SouthState Bank is driving innovation by modernizing its payments infrastructure to meet rising customer expectations and industry demands. Partnering with Volante Technologies, SouthState Bank launched a comprehensive Instant Payments initiative as part of a multi-year strategy to enable faster, flexible, and secure payment experiences to its one million customers via The Clearing House RTP platform and Federal Reserve Financial Services’ FedNow Service. By leveraging Volante’s cloud-native Payments as a Service, the bank not only enhanced operational efficiencies but also turned real-time payments into a competitive differentiator.
About SouthState Bank
SouthState Corporation is a financial services company headquartered in Winter Haven, Florida. SouthState Bank, N.A., the company’s nationally chartered bank subsidiary, provides consumer, commercial, mortgage, and wealth management solutions to more than one million customers throughout Florida, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia. The bank also serves clients coast to coast through its correspondent banking division.
For the past three years, SouthState ranked on the Forbes’ 100 Best Banks in America. Across 240+ locations, the regional bank offers a variety of solutions, including consumer banking, mortgage, small business banking, commercial banking, wealth management and correspondent banking.
The challenges that SouthState faced
SouthState Bank found itself at a critical juncture as customer demand for real-time payments and seamless financial solutions surged. Both businesses and individual customers expected 24/7 access to instant payment capabilities, driven by the rise of digital-first competitors like FinTechs, which leveraged cutting-edge technology to dominate the market. Compounding this challenge was the increasing regulatory pressure to adopt real-time payment systems, ISO 20022 standards, and modern data capabilities, creating an urgent need for innovation.
However, SouthState’s legacy payment infrastructure posed significant obstacles. The existing systems lacked the scalability, flexibility, and efficiency required to support instant payments, unified customer experiences, and future technological advancements. These hurdles risked leaving the bank unable to compete with larger institutions and digital disruptors that had already embraced cloud-native, Payments as a Service (PaaS) solutions.
To address these challenges, SouthState embarked on a transformative payments initiative. By integrating TCH RTP and FedNow networks, adopting a multi-rail cloud platform, and enabling ISO 20022 standards, the bank aimed to modernize its infrastructure, reduce costs, enhance customer experience, and meet rising market demands. This bold transformation positioned SouthState to remain competitive while delivering innovative, secure, and efficient payment solutions.
How Volante helped SouthState Bank
To address these challenges, SouthState Bank conducted a thorough vendor selection process to find the best solution for instant payments. They analyzed several available vendors in the market, such as ACI, Finastra, Finzly, the traditional core providers, and IBM. They evaluated them based on various criteria, such as technical architecture, capabilities, timeline, culture, and cost. They also considered the feedback from our stakeholders, customers, and regulators. Based on their analysis, they selected Volante as their vendor partner for instant payments. Volante was offering a robust, scalable, and flexible solution that can support multiple payment schemes, formats, and channels. Volante also held a strong culture of innovation, collaboration, and customer-centricity. Volante’s solution proved to be cost-effective and could be deployed quickly and easily on Microsoft Azure cloud, which aligns with SouthState’s cloud strategy.
Volante worked closely with SouthState to ensure a smooth and rapid implementation process. By leveraging the platform’s cloud architecture, the solution was deployed quickly, aligning seamlessly with SouthState Bank’s broader cloud adoption strategy. This approach minimized the disruption often associated with legacy infrastructure overhauls while keeping implementation costs under control.
Through Volante’s advanced technology and collaborative approach, SouthState Bank gained a modern, streamlined payments foundation that positioned them to turn their payment challenges into a competitive advantage.
Transforming payments into a strategic differentiator
The partnership with Volante Technologies has had a transformative impact on SouthState Bank’s payments strategy and overall customer experience. By launching Instant Payments to its one million customers via The Clearing House RTP platform and Federal Reserve Financial Services’ FedNow Service, the bank addressed one of its most pressing challenges: meeting customer demands for faster and more reliable payment options. This innovation created a seamless, unified experience for customers, allowing them to transact in real-time and manage their finances with greater confidence and ease.
Operational efficiency became another critical area of improvement. By modernizing its infrastructure, SouthState Bank was able to streamline internal workflows, eliminate redundancies, and reduce operational costs. Tasks that previously required extensive manual intervention became automated, freeing up resources and enabling the bank to focus on delivering more value-added services.
Customers now view SouthState as an innovative, forward-thinking institution capable of meeting their evolving needs with modern, efficient payment solutions.
Volante Technologies will enable us to deliver on payments as a service for FedNow and RTP and help us innovate through a single platform, creating economies of scale that we anticipate being able to pass on to our customers. Moreover, with Volante’s Payments as a Service, we will be able to innovate our products and services as the market demands it.
Chris Nichols, Director of Capital Markets, SouthState Bank
These achievements not only strengthened the bank’s competitive position but also enhanced customer loyalty and trust, laying the groundwork for continued growth and innovation.
Building a foundation for future innovation
SouthState Bank’s journey with Volante Technologies has only just begun. With its modern, cloud-native payment hub in place, the bank is now positioned to drive further innovation and expand its offerings to meet future market demands.
The next phase of SouthState’s strategy will focus on transforming the landscape of instant payments by introducing new features, expanding our reach, and developing solutions for various industries. They plan to launch request-for-payment, a service that allows payers to initiate payments based on requests from payees, enhancing convenience and security for both parties. They also plan to extend their endpoints to include the card rails, enabling instant payments to be made and received through debit and credit cards. Moreover, they will leverage the instant payments platform to create innovative products for specific sectors, such as healthcare, payroll, manufacturing, insurance, and law firms, addressing their unique needs and challenges with speed, efficiency, and reliability.
By embracing Volante’s scalable and future-ready platform, SouthState Bank has not only transformed its payment infrastructure but also built a foundation for long-term success. With the ability to adapt quickly and innovate strategically, the bank is well-equipped to lead in the dynamic and competitive payments landscape of the future.
The Volante Difference
As a leader in payments modernization, Volante enabled SouthState Bank to launch its first Instant Payments solution through FedNow and TCH RTP, delivering real-time capabilities that align with industry standards like ISO 20022 messaging. Volante’s proven expertise, including facilitating instant payments for financial institutions globally, made it the ideal partner for SouthState Bank’s payments transformation journey.
For SouthState Bank, the key drivers were clear: addressing rising customer demand for faster, seamless payment services, overcoming the limitations of legacy infrastructure, and achieving rapid deployment with minimal operational disruption. The bank also sought a solution that could scale easily, integrate seamlessly with its cloud-based strategy on Microsoft Azure, and provide a solid foundation for future innovation.
Ultimately, Volante delivered a modern, scalable, and real-time payments solution that not only met immediate needs but positioned SouthState Bank to compete effectively, deliver value-added services, and continue innovating as customer and market demands evolve.
Volante Technologies serves as the trusted payments modernization partner to over 150 financial businesses of all sizes worldwide. Our cloud-native payments as a service solutions and low-code financial platform give our customers the freedom to evolve and innovate at record speed.
