Reed Luhtanen, Executive Director, FPC
The Pumpkin Spiced Latte returned at Starbucks. Stores are showcasing their Halloween displays. And college and NFL football are kicking off. What does this all mean? Fall is basically here, and so too is our 2023 Fall Member Meeting.
This year marks the FPC’s five-year anniversary. It also marks five tremendous years of faster payments progress. And the meeting agenda reflects this growth, while recognizing some of the work still to be done.
For instance, we’ll explore the faster payments networks of today, like FedNow®. With the Service just a little over a month old, the industry is eager to learn how things are progressing and what’s next. So, in “Getting Up to Speed on FedNow® Post-Launch,” we’ll hear from Connie Theien of the Federal Reserve on the status of the Service and upcoming plans. We’ll also get an opportunity to hear from a panel of early FedNow adopters on their implementation experiences and lessons learned for the rest of the industry.
Through the meeting, we’ll also get a chance to demonstrate how faster payments are being used. We’re all well aware of the common use cases like P2P payments, bill pay, disbursements, ecommerce, and more. In “Careful What You Ask For, You Just Might Get It: Faster Payments Use Cases!,” representatives from banks, credit unions, and merchants will discuss these more common use cases and showcase additional ways faster payments are and can be used.
But we recognize our conversations can’t just focus on the here and now (no matter the tremendous progress we’ve spearheaded). That’s why we’ll also explore ways to increase adoption and volume, by specifically looking at commerce payments, as few use cases have the potential for growing volume as commerce payments do. According to Bain & Company, commerce payments earned $356 billion in global revenue in 2021. Estimates suggest that by 2026, commerce value will hit $480 billion. Additionally, use of real-time payments in commerce offers benefits for the retailer and consumer: instant confirmation, faster settlement, transparency, greater reliability, lower costs, greater liquidity, and more. So, In “What Commerce Experience Do We Want in Faster Payments?,” we’ll take a look at this opportunity, reviewing examples from faster payments schemes around the globe, and provide insights for the U.S. market through the lens of a merchant enabler and a payment network.
Additionally, we’ll articulate the ways to keep faster payments safe to ensure end-user peace of mind when leveraging faster payments. A newly released Federal Reserve resource, The Danger of Synthetic Money Mules, highlighted the latest tactic leveraged by fraudsters. They are moving beyond the use of traditional money mules to synthetic mules, or synthetic identities, to “mule” money, giving fraudsters even more control and anonymity. The session “Managing Account Opening Risks and Screening Inbound Transactions” will discuss in detail how fraudsters are using synthetic identities to perpetuate faster payments fraud and practices to help financial institutions and corporates respond.
From just these few sessions you can see the Fall Member Meeting is going to be a comprehensive educational event (as well as a celebratory one) that’s sure to provide the industry with the “need-to-know” information about the faster payments landscape of today, and into the future. But these sessions are just a sampling of what the fall meeting has to offer. Take a look at the full agenda here.
While FPC Meetings are Members-only events, it’s not too late to become a member and join us at the Fall Meeting. If you’re interested in attending, please reach out to our Member Services Team. We’d love to have you join us for this event that promises to be something exceptional.