Payments Nerds

For many financial institutions (FIs), adding send capabilities is the next step in the instant payments journey. Moving from being a receive-only bank to one that also offers send requires additional functionality, including more robust fraud scoring, enhanced security features, such as multi-factor authentication or biometrics, and operational and technology considerations.

IncredibleBank, a Wisconsin-based bank with operations in Wisconsin, Michigan, and more recently southern Florida, is adding instant payment sending capabilities to its payments strategy after initially joining the RTP® network back in March 2020 through its technology partner, Jack Henry. In this episode, Phil Suckow, Vice President of Innovation at IncredibleBank, discusses how his team evaluated risk and operational enhancements as the bank moved to add send capabilities. 

Payments Nerds is brought to you by The Clearing House, hosted by Greg MacSweeney, and produced by Earfluence.

While many financial institutions initially join the RTP® network as receive-only participants, adding sending capabilities can be done relatively quickly with a sound business plan, a thoughtful approach, and a great technology partner. ABNB Federal Credit Union, which joined the RTP network a few short months ago (May 2024), is already moving to become a send/receive participant. Cassandra Tucker, director of operations at ABNB, discusses how the Virginia-based credit union planned to add send functionality for all of its members when it started its instant payments journey earlier this year with Alacriti, its technology solutions provider. Tucker walks through how ABNB has prepared risk parameters, safeguards, support, and its entire instant payments plan in this Payments Nerds podcast.

Payments Nerds is brought to you by The Clearing House, hosted by Greg MacSweeney, and produced by Earfluence.

Joe Casali, host of NEACH’s Wrestling Payments podcast, joins the show to discuss what he has learned about current instant payments trends while recording his podcast, and previews his interview with Rusiru Gunasena, SVP of RTP® Product Management at The Clearing House. Rusiru joined the Wrestling Payments Podcast earlier this month to discuss the RTP networks growth, how instant payments meet customers’ expectations for real-time interactions, and why they should be part of a financial institution’s customer-centric strategy. Listen to the full Wrestling Payments episode here on Payments Nerds, and don’t forget to subscribe to Payments Nerds and Wrestling Payments on your favorite podcast app.

To hear this episode and many more like it, subscribe to Payments Nerds on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else you listen to podcasts, or listen below.

----

Payments Nerds is brought to you by The Clearing House, hosted by Greg MacSweeney, and produced by Earfluence.

Making sure employees are paid correctly each pay period is a primary focus of corporate human resources and finance teams, and their payroll provider. Usually payroll runs smoothly and employees are happy to receive their pay.  However, often there are payroll exceptions and emergencies that require employers to find alternative ways to get pay to their employees urgently. Given the nature and schedule for payroll, these payroll exceptions often happen at the end of the day or on a Friday, which makes utilizing traditional payment methods – such as checks and ACH – difficult. 

Luckily, instant payments on the RTP® network are helping payroll providers and their customers speed up and streamline emergency payroll, resulting in happier employees, and reduced stress on HR and finance professionals. In this episode, hear how ADP, the global provider of talent management and payroll solutions, and J.P. Morgan, are leveraging the instant payment capabilities of the RTP network to both provide employees with emergency payroll instantly and reduce complexity with payroll exceptions.

Payments Nerds is brought to you by The Clearing House, hosted by Greg MacSweeney, and produced by Earfluence.

In the transportation industry, freight factoring is a vital way for trucking and shipping companies to get paid on quickly for  freight and shipments that have been successfully delivered. These payments help trucking companies maintain positive working capital instead of waiting 30 to 90 days for an invoice to be paid by the manufacturer or supplier (the standard payment timeline in the trucking industry is 40 days or more). Lengthy payout times can break a freight company’s budget and force some companies to turn elsewhere to find the funds to cover operating costs. With factoring, a trucking or shipping business sells its accounts receivables (invoices) to a factoring company at a discount for payment within 24 hours.

Now, over the RTP® network, freight, shipping and other companies that need to receive timely payment on invoices can benefit from factoring and receive payments instantly, cutting the time from days to seconds with the ability to receive a payment 24/7.

In this podcast, hear how Quickpay Funding, a factoring provider that helps provide a consistent cash flow to its clients, and Bank of America worked together to bring instant payments to Quickpay Funding’s trucking, shipping, freight, and service industry clients. Juan Estrada, president & CEO of Quickpay Funding, and Miyoshi Lee, head of U.S. Real-Time Payments at Bank of America, discuss how instant payments creates a competitive advantage for Quickpay, and how Bank of America helps its clients take advantage of the benefits of real-time payments.

Payments Nerds is brought to you by The Clearing House, hosted by Greg MacSweeney, and produced by Earfluence.

Transit agencies and tolling authorities process millions of payments each day. Consumers and businesses pay tolls or mass transit fares to go to work, deliver goods or to simply go on vacation. It is important to make sure that electronic tolling tag accounts or mass transit accounts are funded so customers don’t miss payments or face fines for not paying tolls. Checks take time to process and ACH transactions may only post the next day, leaving a customer with an underfunded account. To reduce underfunded accounts and to help reduce bank account overdrafts, one provider of payment services to the transportation industry is turning to real-time payments on the RTP network. Conduent Transportation is offering real-time payment capabilities to tolling authorities and transportation agencies so that customers can make sure their accounts have the necessary funds. Tolling authorities can also send request-for-payments (RfP) to business users, such as trucking companies, to make sure their tolling account has enough funds to cover tolls for its trucking fleet.

In this episode of Payments Nerds, hear from Kathy Mertes, Vice President of Digital Payments at Conduent, a business process provider, and Eralda Hasani, Director of Immediate Payments Product Management at BNY Mellon Treasury Services, about how instant payments on the RTP network is providing a value-added service that Conduent is offering its customers through its relationship with BNY Mellon.

Payments Nerds is brought to you by The Clearing House, hosted by Greg MacSweeney, and produced by Earfluence.

If you have ever participated in a real-estate transaction, either as a buyer or seller, you quickly realize that real estate doesn’t move as quickly as other transactions in today’s economy. This applies to payments as well, which typically still happen by check (most common), wire transfer or ACH payment. All three of these payment types can cause confusion, delays or errors in a real estate deal. To solve some of these payment problems, EMTranfer and KeyBank are brining real-time payments over the RTP® network to the real-estate market so customers, agents, attorneys and almost anyone who gets paid during a mortgage closing can have confirmed, immediate funds without having to worry about last minute checks or ACH payments that won’t settle until the next day.

About Our Guests
Ricky Booth is a Senior Manager of Real Time Payments at KeyBank, and Bob Beams is the CEO of EMTransfer.

Payments Nerds is brought to you by The Clearing House, hosted by Greg MacSweeney, and produced by Earfluence.

Consumers often need access to funds to cover an unexpected expense, such as a flat tire or a repair to a faulty hot water heater. While there are a variety of loans available on the market, often the earliest a customer could get money into their bank account was the next day. Grain, which analyzes a consumer’s cash flow to determine eligibility, now sends loan payments instantly to customers via the RTP® network so they can have cash in hand right away – a benefit to the customer and a competitive advantage for Grain, which works with Dwolla and Cross River Bank to connect to the RTP network. Hear about Grain’s real-time payments journey and how it connected to the RTP network in order to provide customers with a better experience and access to funds instantly.

About Our Guests
Yasser Abou-Nasr is the Senior Vice President of Product at Dwolla, and Patrick De Suza is the Chief Technology Officer at Grain.

Payments Nerds is brought to you by The Clearing House, hosted by Greg MacSweeney, and produced by Earfluence.

The fastest-growing use case on the RTP network is real-time pay and earned wage access (EWA). To give you an idea of how fast it is growing, from Q1 to Q2 this year, Instant Payroll grew 104%! RTP, in particular, makes it possible for wages to be instantly sent to a worker’s bank account … so they can use it just like cash, on the same day to pay bills, buy groceries, or pay emergency expenses.

So what is driving this trend? And is “instant” the future for all payroll? To answer these, and other questions about EWA and instant pay, this episode pf Payments Nerds features Genie Walden, Chief Innovation & Marketing Officer at DailyPay, a leading provider of on-demand pay solutions, and Doug McKinley, Head of Treasury Management Innovation within PNC Bank's Corporate & Institutional Banking group.

RTP, the nation’s newest payments rail, launched in November 2017 and is now celebrating its 5-year anniversary.

RTP transaction volume continues to grow at an average of 10% each quarter, and dollar value also continues to grow at the same pace. There are over 280 banks and credit unions on the network, with more joining each week. And what is really interesting about the growth, is that it is coming from financial institutions of all sizes: more than 80% of RTP participants are from smaller FIs….under $10 billion in assets.

Hear from Sarah Billings, who is senior vice president and group manager for PNC’s Payment Product, Operations and Strategy group, and Rusiru Gunasena, who is Senior Vice President, RTP Product Management and Strategy here at TCH, as they discuss the surprises RTP delivered during the past 5 years, what to expect on the RTP network as we look forward, and how real-time payments are now poised for rapid growth here in the United States.