Reed Luhtanen, Executive Director, FPC
We’re just a month into 2024, but we are already hitting the ground running, having released three major industry resources in the last few weeks.
On January 10th, we issued The Practicalities of Cross-Border Payments in a Faster Payments World. Developed by the Cross-Border Payments Work Group, this new resource explores the challenges of cross-border payments, including regulatory compliance, security, high costs, and more, as well as the advancements like new currencies and payment formats, that are altering the current cross-border payments ecosystem. Because the pace of change isn’t slowing down anytime soon, the report also emphasizes the need for constant review and adaptation to emerging technologies, industry initiatives, mandates, and regulations and an assessment of how these changes impact the entire payments ecosystem. In this way, payments workflows can remain smooth and efficient. Given the fluid environment and accelerated pace of change, this resource is a key tool in ensuring financial institutions and fintechs understand the realities to consider when dealing with cross-border payments in a faster payments environment.
And the industry agrees this resource is critical, given the extensive coverage this report has already garnered. From PYMNTS and Finextra to the PaymentsJournal, and others, the reporting on this FPC resource and the topic of cross-border payments highlight the fact that cross-border faster payments are an important initiative and the tools to support development, advancement, and eventual adoption are just as vital.
Then on January 24th, we released the Fraud Work Group’s first Faster Payments Fraud Trends and Mitigation Opportunities Bulletin. The Bulletin reviews current fraud trends and mitigation techniques and outlines ways to improve mitigation efforts through more standardized processes and technologies, and enhanced information sharing. The Bulletin specifically identifies possible solutions like standardized coding for fraud reporting, which would help organizations promptly and accurately trace the origin of fraud and route to appropriate departments for support, as well as develop training materials and educational resources to support mitigation. Other recommended approaches involve more uniform fraud reporting and the timeframe in which to do so. Timely fraud reports can quickly identify bad accounts, and when combined with payment patterns, these reports can build identifiers for future suspected bad accounts. It is hoped that this Bulletin, and other efforts, begin to lay the groundwork for successful industry-wide efforts to prevent, detect, and mitigate faster payments fraud.
And if that wasn’t enough, this week we released Digital Assets in the Financial Industry, a blog created by the similarly named FPC Work Group. The first in a series, this initial blog outlines opportunities in which distributed ledger technology (DLT) can support faster, more automated digital asset transactions. Subsequent blogs, which will be released over the coming months will address more of the most topical issues relating to the use of digital assets in support of faster payments in the United States.
I think it’s clear, we’re definitely running, not walking, through the start of 2024. And the pace will continue, with even more resource releases, and not to mention, our upcoming Spring Member Meeting being held March 27-28 in sunny Florida. There, we’ll be exploring the aforementioned topics and resources in more detail, as well as other pressing trends and issues impacting faster payments.
So, to ensure we keep pace, we’re planning to stay one step ahead of industry development through the year ahead. If you’re interested in joining us on this journey, please consider becoming a Member of the FPC. Learn more at https://fasterpaymentscouncil.org/Why-Join-the-FPC.