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The U.S. Faster Payments Council on Friday released guidelines for messages that financial institutions use in association with real-time payments or other transfers processed within a matter of hours or minutes. Such messaging can cover matters related to payment requests, return of money, payment status reports, and exchange of other information regarding payments, the Bentonville, Ark.-based group says.
The new guide addresses matters such as operational readiness, exception handling, and coordination with other areas within financial institutions, according to the FPC.
The messaging guidelines come as banks and other financial parties become more active in enabling same-day and real-time payments, particularly in the U.S. market. The Real Time Payments network operated by The Clearing House, a New York City-based operator owned jointly by many of the nation’s largest banks, processed 422.2 million transactions worth $1.68 trillion through September, exceeding the dollar value handled all of last year.
The Federal Reserve’s 3-year-old real-time payments network, FedNow, in the same quarter handled 6.38 million payments, 2.5 times the volume it saw in the same period last year. Dollar value for the Fed service reached $370.9 billion in the third quarter, up 21% year-over-year.
While messaging doesn’t move money, it helps parties manage exception items, request payments, handle returns, and generally smooth operations for participating institutions, the FPC says. “When designed and used effectively, [messages] provide the context, visibility, and control needed to make payments work better,” says Miriam Sheril, head of product for North America at Form3 and chairperson for the FPC’s Operational Considerations Work Group, in a statement. London-based Form3 is a developer of technology for account-to-account payments and manages operations in North America as well as the U.K. and Europe.
The FPC, formed in 2018, grew out of work performed by the Federal Reserve’s Faster Payments Task Force and, later, the Governance Framework Formation Team. Members include banks, payment networks, businesses using faster payments, and developers of related technology.
