In today’s digital-first financial landscape, banks and financial institutions face mounting pressure to deliver seamless, secure, and innovative payment experiences. Yet, many are held back by legacy payment infrastructures—often built on decades-old technologies like COBOL. These systems, while historically robust, are now a barrier to agility, scalability, and compliance. Modernizing them is no longer optional; it’s a strategic imperative for institutions seeking to remain competitive, reduce operational risk, and unlock new business value.
Legacy payment systems are notoriously complex and tightly coupled, making them difficult to adapt to new regulatory requirements, integrate with emerging payment rails, or support real-time, always-on digital commerce. Traditional modernization efforts can drag on for years, consuming vast resources and introducing significant risk to business continuity and compliance. The result? Innovation stalls, operational costs rise, and customer expectations go unmet.
Sapient Slingshot, Publicis Sapient’s proprietary AI-powered platform, is purpose-built to accelerate and de-risk the modernization of legacy payment infrastructures. Leveraging advanced AI agents, a vast enterprise code library, and deep domain expertise, Slingshot transforms the modernization journey from a high-risk, multi-year slog into a streamlined, iterative process that delivers results in a fraction of the time.
Slingshot begins by analyzing legacy codebases—such as millions of lines of COBOL—using AI to break down and understand program logic, data structures, and business rules. This analysis is translated into tech-neutral specifications and clear, behavior-driven requirement documents. The result is a transparent, easily understood blueprint that product owners and developers can review, enhance, and sign off on, ensuring alignment with business and regulatory needs from the outset.
Once specifications are validated, Slingshot’s AI generates modern architecture diagrams tailored to the institution’s target state. This includes high-level microservices architectures, entity-relationship (ER) diagrams, sequence diagrams, and class diagrams. These design artifacts provide a clear roadmap for the new system, ensuring scalability, modularity, and compliance with international banking standards.
With the architecture in place, Slingshot’s AI agents generate modular, production-ready code in modern languages such as Java. The platform also creates comprehensive unit tests, automation test scripts, and API documentation (including Swagger specs for REST APIs). Automated static code analysis and functional test suites ensure the new codebase is robust, secure, and ready for deployment—whether on cloud or on-premise environments.
Modernizing core payment systems is fraught with risk—from data integrity and business continuity to regulatory compliance. Sapient Slingshot addresses these challenges head-on:
By automating the most complex and error-prone aspects of legacy modernization, Sapient Slingshot dramatically accelerates timelines. What once took years can now be achieved in months or even weeks, freeing up IT and business teams to focus on innovation and customer value. Banks benefit from:
Legacy payment modernization is not a one-size-fits-all journey. Real-world challenges—such as tightly coupled business logic, fragmented data, and evolving compliance mandates—require a flexible, iterative approach. Sapient Slingshot’s agile methodology ensures that each phase is planned, tested, and validated, reducing risk and enabling rapid course correction as business needs evolve. This iterative process supports continuous improvement, allowing institutions to deliver incremental value while minimizing disruption.
Modernizing payment systems with Sapient Slingshot unlocks significant business value:
With a track record of working with 85% of the top global banks, Publicis Sapient combines advanced technology with deep industry insight. Sapient Slingshot is more than a tool—it’s a proven platform for core modernization, designed to help banks and financial institutions unlock agility, efficiency, and innovation at scale.
Ready to modernize your legacy payment systems?
Connect with our experts to see how Sapient Slingshot can accelerate your journey from COBOL to cloud-native—and position your institution for the future of payments.