For decades, core banking transformation meant long implementation cycles, multiple vendors, and disruption banks could ill afford. But as real-time payments, embedded finance, and rising customer expectations reshape the industry, that model is showing its age, especially for cooperative banks and mid-sized institutions racing to keep pace. In this conversation, Rajiv Beri, Chief Technology Officer at NPST (Network People Services Technologies), unpacks the idea of “Bank-in-a-Box”, a modular, API-first approach that lets banks deploy payments, issuer processing, and digital banking capabilities without rebuilding their infrastructure from scratch. Beri discusses what breaks down in siloed systems, how compliance is engineered into modern platforms rather than bolted on, and where he sees payment infrastructure heading over the next five years.
Chief Technology Officer
NPST (Network People Services Technologies)
CISO Forum: Banks have relied on core banking transformation for decades. What’s driving institutions to look beyond that model now, and what are traditional cores no longer able to deliver in today’s environment?
Rajiv Beri: Core banking systems remain the backbone of banking operations, but the pace of innovation today is increasingly being driven by payments, digital channels and customer expectations. Consumers and businesses expect real-time transactions, seamless digital onboarding and integrated financial experiences, while banks must simultaneously respond to evolving regulatory requirements and increasing transaction volumes.
For many banks, particularly cooperative banks and mid-sized institutions, legacy core systems were not designed to support this level of agility. Introducing new payment capabilities, merchant acquiring services or digital banking features often requires extensive integration efforts, significant investments and long implementation cycles.
Rather than replacing their core systems altogether, banks are increasingly looking to modernise through modular, interoperable platforms that work alongside existing infrastructure. This approach enables institutions to accelerate innovation, introduce new digital services faster and strengthen operational efficiency, while preserving the stability of their core banking environment.
CISO Forum: How do you define “Bank-in-a-Box” for someone hearing the term for the first time, and how is it fundamentally different from simply outsourcing individual banking functions to multiple vendors?
Rajiv Beri: Bank-in-a-Box is an integrated digital banking and payments platform that enables banks to rapidly deploy essential banking and payment capabilities without having to build and integrate multiple technology solutions independently. Instead of managing separate vendors for payment switching, merchant acquiring, digital channels, fraud management and reconciliation, institutions can access these capabilities through a unified technology platform.
The key differentiator is integration. When multiple point solutions operate independently, banks often face fragmented data, duplicated integration efforts and higher operational complexity. A unified platform provides common APIs, standardised security, streamlined compliance and a consistent view of transactions across the ecosystem.
Importantly, Bank-in-a-Box is modular. Banks can begin with capabilities such as merchant acquiring, payment switching or digital banking and expand over time based on their business priorities. This flexibility allows institutions to modernise at their own pace while reducing implementation complexity and accelerating time-to-market.
CISO Forum: Your platform brings together payments, issuer processing, and digital banking under one roof. What breaks down when these are managed as separate, siloed systems and what specifically improves when they’re unified?
Rajiv Beri: When payments, issuer processing and digital banking operate on separate platforms, banks often struggle with fragmented transaction visibility, duplicated data and slower decision-making. Different systems may maintain different versions of customer and transaction information, making reconciliation more complex, delaying issue resolution and limiting the effectiveness of fraud monitoring and risk management.
Operationally, every new product launch or regulatory update requires coordination across multiple vendors and systems, increasing both deployment timelines and operational costs.
By bringing these capabilities together on a common platform, banks gain a unified view of transactions and customer interactions, enabling faster reconciliation, more informed risk decisions and a more consistent customer experience across every digital touchpoint. It also simplifies integration, shortens deployment cycles and enables institutions to introduce new payment products and digital services with significantly greater agility.
For banks, the outcome is not simply operational efficiency—it is the ability to respond faster to changing customer expectations, regulatory requirements and opportunities within India’s rapidly evolving digital payments ecosystem.
CISO Forum: What’s a realistic timeline difference, in concrete terms, between a bank or NBFC launching a new digital banking service via legacy transformation and via a Bank-in-a-Box model?
Rajiv Beri: Traditional banking transformation projects typically involve multiple technology vendors, extensive integration, infrastructure planning, testing and regulatory validation. Depending on the scope, these initiatives can take several months before new services are operational.
A modular Bank-in-a-Box approach significantly shortens this journey because much of the underlying payments infrastructure, security framework and compliance readiness is already in place. Depending on the scope of deployment and integration requirements, banks can implement new capabilities in a phased manner, enabling them to launch digital payment and banking services much faster than traditional transformation programmes.
This approach allows institutions to respond more quickly to changing customer expectations, introduce new payment capabilities with greater agility and modernise incrementally without disrupting their existing core banking environment.
CISO Forum: Cloud-native and API-led architecture is now common industry language. What does “API-first” actually mean operationally for a bank’s IT and compliance teams, and where do institutions most often get this wrong?
Rajiv Beri: For banks, an API-first approach is about enabling interoperability rather than replacing existing systems. It allows institutions to integrate new payment capabilities, merchant services, fraud management tools or digital channels with their existing infrastructure through standardised interfaces, reducing implementation complexity and improving scalability.
From an operational perspective, APIs enable technology teams to introduce new capabilities faster while minimising disruption to critical banking operations. For compliance and risk teams, every API interaction must be governed by strong authentication, audit trails, access controls and continuous monitoring to ensure regulatory requirements are met.
A common misconception is that API-first is purely a technology initiative. In reality, successful adoption also requires strong governance, clearly defined ownership, standardised integration practices and continuous oversight. Without these foundations, organisations risk creating new operational silos instead of achieving greater agility.
CISO Forum: Indian banking is a heavily regulated environment with RBI guidelines, data localisation, and audit requirements. How does a modular, cloud-enabled platform like NPST’s navigate this without compromising the speed advantage it promises?
Rajiv Beri: In financial services, speed and compliance must go hand in hand. Modern platforms should be designed with regulatory requirements embedded into their architecture rather than treating compliance as an afterthought.
At NPST, our platforms are designed to operate within the regulatory frameworks established by the RBI and NPCI while enabling banks to innovate at pace. Whether it is payment processing, merchant onboarding or transaction monitoring, compliance controls, audit trails and policy-driven workflows are integrated into the platform from the outset.
A good example is our Risk Intelligence Decisioning Platform (RIDP), which combines AI-driven analytics with configurable business rules to help institutions strengthen fraud detection, automate decision-making and maintain complete visibility into every transaction. Banks retain full control over policies and approval workflows while benefiting from faster, more intelligent risk decisions.
This approach enables institutions to scale digital payments confidently without compromising governance, transparency or regulatory compliance.
CISO Forum: Banks, NBFCs, and fintechs have varying scales, risk appetites, and regulatory obligations. How does NPST’s platform flex to serve all three without becoming a one-size-fits-none solution?
Rajiv Beri: Every financial institution has a different operating model, customer base and regulatory environment. A cooperative bank expanding its digital payment capabilities has very different priorities from a large NBFC or a fintech building customer-centric financial products.
Our platform is designed with this diversity in mind. Rather than offering a rigid, one-size-fits-all solution, we provide modular capabilities that allow institutions to adopt only the services they require, whether that is payment switching, merchant acquiring, digital banking or fraud and risk management, and expand over time as their business evolves.
While the deployment model remains flexible, the underlying architecture maintains consistent standards for security, interoperability and compliance. This allows institutions of different sizes to modernise at their own pace while benefiting from a common technology foundation built for scale.
CISO Forum: Embedded finance and real-time payments are reshaping who “does” banking. What infrastructure capabilities does this trend demand that didn’t matter five years ago?
Rajiv Beri: The shift towards embedded finance and real-time payments has fundamentally changed how financial services are delivered. Payments are no longer confined to traditional banking channels—they are increasingly embedded within commerce platforms, enterprise applications and digital ecosystems, where customers expect seamless, instant experiences.
Supporting this environment requires infrastructure capable of processing high transaction volumes with low latency, enabling intelligent routing across payment networks and making real-time fraud and risk decisions without impacting customer experience.
Equally important is transaction intelligence. As payment volumes continue to grow, institutions need greater visibility into transaction behaviour, AI-driven fraud detection and explainable decision-making that satisfies both internal governance requirements and regulatory expectations.
The focus has shifted from simply processing transactions to delivering secure, intelligent and scalable payment infrastructure that supports continuous innovation.
CISO Forum: Can you walk through a real (or representative) example of an institution that used NPST’s Bank-in-a-Box model? What was the starting problem, and what changed post-deployment in measurable terms?
Rajiv Beri: A representative example is our work with cooperative banks looking to strengthen their participation in India’s rapidly growing digital payments ecosystem. Many of these institutions recognised the opportunity in merchant acquiring but faced challenges in building the required payments infrastructure independently due to cost, technology complexity and resource constraints.
Through our Bank-in-a-Box approach, these banks were able to deploy capabilities such as payment acquiring infrastructure and merchant onboarding without having to undertake a large-scale technology build from the ground up.
Post-deployment, these institutions were able to begin offering merchant acquiring services, streamline digital merchant onboarding, and participate more effectively in the UPI ecosystem while leveraging a secure and compliant payments infrastructure. This enabled them to accelerate their digital payments journey while focusing on serving customers rather than managing complex technology infrastructure.
CISO Forum: Where do you see Bank-in-a-Box platforms heading over the next 3–5 years, and what capability is NPST building toward next that isn’t part of the conversation yet?
Rajiv Beri: Over the next few years, Bank-in-a-Box platforms will evolve from enabling digital banking to becoming comprehensive payment infrastructure platforms. The focus will move beyond transaction processing towards delivering intelligent capabilities around merchant services, fraud management, embedded finance, compliance automation and data-driven decision-making.
Banks will increasingly look for technology partners that help them monetise payment ecosystems, improve operational resilience and launch new digital services without large-scale transformation programmes.
For NPST, our continued focus is on strengthening payment infrastructure through AI-driven risk management, advanced payment technologies and highly scalable, modular platforms that support the evolving needs of financial institutions. We are also working towards extending these capabilities to international markets by adapting our technology to different regulatory and commercial environments.
Ultimately, competitive advantage will not come from processing the highest number of transactions. It will come from enabling institutions to innovate faster, manage risk more intelligently and deliver secure, seamless payment experiences at scale. That is where we believe the next phase of banking transformation is headed.
