Faster payments

Wells Fargo appears to be outpacing its rivals in the API race; CFPB's unexpected showdown with Citizens; Varo gets vital FDIC OK for bank charter; and more from this week's most-read stories.

Ken Montgomery, who is heading up the Federal Reserve's faster payments network, says the agency is taking an incremental approach to launching the service.

To address immediate market demand but allow time for the project to be done right, the official leading implementation of FedNow says the central bank envisions an initial release in 2023 or 2024 followed by subsequent updates.

While many consumers and large businesses are keen to adopt digital, real-time payments, there are still some groups of users that tend towards longer-established payment methods that are inconsistent with the digital economy, according to Standard Chartered's Tarek Elyafi and Shantanu Vijaykumar Bhosale.

Nacha is readying its network to meet with the demands of its financial institution members.

TBI Bank is an early regional adopter of a program that allows SEPA instant faster payments for digital lending clients.

The bank was one of the first users of The Clearing House's RTP network. Andrew Haskell explains how faster payments are helping the bank and its clients.

American Express has focused the past few years on overcoming a couple of its stigmas — that not all U.S. merchants accept Amex cards, and that younger cardholders were not intrigued by the status of holding an Amex card.

Projects in both countries are picking up steam and serving as an example to the rest of the world, says ACI Worldwide's Craig Ramsey.

Providing simple and rapid claims payouts is a competitive feature in the property and casualty insurance industry. Both Visa and Mastercard see insurance payouts as a use case for their respective card-to-card transfer services, Visa Direct and Mastercard Send.

Fearful of being the last one standing, banks and credit unions of all sizes will become more aggressive about real-time payments — or risk getting left in the past.

Payment fintech Tribe Payments says it has implemented its new software platform at Telleroo to provide the company direct access to payment rails and other banking services for its accounting and bookkeeper clients.

The economic outlook for the next year has been a moving target, but business payment companies fear that certain organizations are losing patience with the speed of transactions.

In what’s been named the “fourth Industrial Revolution,” the opportunity for fintech to continue to disrupt the payments landscape and deliver solutions that move money quickly and securely will only continue to grow, says AvidXchange's Dan Drees.

One of the biggest untapped areas of payment innovation is in consumer bill payment, which makes up 30% of U.S. consumer spending, with banks currently playing a shrinking role in the $4 trillion segment.

A recent study from the Federal Reserve outlines consumer habits at the point of sale and offers a preview of how things might trend in the decade ahead.

When the European Union began developing the Single Euro Payments Area more than a decade ago, it didn't include a vision for real-time payments and the potential for a third European payments scheme.

With the cost of processing business transactions remaining stubbornly high, a number of U.K. fintechs are working to facilitate open banking payments, a method which could soon enable consumers and businesses to make faster payments at a lower cost.

To compete and remain relevant in 2020 and beyond, organizations must rapidly develop, test and deploy innovative new products and services in increasingly larger amounts, says Paragon Application Systems' Steve Gilde.

In order to ensure that the public benefits from a faster payments system, we strongly support the Federal Reserve playing a key leadership role, just as central banks have successfully done in other jurisdictions, says TransferWise's Harsh Sinha.