This episode features an interview with Reed Luhtanen, Executive Director of the U.S. Faster Payments Council.  The FPC was birthed by the Federal Reserve as an independent, inclusive and equitable governance framework to speed up the nation’s payment system to facilitate the safe, secure transfer of funds in near real time.   

Reed is leading the first cross-industry payments trade.  He is responsible for managing daily operations, working with the board and membership to execute on the FPC's strategic plan, and communicating with their stakeholders.  Prior to the U.S. Faster Payments Council, he served as Walmart’s Senior Director of Global Treasury.

On this episode, Reed talks about facilitating seamless transactions across a network of systems, exceeding user expectations of instant transactions, and protecting against fraud or inadvertent payments.

Quotes

*“We all want payments to be like they are when we do an Uber.  And I think to the extent you can create this flow where the payment is part of an experience.  It's one click on a button and then you get an acknowledgement back immediately that says you're paid and you're good to go, which is what you want. You want to know that the bill has been paid.”

*“We are already starting to see the tipping point for certain use cases.  The big one that comes to mind is disbursements. So payroll, gig economy, government payments, things like that.  That's probably the lowest hanging fruit and folks are moving aggressively towards using these networks to facilitate those types of payments.  And then I think further down the road, it’s going to be things that are more mass market.“ 

*”I think if we've learned anything over the last couple of years, it's that the changes that we've experienced were not really a change in the direction that things were going.  It was an acceleration of trends that were already in place.  So you saw an acceleration of people moving all kinds of different activities to being remote and being digital that used to be in person and be physical.  And payments have not been an exception to that. In fact, I'd say it's been one of the leading things affected by it.”

Time Stamps

4:43 Navigating new payment systems 

6:41 Cash Crossroads: Navigating challenges in the payment ecosystem

13:26 Automating payments

14:38 Introducing new payment networks

15:46 Utilizing RFP

17:20 The appeal of faster payments

18:30 The advent of FedNow

19:30 The Playbook

23:37 Understanding different kinds of fraud

25:49 Preventing inadvertent payments

29:57 Report from the Future

33:58 Building the payment into the experience

35:01 Adopting faster payments, phasing out checks

45:12 The future of faster payments

Sponsor

The Invisible Vault is powered by the team at Kyriba, the global leader in cloud treasury and finance solutions, empowering CFOs and their teams to transform how they activate liquidity as a dynamic, real-time vehicle for growth and value creation. To learn more visit www.kyriba.com

Links

Connect with Reed on LinkedIn

Check out FasteryPaymentsCouncil.org

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