Fintechs

Payments infrastructure powering modern fintech platforms

Fintech innovation moves fast — and your payments infrastructure needs to keep up. 

For more than 50 years, SHAZAM has powered the technology behind modern financial services, beginning with the nation’s first shared EFT network. Today, we serve as the payments infrastructure layer for fintech and embedded finance platforms, enabling real-time payments, debit card transactions, funds transfers and secure payment processing through a resilient, API-ready gateway.

Our modular payment solutions integrate seamlessly with existing systems, allowing you to activate the capabilities you need today and expand your payments ecosystem as your platform grows. Whether you’re launching a new product or scaling an existing one, SHAZAM delivers the infrastructure and expertise needed to move money securely, instantly and reliably — without adding operational complexity.

Reach the market faster

Challenge:

Fintech platforms often struggle to achieve widespread market reach. Connecting to multiple card networks and financial institutions individually can slow product launches and create significant integration complexity.

At the same time, it can be difficult to compete against the established reputation of traditional financial institutions.

Solution:

As one of the nation’s largest independent debit networks, the SHAZAM payments network delivers seamless connectivity to major card brands — including Visa® and Mastercard® — giving you access to nearly every debit cardholder and account in the U.S.

By leveraging our proven network, you instantly broaden your market reach, strengthen credibility with regulators and consumers and ensure secure, real-time payments along with dependable debit card processing.

Supported by decades of payments expertise and a fully regulated network infrastructure, SHAZAM empowers you to launch faster, build trust and effectively reach your customer base.

Deliver payments instantly

Challenge:

Slow settlement times on traditional payment rails can create friction in the customer experience. Waiting days for funds to arrive can drive churn and reduce engagement — especially for gig platforms, digital wallets and fintech apps that rely on immediate financial access.

Building direct integrations with multiple payment rails, however, is technically complex and expensive.

Solution:

The Peregrine™ payments gateway provides a single integration point for fast, secure real-time payments across multiple networks, leveraging Funds Transfer Credit to move money to debit cards and accounts in seconds.

With modern API-driven payments infrastructure, your engineering team can integrate once and instantly unlock nationwide payment reach without the cost and complexity of building payment rails from scratch.

The result is a faster user experience that improves customer satisfaction, increases retention and enables new fintech payment products.

Leverage AI-driven payments protection

Challenge:

As fintech platforms scale, transaction volumes grow rapidly — and so do fraud risks. Monitoring transactions across multiple payment channels requires constant vigilance, pulling engineering and operations teams away from product innovation, while legacy systems can make it difficult to detect suspicious activity early.

Solution:

SHAZAM integrates advanced fraud monitoring directly into our payments processing environment to help protect your transactions without adding operational complexity.

Our fraud management tools use neural-network analytics to identify suspicious patterns in real time, helping you detect and stop fraudulent activity before it impacts customers or your platform.

By embedding fraud protection into your payments infrastructure, SHAZAM helps you strengthen security, reduce risk and maintain regulatory compliance — so your team can stay focused on building innovative financial experiences.

Where fintech innovation meets trusted partnership

“We believe in building products people love and trust to help them meet their financial goals. As more and more people adopt digital financial services, it's critical that our partners are able to scale, move quickly and be flexible. This is why we decided to partner with SHAZAM. Their commitment to our program has been exemplary.”

Mark Barberan, Vice President, Operations
Qapital — New York, NY

How SHAZAM’s payments infrastructure works

Modern fintech platforms rely on secure payments infrastructure to connect applications, financial institutions and payments networks in real time. We combine the Peregrine™ payments gateway, the SHAZAM payments network and our scalable payments processing infrastructure to power reliable real-time payments across the U.S. financial ecosystem.

API integration

Secure APIs allow fintechs to access our payments gateway, where they can initiate payments, validate accounts and manage transactions through a single connection.

Transaction routing

Once a payment request is initiated, the payments gateway securely routes the transaction through the most efficient pathway using advanced transaction routing capabilities.

Payments processing

Transactions are handled by our resilient Peregrine™ processing engine, designed to support billions of annual transactions with high availability and built-in fraud monitoring.

Instant funds delivery

Through the reliable SHAZAM payments network, fintech platforms can deliver secure, real-time payments to nearly 100% of debit cardholders and accounts in the U.S.

Read the white paper

Frictionless, secure and scalable: Understanding the complex world of debit cards

As debit card programs grow more complex, fintechs need scalable, secure solutions. This white paper breaks down the card issuance process, outlines industry best practices and helps you evaluate partners to confidently launch compliant, growth-ready programs.

frictionless secure and scalable debit card graphic with digital payment cards illustration

Building the future of fintech payments

The payments landscape continues to evolve — and fintech platforms need payments partners that evolve with it.

With decades of expertise and modern API-driven technology, SHAZAM delivers secure real-time payments infrastructure, flexible network connectivity and reliable payments processing.

Fintech innovators trust SHAZAM because we combine modern technology with decades of payments expertise. From the Peregrine™ payments gateway to scalable transaction routing, we’re building the infrastructure behind modern fintech innovation.

Ready to explore what SHAZAM can do for your fintech platform?