The United States is a unique banking market, with more than 11,000 financial institutions and some of the most stringent regulations in the world. With the launch of FedNow last year, The Clearing House’s RTP network, and a new messaging standard in ISO 20022, U.S.real-time payments have finally arrived. There’s only one problem: The infrastructure here is not ready. 

In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Himanshu Pujara, Managing Director for Euronet Worldwide, and Elisa Tavilla, Director of Debit Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, spoke about how instant payments are happening around the globe today, and how banks can develop payment platforms that take advantage of increased standardization and interoperability, as regulatory bodies push for a more interconnected financial ecosystem.

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Playing Catch-Up With the World

The state of global payments varies depending on where you look.

“We’ve connected to many RTP networks and have been processing instant payments for over a decade now,” Pujara said. “In India, the Unified Payments Interface has been a game-changer, enabling billions of transactions monthly with its simple, mobile-driven approach. Then there’s the EU’s SEPA Instant Credit Transfer, which streamlines cross-border payments efficiently within Europe. In Brazil, the Pix system has revolutionized the speed of payments, quickly becoming a mainstay in their financial ecosystem. We process millions of transactions every single month for our customers in the emerging markets, and in all of these markets real-time payments has become a dominant form of payment in the day to day lives of consumers.”

These global trends have not yet matured in the U.S. market. While the United States has had limited access to instant payments in the past, FedNow has sped up the timeline for banks to offer such payments to consumers and merchants. This gives banks the opportunity to enhance transaction efficiency, financial inclusion, and economic growth.  

Seeking Harmony

Although there are different U.S. regulatory and market environments, the future points toward more collaborative efforts to harmonize regulations and technical standards, making it easier to transact instantly and across borders. Financial institutions have the opportunity to use the real-time payment rails to launch innovative use cases for customers such as insurance companies or payroll service providers.

Under the new rails, banking teams could offer a cash management solution or a liquidity management solution to make sure the merchants they support get their funds in real time. In other parts of the world, fintechs have taken the lead by converting their closed-loop stored-value wallet propositions and making them interoperable on the back of real-time payment systems. U.S. fintechs have the same opportunity. 

Architecture and Use Cases

The challenges lie primarily with legacy applications and their architecture. How does a bank make sure it’s able to connect to these systems in the shortest possible timeframe, knowing there will be new services or functionalities launched by the Fed or TCH? And how do consumers recognize the benefits of adopting instant payments?

“We all know consumers in the U.S. are very card-centric,” Tavilla said. “They like using credit and debit cards and have been accustomed to their rewards and incentives, as well as the purchase protection that cards provide. It’s important for providers to offer comparable benefits to give consumers a reason to convert from card payments to other types of payments.”

U.S. consumers often expect inconveniences in their financial transactions, not realizing that an instant payment system could ease issues.  “Last week I unexpectedly had to go shop for a new car,” Tavilla said. “On Sunday, I picked out a car and negotiated the price. The dealer offered to put $3,000 on my credit card but asked for the balance by the day after tomorrow, which was a Tuesday.  I don’t keep tens of thousands of dollars in my checking account, so I had to transfer it from my savings account via ACH, from one financial institution to another.” 

Such transactions can take a few days to transfer and cost the consumer $30 or $40 each. Real-time payments and ISO messaging can help alleviate such pain points by automating and reducing the time and heightening the efficiency of the entire process.

“Elisa’s story is a classic example where the customer would want some sort of a payment rail, where the money can move on a real-time basis,” Pujara said. “She had an urgent requirement, but even on an ordinary basis, we’re all used to instant gratification. Whether it’s ordering a ride or shopping for goods, the real time element is there pretty much in every part of our lives, other than money movement.”

U.S. financial institutions have decisions to make as they move into instant payments. In addition to having connectivity to RTP systems, banks can build an orchestration layer on top to decide on the rules they want to put in. They have the flexibility to scale their processes based on cost, availability, or which network to route the transaction.

A Range of Solutions

To navigate and capitalize on the evolving landscape of instant payments, organizations must be technologically adaptable, savvy with regulations, and customer-centric, ensuring they can meet the demands of a rapidly changing global payments environment. This means investing in payment technologies that can quickly conform to new standards and regulations. Cloud optimization is just one example of innovative technology that can enhance performance, security, and cost-efficiency.

The future points toward increased standardization and interoperability, as organizations and regulatory bodies push for a more interconnected financial ecosystem, enabling seamless transactions and enhanced user experiences globally. We’re likely to see more collaborative efforts to harmonize regulations and technical standards, making it easier to transact across borders. 

As those efforts come to fruition, Euronet offers an example of the flexibility available to U.S. banks. “We have a flexible deployment architecture depending on the size of the financial institution,” Pujara said. “We could provide a license that the bank can deploy in their own data center. For some of the smaller banks, we have a fully managed services offering with a hosted solution, which includes not just processing these transactions, and routing the transactions to instant payment schemes. It also includes services like reconciliation, settlement, unified dispute resolution, fraud, and risk monitoring.” 

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