Faster payments

With consumers and merchants alike sharing the need to be paid faster, the case for adopting real-time payments globally has quickly advanced during the COVID-19 pandemic.

With the USPS emerging as an election-year flashpoint, postal banking is an idea that could gain steam. But a number of proposals are out there, and they have wildly varying implications for financial inclusion.

Citigroup’s $900 million payment blunder in a normally low-profile part of the financial market dominated by a handful of banks has experts wondering if regulators will uncover a deeper problem.

The Fed's faster payments platform may well roll out in three or four years, but by then it will already be outdated.

As the coronavirus pandemic began, PayActiv waived fees for its earned wage access (EWA) user base. Eventually those fees returned, but they did not deter adoption.

For real-time payments to become a standard in U.S. billing and payment processing, businesses have to want what providers are developing. And that acceptance, or the interest in having an RTP option, is on the rise.

The Fed's faster payments platform may well roll out in three or four years, but by then it will already be outdated.

The past few months have provided no shortage of crises that call out for faster access to funds, giving developers a new impetus to hasten transaction processing.

Appearing to support decentralized systems, the acting comptroller of the currency said on a podcast that "the ultimate public ownership of the payment rails is when you have a network, like the internet, of interconnected institutions and computers."

John Drechny, the CEO of the Merchant Advisory Group, talks to PaymentsSource Associate Editor David Heun about how merchants are looking beyond the coronavirus crisis — and how every choice merchants make today will have consequences that last well beyond the pandemic.