Payment processing is the core of banking, yet many banks still keep it on platforms from the COBOL era. After four decades in the industry, HP offers GreenLake for Payments—payments as a service designed to relieve banks of IT burden and speed up change. The goal is to adapt to regulations and competition without high costs and outages.
Payments as a service: what the provider does
GreenLake for Payments offers a “pay-as-you-go” model: the bank pays for what it actually uses. HP and its partners ensure 24/7/365 availability, infrastructure, operating systems, and the platform, including security and compliance with regulations such as DORA. It also includes the payment processing application itself and its ongoing improvement.
When new mandates come from networks like Visa or Mastercard, the provider implements them on the platform. It likewise implements new services, for example "buy now, pay later," through a controlled change. This lets the bank focus on its day-to-day agenda—managing and blocking cards, issuing new cards, or onboarding merchants and setting fees—without operating extensive IT infrastructure.
Scaling, architecture, and cost model
The solution runs in a hybrid cloud: it can be in the customer’s data center or in the provider’s facilities. The commercial model adapts to volume—if a bank processes 100 million transactions per month, it pays for 100 million, not for a billion. As a result, the service is suitable for smaller institutions as well as large multinational banks.
Technically, the platform is based on a microservices architecture and modern approaches such as low-code/no-code and service-oriented architecture. New features are deployed alongside existing ones without downtime and without the need to retest the entire system; what changes is tested in isolation. The goal is to accelerate innovation while maintaining security and regulatory compliance, so banks can compete nimbly with cloud fintech players.
