payabl. has built a significant part of its financial technology in-house, including its own cloud-native core banking platform.
When it came to direct SEPA connectivity through the Bank of Lithuania’s CENTROlink, the company drew the line elsewhere: keep ownership of the core, use specialist infrastructure for the payment rail, and make sure both can scale together.
That division has become increasingly important as payabl. has grown from its acquiring roots into a much broader payments and financial platform.
At a glance
The challenge: Give a growing European payments platform more control over its euro payment flow without turning CENTROlink connectivity into another large internal build.
The decision: Keep core banking technology in-house and use a specialist partner for the SEPA connectivity layer.
The approach: Separate core banking functionality from CENTROlink connectivity, integrate the two through modern APIs and test the setup under load.
The outcome: Direct SEPA connectivity supporting SCT and SCT Inst, with an infrastructure layer designed to grow without forcing payabl. to scale its internal teams at the same rate.
The merchant problem got bigger than acquiring
payabl. began with a strong focus on acquiring.
Then its merchants started asking for more.
The underlying problem was broader than accepting a payment. Businesses wanted faster access to liquidity, financial operations in one place, reporting that could feed easily into their own systems, and infrastructure capable of handling both more products and more volume.
As Breno Oliveira, CPO at payabl., puts it:
“The problem when it comes to money flow was much deeper than we anticipated.”
The product followed the problem.
payabl. added point-of-sale solutions in 2023, multi-currency business accounts in 2024 and virtual card issuing in 2025. Today, payabl.one brings acquiring, business accounts, cards and other payment capabilities into the same financial environment. payabl. describes the platform as a way for merchants to accept, manage and send money without operating across a patchwork of separate systems.
For a company with strong European roots, euro payments sit close to the centre of that proposition.
Getting closer to the source
SEPA was never going to be a peripheral rail for payabl.
“SEPA is one of, if not the main means of making money flow in Europe.”
Earlier in its journey, payabl. had also relied on sponsor banks for parts of its euro payment flow. That gave the company less control over how payments moved and added another layer to an infrastructure that would eventually need to support much larger volumes.
Direct CENTROlink connectivity offered a different setup.
It gave payabl. greater control over the transaction flow for SEPA Credit Transfer and SEPA Instant, while bringing the company closer to the underlying infrastructure.
Breno’s description of the ambition is simple:
“We really want to get very close to the source.”
That matters increasingly as volume grows. An additional provider may be manageable at one scale. At another, its pricing, operational dependencies and technical limits become part of the economics of every transaction.
CENTROlink itself is operated by the Bank of Lithuania and provides licensed European payment service providers with access to SEPA schemes including SCT, SCT Inst and SDD Core. Payabl. CY Limited is currently listed by the Bank of Lithuania as a CENTROlink participant.
The core was worth building. The rail didn’t need rebuilding.
There is an obvious question here.
payabl. has substantial engineering capability. Its in-house team built the company’s cloud-native core banking platform, and Breno himself originally joined the business to work on its core banking capabilities.
Why not build the CENTROlink connectivity too?
Breno’s answer is probably the cleanest explanation of the decision:
“We can be good at many things, but we cannot be good at everything.”
The connection requires specialised knowledge that sits outside payabl.’s core product focus. That includes knowing the payment infrastructure itself, but also understanding how to deal with technical issues around CENTROlink and having people who already know where to go when something breaks.
There was another consideration: headcount.
A specialised infrastructure partner gave payabl. room to grow the payment rail without having to grow its own team at the same pace. Breno described that combination of know-how and the ability to scale without drastically expanding internal teams as a critical factor.
It allowed payabl.’s engineers to concentrate on the layer they wanted to own.
Inventi came into the picture through a handover
There is no neat vendor-selection story behind the relationship.
payabl. was already connected to CENTROlink through an external technical provider. When Inventi took over that provider’s SEPA gateway portfolio, the existing setup transitioned to Inventi.
What happened afterwards is more interesting.
payabl. was building a new cloud-native core banking platform. Under the previous setup, some core banking functions and SEPA connectivity had sat closer together, including functionality around balances.
With the new architecture, the boundary became clearer.
payabl. focused its own technology on core banking. Inventi focused on CENTROlink connectivity.
The modern setup was designed around APIs, webhooks and notifications, with information moving as close to real time as possible.
In other words, the partnership became part of the architecture rather than an extra system bolted onto it.
One call, then the load test
The integration still had to prove that the split worked under pressure.
During the project, payabl. wanted to run load testing against the end-to-end setup. The objective was straightforward: recreate meaningful transaction volumes in the sandbox and see how the integration behaved.
The planning was equally straightforward.
“We had one call with Inventi, decided how many transactions we needed to mimic in our sandbox environment, and then did it according to plan without major hiccups.”
For Breno, the pleasant surprise was how little ceremony the exercise required. A scalability test that could have taken considerably longer to organise inside a more rigid technology environment was agreed and executed without becoming a project of its own.
That is a useful test for payabl. because scale has two dimensions.
Volumes need to grow without degrading the payment flow. At the same time, the underlying infrastructure needs to accommodate new products as the platform expands.
The payment rail has to do both.
Instant still has to mean instant at scale
For Breno, the expectations from payment infrastructure are less complicated than the infrastructure itself.
It has to stay robust. Response times need to hold up. Instant payments still need to behave like instant payments when transaction volumes rise.
Capabilities around the rail are evolving too. Verification of Payee is now available to CENTROlink participants, alongside SCT, SCT Inst and SDD Core. New payment services will continue to appear around the same infrastructure.
That changes what payabl. expects from a technology partner.
Keeping the existing connection operational is the baseline. The relationship also needs open communication and enough technical depth to discuss what comes next.
Breno says those conversations already happen with Inventi:
“We’re always talking about next steps: how we grow, how we can create new connectivity.”
The objective is to make sure the infrastructure underneath payabl.’s products does not become the reason those products have to slow down.
The infrastructure should disappear into the product
payabl.’s wider product direction is increasingly about putting the merchant’s money flow into one place.
Its current payabl.one platform combines acquiring, business accounts, card issuing and access to more than 300 local and alternative payment methods. The company has also continued expanding the rails available through its business accounts, including SEPA, SEPA Instant and Swift.
The customer should not need to think about every system underneath that experience.
The teams building it do.
For payabl., direct SEPA through CENTROlink is one of those underlying pieces: close enough to the source to provide control, specialised enough to justify a dedicated infrastructure partner, and expected to keep scaling as the platform around it grows.
The best result is fairly unglamorous.
More products. More transactions. Same rail underneath, still doing its job.
About payabl.
payabl. is a financial technology provider offering payments and business accounts for businesses of all sizes. Its services include online and in-person payments, multi-currency business accounts, virtual and physical cards and access to more than 300 local and alternative payment methods. The company combines in-house development with strategic technology partnerships and operates from offices in London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Limassol and Vilnius.
About Inventi
Inventi provides payment and regulatory infrastructure for banks, EMIs and payment institutions. Its Payment Gateway supports direct SEPA connectivity through the Bank of Lithuania’s CENTROlink, Latvijas Banka’s EKS and other supported routes, alongside T2, TIPS and Swift connectivity through the same platform.
