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The source for the most timely insights in the world of instant payments is Level Up! Written by the Wespay Advisor’s staff of payments experts, and updated regularly to keep you learning and your business growing. Got a question you’d like us to cover? We’d love to hear from you.
Understanding which of your clients would be a good fit for Instant Payments is key to developing your FI’s Instant Payments strategy. Below are three key features that FIs can use to evaluate clients who may benefit from Instant Payments.
For credit unions enduring changing market conditions and growing scrutiny on consumer fees, non-interest income from business members could offer up new earnings. Enter Treasury Management Services (TMS).
Inventorying current systems is a vital component of your ongoing Payments Strategy. And a word to the wise: revising your product line may not mean adding more.
For credit unions who’ve become interested in offering instant payment (IP) services tied to RTP (Real-Time Payments) and FedNow, one of the biggest questions these institutions – and very possibly yours as well – must address is which IP network to join.
Even if your credit union only originates consumer entries such as transfers and loans, it’s still exposed to the same risks as credit unions and other FIs that offer traditional business origination services such as payroll and B2B payments.
The uptick in account transfer services rang the dinner bell for fraudsters. $1.7 billion in losses were reported in 2022, an increase of 90% over 2021 (Forbes). Simply put, if you’re an FI, identifying, preventing, and mitigating fraud is a constant challenge, pitting the integrity of your controls against the next-gen tactics of fraudsters.
One of the most common payment strategy topics gaining traction with our clients lately is the growing popularity of posting received Automated Clearing House (ACH) credits to customer accounts earlier than required by the ACH rules. We’ve encountered three consistent takeaways institutions should consider when posting ACH credits early.
‘Instant’ and ‘Faster’ payments process differently and are each characterized by clearing speed or speed of settlement. To help navigate the difference, it’s key to dive into the nuances of the end-to-end transfers.
The qualities that attract Instant Payments to senders and receivers; 24x7x365 availability, clearing speed, and finality of settlement, are the same features that make Instant Payments an attractive target for fraudsters to exploit.
The defining characteristic of an Instant Payment transaction is, of course, the speed with which it clears (i.e., the movement of funds from the sender to the receiver) and settles (the exchange of funds between the sender’s and receiver’s financial institutions).
The sample processing flow outlines the key steps for both U.S. Instant Payments networks, RTP and FedNow.
It is important to remember that Instant Payments (i.e., FedNow and RTP payments) are services and were not designed to facilitate any one particular use case. As Instant Payment services mature, new use cases are sure to evolve.
But here at the beginning of the U.S.’s Instant Payments journey, we provide the most anticipated and implemented use cases so that you can understand how your customers/members are likely to use them.
As we continue our exploration of different Instant Payments topics, we wanted to take a deeper dive into one of the use cases that’s driving the adoption of Instant Payments: Request for Payment, or RFP.
Financial institutions and service providers that are evaluating the implementation of Instant Payments should familiarize themselves with the potential of RFP.
One of the most common concerns we at Wespay hear from our FI members is how they will handle exceptions when it comes to Instant Payments via RTP and FedNow. The underlying concern is whether the FI needs support staff available 24x7x365 to handle exceptions in real-time.
Addressing these concerns requires a shift in mindset from legacy batch processing to the modern continuous processing model. These questions are usually asked in the framework of legacy payment rails, such as checks, wires, and ACH, and can be divided into two categories: debit and credit exceptions.
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