With real-time payments spreading throughout the world (perhaps more slowly than expected, but still spreading), the characteristics of pull payments mean they are likely to play only a marginal role. That’s the view shared by Trevor LaFleche, director, product management, Enterprise Payments Platform Solutions, at Fiserv, during a recent PYMNTS discussion that centered around the spread of real-time payments, and their global prospects going into 2020.
Real-time payments are currently among the hottest trends and topics in the payments industry — a source of significant investment and regulatory attention, as financial institutions and other strive to meet consumer demand for faster money movement.
One of the many questions around real-time payments is what forms they will take as the pace of deployments heat up. That includes the discussion of push payments (in which the account holder sends the money) and pull payments (in which the recipient is authorized to take money from the account). A big challenge with pull payments is that they don’t give consumers as much control over the movement of their funds as they would like.