Faster payments

After two years of helping banks connect globally to domestic faster payments rails, Swift is planning to expand on that concept.

After two years of helping banks connect globally to domestic faster payments rails, Swift is planning to expand on that concept.

The fintech, which spent most of the last decade touting various alternative ACH-powered faster payments approaches, is adding the more mainstream option of debit push payments in its latest iteration.

The pandemic has spurred a major push toward speedier digital transactions, making it an expeditious time for the Faster Payments Council to expand the range of input it gets to expand its mission.

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The Fed's faster payments platform may well roll out in three or four years, but by then it will already be outdated.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The Fed's faster payments platform may well roll out in three or four years, but by then it will already be outdated.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

The deal is said to be well-suited to the coronavirus era, when in-person transactions have been limited by social distancing and other factors.

Banks are utilizing an array of overlay services to address historical market challenges, such as the continued use of checks among businesses that do not have the information or capabilities to send digital payments.

The pandemic will have an impact on customer adoption of digital technologies. Financial institutions and fintechs can achieve growth by gaining consumers' trust and changing their mindset about new platforms.

The agency's voice carries even more weight in light of the coronavirus pandemic, which has hastened the transition to digital and remote payments.

The coronavirus pandemic has greatly disrupted many people's cashflow, and made financial management much more stressful. Earned wage access is one way to provide relief to those who still have an income but find themselves financially strained. PaymentsSource senior analyst Michael Moeser talks about earned wage access with Safwan Shah, the founder and CEO of Payactiv, a company that's operated in this space for nearly a decade.

Digital wallets arguably reached a tipping point this spring when contactless payments jumped 40% in response to concerns that cash and payment terminals were helping to spread the coronavirus, Vidya Peters of Marqeta writes.