The private-sector operator of the only national real-time payments network wasn’t too enthused when the Federal Reserve announced earlier this month that it would launch a rival service in 2023 or 2024, but the Fed’s move sparked at least a temporary windfall for The Clearing House Payments Co.
“One of the things that the announcement has done is, it’s created a great deal of interest in (TCH’s) network, and our actual number of inquiries that we’ve been getting has tripled,” Steve Ledford, Payments Network product executive at The Clearing House, said Tuesday.
Ledford made that comment at the 2019 Mobile Payments Conference in Chicago, where he was of a panel on the controversial topic of real-time payments. Also on the panel was Kassandra Quimby, a vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago who manages faster-payments strategy for the Federal Reserve System.