Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
Proponents of faster-payment services, which enable real-time or nearly real-time transfers, may need a bit of patience for larger-scale adoption of the technology. Fifty-six percent of attendees at the 2019 Nacha Payments conference in May said it will take at least a year, and possibly more, for their companies to implement real-time payments, finds TD Bank in a report released Tuesday. The survey canvassed 498 payments professionals. Only 22% said they will participate in real-time payments within the next year.
Among the options are same-day ACH credit and debit transactions via the Nacha network, real-time payments from The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC, and a variety of other services from the private sector. Looming, perhaps as soon as 2023, is FedNow, a real-time payments service from the Federal Reserve.
“The U.S. has been behind several other countries in implementing faster and real-time payments but is gaining momentum,” Rick Burke, TD Bank head of corporate products and services, said in a press release.
“Dialogue about payments is increasing among banks, lawmakers, policymakers and practitioners, and this is likely to drive faster change. It will be interesting to see how faster payments evolve over the next few years, especially with the Federal Reserve’s announcement that they will develop a new real-time service called FedNow.”
Some businesses aren’t waiting to see how the market develops. Venmo, a person-to-person service from PayPal Holdings Inc., announced a new instant-transfer capability earlier this month.
The TD Bank survey also found that 85% expect payments fraud and cybersecurity to become a larger threat in the next one to two years, up slightly from 84% in 2018.
As for the biggest challenges they face this year, found growing frustration with efforts to update legacy payments systems. Forty-two percent—more than for any other issue—cited this as their greatest task, up from 36% in 2018. Coming in second, at 30%, is cybersecurity, which 32% cited last year.
