The European Payments Initiative is an ambitious project by European banks and politicians to take control of the payments landscape in Europe. It is an effort to modernize and harmonize European payments and bring them into the digital age.  And crucially, to build consumer brand awareness as successfully achieved by India’s UPI and Malaysia’s DuitNow, and currently in progress with Brazil’s Pix.

Alternative payment methods have experienced unanticipated growth in the U.S. as an effect of the pandemic, finally relinquishing cash and check’s hold on consumer purchasing. With the development of FedNow, there is the potential for these traditionally paper-based payments to move to new real-time rails.

The accelerated timeline for the launch of new consumer payments methods means that all stakeholders in the ecosystem – acquirers, issuing banks or merchants – have their work cut out for them. It is expected that EPI and FedNow will plan for ambitious Request to Pay services that will run on real-time rails, something that is already a reality in other regions in the world, most notably India.

Acquirers will play a central role in the new real-time ecosystem and could potentially create a shift of power in payments. Over recent years banks have been busy divesting their acquiring operations, viewing them as low-margin utility businesses. But for these payment systems to be a success, acquirers must now bring new services to market to capture, process and reconcile the new digital payments for merchants.

Another crucial task will be solving the reconciliation challenge. If reconciliation of new real-time, account-to-account payments cannot be made seamless for merchants then no amount of consumer brand awareness will overcome this operational hurdle.

So, we might ask “Do you take real-time?” If merchants cannot answer ‘yes’ either in person or online, it will all be for nought.

Join this session to learn what issuers, acquirers and merchants need to do to get ready for the new real-time and digital payments services in an omnichannel environment, and to get an insight into the lessons of other countries and regions that have tried to harmonize and simplify their payment infrastructure.