Green Sheet interviews meshIQ's Navdeep Sidhu

As payment environments grow more complex and real-time expectations rise, many enterprises still lack a clear, end-to-end view of their transactions. In this Q&A, Navdeep Sidhu, CEO of meshIQ, discusses why traditional monitoring tools fall short in modern payment ecosystems and how fragmented visibility creates hidden operational and compliance risks.

Drawing on his background in enterprise integration and observability, Sidhu explains how “flow intelligence” and transaction-level correlation can help financial institutions detect continuity gaps before they escalate into outages, reconciliation failures or regulatory concerns.

He also explores how regulators are responding to increased demands for traceability and what organizations must do to ensure trust, resilience and control across increasingly layered payment infrastructures.

The Green Sheet: Why are enterprises still analyzing only a fraction of transaction data, even with modern monitoring systems in place?

Navdeep Sidhu: Enterprises are still analyzing only a fraction of their transaction data because most monitoring tools were never designed to track transactions end to end. Traditional observability focuses on system health, whether the system is up or messages are flowing, not whether a payment was actually completed across every system involved.

Even the tracing tools treat middleware as a black box and fail to provide insights as the transaction traverses a complex maze of hybrid messaging and streaming infrastructure.

In modern payment environments, transactions span APIs, middleware, payment hubs, clearing rails and internal ledgers. Monitoring remains siloed across those layers, which creates a critical lack of context and correlation. IT and finance teams may see activity in individual systems, but they can't easily assemble a complete narrative for a single transaction.

As a result, the most important data, such as acknowledgments, timing gaps and breakdowns between systems, remains fragmented and largely unanalyzed.

GS: Where do transaction failures most commonly occur as payment paths become more complex?

NS: Transaction failures most often occur at the handoffs between systems, not inside the systems themselves, and payment paths are only becoming more layered. With payments moving from APIs to ISO 20022 messaging, across legacy, real-time and even digital rails, and into core ledgers – the handoffs between each are the weakest links.

Each system may report success on its own, but in reality, the transaction may have stalled, duplicated or drifted out of alignment.

These failures are especially common in the middleware layer that connects payment infrastructure. Historically, middleware was the domain of specialized administrators operating behind the scenes.

Today, that layer sits directly in the critical path of digital payments and is touched by developers building APIs, application support teams keeping services running, and business users who depend on real-time status and certainty. As a result, middleware remains fragmented across tools and teams, with no single, shared view of transaction continuity.

GS: How does correlating messages end to end change an organization's ability to detect problems before they become outages?

NS: End to end correlation detects continuity risks by emphasizing transaction continuity, rather than isolated events. Instead of reacting to individual errors or alerts, organizations gain a holistic storyline that shows how a payment moves and where it begins to slow, break or drift out of alignment.

By creating a shared, transaction-level view, end-to-end correlation enables application support to identify issues early, helps shared services reduce incident impact and allows developers to pinpoint where changes introduce risk. At the same time, business and operations users gain confidence that payment status reflects reality, not just system-level success.

With this visibility across roles and systems, organizations gain the ability to detect problems before they surface as outages, reconciliation failures or customer-facing disruptions, and begin anticipating where continuity is likely to break next.

GS: What types of payment environments benefit most from flow intelligence right now: real-time payments, cross-border or something else?

NS: Flow intelligence delivers the most value wherever speed, complexity and fragmentation converge, and most large financial institutions and enterprises are already operating at this complex intersection.

Real-time payments benefit immediately because instant settlement leaves no margin for delayed acknowledgments or manual verification. If continuity breaks, the impact is immediate and impacts customer satisfaction. Cross-border payments see similar benefits due to the number of handoffs involved, with multiple clearing networks, message formats, time zones and regulatory regimes each increasing the likelihood of misalignment across the transaction lifecycle.

Another environment to consider is the hybrid environment, which may benefit the most overall. Many institutions are operating across legacy batch systems, ISO 20022 rails, APIs and fintech integrations at the same time.

Traditional monitoring can confirm that individual platforms are running, but it cannot confirm that transactions remain aligned as they move between old and new rails. Flow intelligence provides a unifying layer of assurance across these environments, allowing organizations to modernize payment infrastructure without sacrificing continuity, compliance or trust.

GS How are regulators and auditors responding to more granular, transaction-level visibility?

NS: Granular, transaction-level visibility is raising the bar for what auditors expect across the board. Regulators and auditors are demanding clear evidence that transactions can be traced across their full lifecycle, not just sampled or inferred after the fact. Additionally, all aspects of a transaction; who triggered it, who authorized it, who has access to it at infrastructure level, etc., need to be governed and reported.

For institutions with end-to-end, transaction-level visibility, audits will move faster, false positives decline, and compliance becomes something that's demonstrated continuously rather than reconstructed under pressure.

Just as importantly, finance, treasury and compliance teams begin working from the same version of truth, which improves confidence, internally and externally. Over time, this level of visibility becomes key to building trust with regulators, partners, and customers.

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