Pacing Payments

US-based financial services company PNC Treasury Management has announced it is offering intelligent payment routing capabilities.

With this service, clients can specify criteria that will help determine the appropriate payment type or format payments to different specifications based upon clearing channel, thus increasing efficiency and allowing them to directly focus on growing their business.

US-based B2B payments company Bottomline Technologies has launched Real-Time Payments module, utilizing the RTP network from The Clearing House.

Designed to speed up the business-to-business payments process, the new product capability enables a bank's corporate customers to send and receive real-time payments, to request a payment, and to leverage complete and integrated information.

Bottomline’s Real-Time Payments module focuses on the ability to send and receive real-time credit transfers on the RTP network, dramatically accelerating the completion of a payment and access to funds while reducing numerous manual or paper-based processes. It provides immediate and automated payment status updates, integrated remittance and payment information, and instant request-for-payment functionality, as well as enhanced communication between parties through its conversational capabilities.

Following the Federal Reserve’s announcement that it will create a real-time payment network named FedNow, it became clear that there were misconceptions about how faster payments impact the speed with which people receive their paychecks.

Faster payments does not mean payday will come earlier or that paper checks will clear in an instant. This belief was refuted in not one, but two PaymentsJournal articles by Sarah Grotta, director of Debit and Alternative Products Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group.

But it is important to make the distinction that not all paydays are created equal. With direct deposit, your money is available faster than with a paper paycheck. And there is a significant distinction between a “paycheck” which arrives electronically via direct deposit for 93% of American workers and a “paper” paycheck, which may take days to clear.

There has been a lot of news about faster and real-time payment products and platforms, but less about how to secure them.

Some in Congress are asking for the Federal Reserve to deliver a real-time payments solution as quickly as possible, but they haven’t recognized that time may be needed to ensure all the right security measures are in place.

The Federal Reserve has created a fraud definitions group earlier this year, and an article in PaymentsSource provides an understanding of the group’s goals and progress to date:

Established by the Federal Reserve last March, the fraud definitions work group is using the mantra of “better data, faster” as it seeks a high-level structure to classify the scope of payments fraud scenarios, said group member Dondi Black, vice president and senior product strategist at FIS.