Over the past few years, there’s been a concerted effort to bring faster payments to fruition. Why is this now becoming real as opposed to when the industry’s tried in the past? The answer is simple: survival. In this episode Carl Slabicki, Director, Product Line Manager at BNY Mellon, shares more.

“We look at moving to Real-Time Payments® as a strategic imperative.” So says today’s guest: Mary Alice Liotta, SVP, Director, Operations at ESL Federal Credit Union—and for good reason. ESL has seen a number of exciting efficiencies in their payments arrive recently, both on the customer and the internal side. In this episode, Mary Alice talks about how ESL’s whole team embraced RTP® as well as some of the most exciting changes happening in their organization as a result.

Instant gratification in payments is not asking too much. It’s simply what people expect. So why does the US lag behind when it comes to real-time payment solutions?   On this episode, we interview Steve Ledford, SVP of Products & Strategy at The Clearing House. His team is responsible for the development of the RTP® network — a real-time payments solution.   On this episode, Steve gives us his thoughts on the development process and the new network, including:   Why meeting customer demands is central to innovation How technology has enabled real-time settlement Whether companies should wait for the feds to use RTP

What’s the surprising trigger that’s prompting financial institutions to initialize faster payments on the RTP network? Robert Mancini, Services Executive & Payments Evangelist at Finastra, has the surprising answer. Demographics. Banks know they need to transform themselves. For a long time they have depended on great customer service to differentiate from their competitors. But the Baby Boomer employees who embodied that customer service model are retiring in droves. A lot of them have been with their banks for 30 or 40 years and are hard to replace. And young adults coming out of college are not interested in those jobs. So these banks have to find a new way to set themselves apart to meet the needs and expectations of their customers and wow them.

If you’re a payments nerd, you know that unfortunately, today most payment data is more big data than smart data. What makes smart data? For many financial institutions, real time payments (RTP) are the key to opening the door to vast amounts of smart data that they can use to create a whole new suite of services. Some see offering RTP as a game changer for both financial institutions and their customers. By allowing RTP, financial institutions open up their architecture, according to Keith Riddle, President & CEO of Sherpa Technologies, a CUSO that helps credit unions transform their digital infrastructure and offerings. I recently interviewed Riddle for the Payments Nerds podcast.

Did you hear about the new payments system? Can Bitcoin compete in the retail payments space? Will the latest policy change help or hurt folks using payment systems? You’ll get answers to these questions and more in our new Payments Nerds podcast. We at The Clearing House are experts in payments. The Clearing House has evolved from our early days of just clearing and settle check payments. We’re the only private ACH operator in the country. We have the largest check image network. Our product CHIPS competes with Fedwire. On a daily basis we clear and settle around $2 trillion in payment. The payments space has never been this dynamic. There are new products, new technologies, and new policies that will disrupt the old order in ways that you need understand. There are people with some really interesting perspectives on all of this and you will hear from them. We want this show to be a repository of very stimulating conversations for payments nerds (hint, hint). If you want to be a guest or know someone who should be a guest on the podcast, please reach out to me. [email protected] or call (917) 509-8677.