on real-time expectations, we’ve built an account-to-account payment platform that meets those needs today.

At the core of our solution is Azura, our proprietary data engine. Azura makes every payment up to 2x faster than traditional flows and enables highly personalised, high-conversion payment experiences. With real-time verification, risk scoring, and automatic account creation all handled in one streamlined flow, we help merchants reduce complexity and cut fraud risk to as low as 0.012%.

Trustly is also the only Pay by Bank provider that owns and operates the entire payment journey—from initiation to settlement. This gives you complete control, end-to-end security, and better reliability.

We’ve gone further by building direct integrations with key central bank infrastructure. In Sweden, we were the first third-party provider to support RIX INST, unlocking instant payouts to all Swedish banks. We’ve done the same across the Eurozone via SEPA Inst and in Denmark through Straksoverførsel—enabling rapid refunds and real-time money movement without changes to your existing APIs.

Together, these capabilities don’t just make payments work better—they help you deliver the seamless experiences your customers expect, in any market.

What does this mean for your business

Today’s customers expect payments to be fast, secure, and easy. Delivering that through legacy systems is hard, especially if you’re scaling, launching in new markets, or managing complex user journeys.

A modern A2A setup helps businesses to:

• Reduce payment friction at every step
• Offer instant refunds and cross-border payouts
• Improve fraud prevention without adding more steps
• Simplify onboarding and identity checks in regulated industries

This is what future-ready payments look like, and the future can start today.