Legacy mainframe retirement marks milestone in industry shift toward modern ACH payment infrastructure
Metropolitan Commercial Bank, a full-service commercial bank based in New York City has become one of the first U.S. banks to fully retire its legacy ACH mainframe, completing a migration to Finzly’s cloud-native, API-first payment platform. The move is part of the Bank’s Modern Banking in Motion initiative and marks a milestone in an industry seeking alternatives to aging payment infrastructure.
MCB’s migration demonstrates that full ACH cloud modernization—long considered too complex for most banks—is now achievable. Several financial institutions have begun running modern ACH platforms alongside legacy systems, but MCB is the first to adopt Finzly’s platform as its primary system and fully decommission its legacy ACH infrastructure. Finzly enables banks to meet the demands of modern ACH processing at scale, delivering speed, efficiency, reliability, operational simplicity and a clear ROI on its investments.
The migration reflects a broader industry shift. As financial institutions face pressure to modernize ahead of Nacha’s March 2026 fraud monitoring requirements and rising customer expectations for real-time visibility, many are reevaluating their core payment infrastructure. A recent American Banker webinar poll found that 84% of financial institutions believe the resilience of their current Fedwire and ACH infrastructure should be reassessed—a signal that the market is actively seeking alternatives to aging systems.
With Finzly’s unified platform, MCB has consolidated all payment rails—ACH, wires, and real time payments—on a single system using a modular approach that allowed the bank to surround, shrink and completely phase out legacy operations over time. MCB is achieving near 100% straight-through processing for wires on Finzly’s ISO 20022-native platform. Retiring legacy infrastructure has simplified operations, strengthened resilience, and enabled MCB to deliver the clear, efficient payment experiences corporate commercial clients expect.
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“Finzly has been a strong technology partner for Metropolitan Commercial Bank,” said Mark R. DeFazio, Founder, President and CEO, Metropolitan Commercial Bank. “Their unified payment platform and modular transformation approach allowed us to retire legacy ACH and wire systems safely, launch real time payments, and deliver a seamless experience to our clients. This migration has strengthened our operational resilience, improved straight-through processing, and positioned MCB to scale efficiently while continuing to innovate. This new platform will enable MCB to expand its payment business which will meaningfully add to NII and lower cost of deposits.”
“ACH is the most complex of all payment rails, having evolved over more than 50 years,” said Booshan Rengachari, Founder and CEO of Finzly. “With this, MCB has completed one of the most comprehensive cloud-native payment modernizations in the U.S. today—spanning ACH, wires, instant payments, and international payments on a single platform. It’s a testament to the team at MCB and their achievement in accomplishing what is a bellwether moment for ACH and the industry.”
Through continuous automatic updates that deliver modern features, built-in compliance, and evolving regulatory support, Finzly has positioned itself as a future-ready choice for financial institutions. Its wire platform became ISO 20022-ready early, enabling customers to process compliant messages without translators, well ahead of Federal Reserve and SWIFT deadlines. In a similar way for ACH, MCB and other Finzly customers are on track to meet Nacha’s 2026 compliance requirements through automated updates and built-in regulatory support.
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