Our 2026 Excellence in Innovation Payment Technology Solutions for Europe award was recently granted to Diebold Nixdorf. This allowed us to meet with Andy Zosel, EVP, Chief Product & Technology Officer at Diebold Nixdorf. We spoke about how banks and retailers can simplify payments across every channel and introduced a shared transaction orchestration layer that improves resilience, security, and speed-to-market through phased modernization.
Q1: What’s driving banks and retailers to rethink payments and self-service together—and where are the biggest gaps?
What’s changed is the expectation that the same reliability and consistency extend across every payment touchpoint: POS, mobile, and online ,branch and ATM,. At the same time, fraud pressure, compliance demands, customer demands, and integration complexity have all increased.
The biggest gaps typically come from fragmentation—separate stacks by channel, duplicated business rules, and inconsistent controls that slow change and add risk. The opportunity is to unify the foundation so banks can build capabilities once—journeys, routing, and controls—and reuse them everywhere. For decades, Diebold Nixdorf (DN) has processed billions of secure transactions in mission-critical environments. Today, we’ve extended that same reliability, security, and orchestration capability across all payment channels — ATM, digital, mobile, web, kiosk, and real‑time payment networks.
Q2: Given those gaps, what architectural approach should banks take to simplify and move faster—without increasing risk?
The pattern I see work is separating the channel experience from the transaction “plumbing”. When routing, transformation, controls, and audit live in a shared layer, you stop rebuilding the same logic in every channel—and you get consistency by design instead of by policy.
That’s the bridge between identifying gaps and delivering a solution: a platform approach that’s modular, standards-driven, and operable at scale—so institutions can modernize incrementally while improving resilience and control. The next question is really about what that shared layer looks like in practice.
Q3: DN has this shared layer, tell us about it—and what principles guided how you designed it?
Vynamic® Transaction Middleware , DN’s platform, is a transaction processing and orchestration layer between channels and back-end systems. It’s where you centralize reusable services—routing and orchestration, message transformation across legacy and modern standards (including ISO 20022), policy enforcement, security controls, auditability, and reconciliation—so institutions don’t rebuild the same “plumbing” separately for e-commerce, mobile, POS, branch, and ATM.
From a software standpoint, the principles are simple: API-first integration, cloud-native/containerized microservices for resilience and scale, and security-by-design. Just as importantly, it’s built for continuous evolution—so adding a new payment method, partner, or channel doesn’t require a disruptive replacement cycle.
Q4: How can banks adopt this without risking availability—and can you share what that looks like in practice?
Banks rarely have the luxury of a “big bang”—and they shouldn’t take that risk. The pragmatic approach is coexistence and phased migration: introduce the platform layer where it creates leverage, run in parallel where required, and expand channel by channel and function by function with clear rollback paths. A good example is Bankart, a leading payments processor in Slovenia that processes transactions for more than 20 banks across six different countries, where the focus was multi-channel enablement and a controlled migration away from legacy components.Implementation proved stability in a contained scope first, then we scaled across additional transaction types and channels.
Most institutions often start where they can prove value quickly—using APIs to modernize specific journeys—then extend to additional transaction types and channels over time. The key is incremental modernization that improves capability while protecting the “always-on” expectation.
Q5: What are the non-negotiables in the critical path—and what proof points matter?
If you’re in the critical path, there are no compromises: resilience, predictable low latency, horizontal scalability, and security and compliance by design. Banks also need auditability and operational transparency—clear evidence of what happened, why it happened, and how controls were enforced.
That’s why scale and production history matter. Vynamic Transaction Middleware processes 20B+ transactions annually, and is used by 80+ financial institutions, including deployments of 50,000 terminals in a single implementation. And on the architecture side, active-active designs proven at around 3,000 TPS help support continuous availability.
Q6: Where should a central policy and decisioning layer live—and how does modern architecture help apply consistent controls without adding friction?
Threats don’t respect channel boundaries anymore, and neither should controls. In a modern architecture, a central policy and decisioning layer—policy, decisioning, and enforcement—needs to be applied consistently across channels, not re-implemented as point solutions for POS, online, mobile, and ATM.
Vynamic® Transaction Middleware gives you a practical place to enforce controls—limits, authentication signals, fraud rules, and screening—while still letting each channel optimize the customer experience. The goal is smarter controls: more consistent risk management with less unnecessary friction.
Q7: What cloud-to-edge architecture and operating model works best for global banks—and what slows adoption?
Global banks operate in a hybrid reality, and the ATM channel makes edge a primary requirement. The architecture that works is cloud-native at the core with portable deployment options—cloud, on-prem, private cloud, or hybrid—so institutions can meet regulatory and data-residency requirements without fragmenting the platform.
The real barriers are often operating-model related: security and risk approval cycles, legacy release governance, and the shift to CI/CD and microservices operations. When teams pair phased rollout with strong observability, the risk becomes manageable—and adoption speeds up.
Q8: How does DN reduce integration complexity and speed time-to-value with interoperability?
Interoperability must be designed in because it’s where many transformations stall. With Vynamic® Transaction Middleware, DN focuses on standards support—including ISO 8583 and ISO 20022—plus API-driven integration, certification discipline, and a partner ecosystem that reduces one-off custom work.
The objective is straightforward: fewer bespoke integrations, faster onboarding of new partners and rails, and a platform that can evolve as the ecosystem changes—without forcing a re-architecture every time.
Q9: What differentiates DN in a crowded payments technology market—and where do clients see ROI?
DN’s advantage is that we combine platform engineering with decades of “always-on” self-service operations. That operational discipline—resilience, lifecycle rigor, and managing heterogeneous estates—shows up directly in how we build and run software.
Clients see ROI when they reduce duplication and complexity: implement core transaction services once, apply them consistently across channels, and speed up delivery of new capabilities. That typically translates into lower cost-to-change, fewer integration failures, improved reliability, and faster time-to-market.
One clear example of DN’s involvement and impact is the Digital Euro initiative. DN is actively navigating the substantial complexity and elevated cost structures that arise from legacy payment systems—many of which were originally designed for card and PIN-based transactions. DN’s platform enables banks to modernize systems, increase flexibility, and rapidly launch new payment solutions like the Digital Euro. This demonstrates how DN delivers tangible ROI: supporting banks in adapting quickly and efficiently to major industry shifts while minimizing disruption and cost.
Q10: What separates successful multi-channel modernization programs—and how can banks scale with confidence?
The programs that succeed typically do three things well: they simplify integration rather than add to it, they make controls consistent across channels, and they treat operations readiness as a principal deliverable—not an afterthought at cutover. The “watch-outs” are the flip side of that: integration sprawl, uneven control coverage, and reconciliation or data breaks that only surface once volume ramps.
Scaling with confidence comes from disciplined governance, rigorous testing, and strong observability—logs, traces, and audit trails that make system behavior explainable. The best teams prove stability in a contained scope, build repeatable rollout patterns, and then expand predictably—so each wave is less risky than the last.
Q11: For Global Banking & Finance readers, what should banks be doing in the next 6–12 months to advance a multi-channel payments modernization agenda?
Over the next 6–12 months, banks should focus on creating momentum through a few concrete moves: standardize how channels integrate (API-first where possible), centralize shared transaction services and controls so they’re consistent by design, and invest in observability so operations teams can run changes safely. The goal is to shift from bespoke, channel-by-channel delivery to reusable services and repeatable deployment patterns.
On a global scale, success is a platform that runs 24/7/365 with consistent performance, enforces policies uniformly, and can evolve continuously—so new payment types, rails, and experiences can be introduced without multi-year reinvention cycles.
Author:
Andy Zosel
EVP, Chief Product & Technology Officer, Diebold Nixdorf
