FPC’s 2025 Accomplishments: Building Momentum for Faster Payments
Reed Luhtanen, Executive Director & CEO, FPC
At the FPC, we are extremely thankful for a year of continued progress and advancement of faster payments. In response to a need for solutions that make faster payments more accessible for all – a sentiment revealed in our 2025 Faster Payments Barometer – we intensified our efforts to deliver the tools and resources needed to support industry understanding and adoption. And thanks to the dedication and commitment of 200-plus FPC Members, and the larger industry, we made great strides in 2025 towards this goal.
To start, we increased our focus on industry education. From blog posts on stablecoins to broad-reaching FAQs, state of play evaluations, and beyond, FPC Work Groups labored to arm the industry with the resources that supported their knowledge needs. These works showed us that with the speed and transparency of blockchain technology, stablecoins could be the answer to some of the key challenges faced by existing payment systems. They also helped to define and explain key nomenclature to ensure shared understanding of the faster payments landscape. And they helped demonstrate that today’s faster payments networks are offering a broad range of features and characteristics that provide businesses and consumers with a variety of options to support payments like B2B, P2P, disbursements, payroll, and more. In all, the nearly 20 resources developed by the FPC and its Work Groups this year built and expanded upon a foundation of faster payments knowledge to support the evaluation and implementation of faster payments.
In more formal education, this year, we celebrated our inaugural class of Accredited Faster Payments Professionals (AFPPs): 161 payments leaders passed the exam, marking an important milestone in demonstrating expertise and commitment within the faster payments ecosystem that will help drive further adoption and use. We are energized by the enthusiasm displayed through the interest and participation in this first year of the exam and look forward to what is to come with this program.
We also worked to solve the challenges identified in the Faster Payments Barometer of implementation hurdles and a lack of ubiquity. To that end, we developed resources like Operational Considerations for Instant Payments Send-Side PrimerandOperationalConsiderations for Sending Instant Payments Guideline togive financial institutions and businesses the tools for a deeper understanding as it applies to their operational architectures. Additionally to support interoperability, the Cross-Border Payments Work Group identified ways the ISO 20022 standard can help in achieving global efficiencies. And, we announced a partnership with X9 to explore ways that standards can help unite disparate systems and their faster payments protocols alleviate some of the disconnect that exists today. The collaboration will build on the FPC Work Groups’ efforts, which unite diverse industry voices to address issues like fraud mitigation, cross-border payments, and operational needs. Through the X9 alliance, insights from these groups will guide standards development to better reflect real-world stakeholder needs. To continue the momentum, we will build on these efforts in 2026 through FPC events, like our Member Meetings and Town Hall sessions. Our 2025 Member Meetings produced more than 30 hours of key education and networking, 100-plus member and guest speakers, and 400 attendees. And we presented six Town Halls and Webinars on a range of critical faster payments topics. In 2026, we will continue to provide these forums where we can learn, collaborate, and work to produce the necessary tools and resources to build and advance the future of faster payments.
As we reflect on all that we have achieved, we, at the FPC, want to thank our Members and the larger industry for all you have done to make 2025 such a success. Our work is far from over, but we are grateful for what we have accomplished thus far with your help and look forward to building upon what we’ve started.