Real-time payments

Two smaller banks with strikingly different roots — a startup financial institution in Irvine, Calif., and a century-old Missouri-based bank — are seeing similar trends emerge around demand for real-time payments.

There's going to be a strong emphasis on the creation of financial products underneath innovative, customer-centric innovation from big tech companies, says FIS' Raja Gopalakrishan.

Nano Banc's president, Mark Troncale sits down with PaymentsSource's senior editor Kate Fitzgerald to discuss how the fintech decided to be amongst the first wave of small-to-midsize banks adopting The Clearing House's real-time payments solution. So how did it go?

Control of the U.S. Senate hangs in the balance in the upcoming election, with the outcome determining the direction of laws and regulations that can have a profound impact on financial services, technology, fintech and payments innovation.

Mastercard and ACI Worldwide are partnering to provide technology to help central bank infrastructure meet the demands of real-time payments during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

Risking traditional profit generators in return for potential revenues down the line is a gamble many have not been willing to take. But immediate payments are coming to the U.S. whether banks like it or not, says Icon Solutions' Lauren Jones.

As the coronavirus pandemic has driven more people to work from home and shop online, the demands on digital, faster payment systems have been heightened — as have the opportunities for fraudsters to exploit them.

As the Federal Reserve's FedNow instant payments and settlement system enters into testing and use-case development phases, an emphasis on speed to market, ubiquity and compatibility with other systems remains in the forefront.

Speed stands at the forefront of any real-time payments deployment, but the real staying power in new payments innovation rides on the development philosophy of the platform itself.

Credit and debit cards, merchant apps and loyalty programs are being linked through a platform from U.K-based Fidel to provide real-time rewards, business expense management, digital receipts, and charity donations.

Baptist Memorial Health Care in Memphis, Tenn., is among the first to enable real-time payment posting into Epic systems and a single deposit that reconciles daily with the Baptist Memorial system.

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.

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.

The central bank released new details about FedNow, which officials hope to get off the ground before a 2023 or 2024 target launch date.

The measure would release $2 million in funding for the U.S. Postal Service to launch pilot programs to provide basic services such as checking accounts and bill payment.

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