Reed Luhtanen, Executive Director, FPC
It’s back to school time: students back to learning, educators back to educating. But at the FPC, school is always in session. As educators of faster payments, our work to raise awareness and create resources to support faster payments never stops. Just look at our most recent effort and the Education and Awareness Work Group (EAWG), sponsored by The Clearing House, which has been active all summer creating products and deliverables to be released in the near future.
For example, we recently released an updated State of Play in U.S. Faster Payments report. The original report, published in January 2021, provided an overview of the faster payments landscape – use cases, faster payments networks, and detailed characteristics of those networks – based on 2020 data and information. But, as we all know, the world of faster payments has changed significantly since then, with the pandemic and other factors accelerating the development of faster payments solutions and driving the increased use of these payments and other contactless offerings. As such, the latest report provides an updated look at today’s use cases, as well as a detailed review of the faster payments networks represented in the FPC, which have grown from the seven outlined in the original report to 11. Additionally, the report overviews the growing trend of cross-border faster payments and the benefits, the functional characteristics, and networks supporting or exploring them.
To enable the wide variety of emerging faster payments, the industry depends upon service providers, and with that in mind, the EAWG also decided to issue a service provider questionnaire. This questionnaire will seek information on faster payments services offered by service providers including details such as intended customers, use cases supported, target industry for use cases, and much more. The results of the questionnaire will complement the Solution Providers Catalogue, providing an even more robust listing of not only solutions available, but the services that can support and grow faster payments by driving adoption, enhancing trust, expanding use cases and more.
The EAWG is also putting the final touches on its Use Case Repository and accompanying infographic. Once published, the Repository will include more than 130 use cases that viewers can filter and search by use case type (A2A, B2B/B2G, B2C, C2B/C2G, G2B/G2C, and P2P), industry the use case supports (lending, insurance, gig, legal, retail, and more), and the function the use case addresses (disbursements, loans, payroll, POS, account transfers, bill pay, etc.). The Use Case Repository, and complementary infographic, will be available in the FPC Knowledge Center, and is planned for release in the coming weeks.
And if that wasn’t enough, the EAWG is also working on an updated version of the Faster Payments Glossary of Terms and a new Faster Payments Frequently Asked Questions list. These documents will be key as ensuring a common nomenclature is critical for industry understanding, and eliminating ambiguity with clear responses to the most pressing faster payments questions drives certainty and trust, both key to further adoption and growth.
It’s a lot. But it’s what we do at the FPC. As the rest of the United States gets “back to school,” the FPC is continuing on, because knowledge never rests.