Conflicting priorities are nothing new to banks, but in the current climate these are exacerbated by the erosion of historic revenues and competing market pressures of compliance, competitive differentiation, and customer demands. Reducing TCO and cost to income ratios is the priority, but it cannot be at the expense of growth.

The need to modernize legacy systems has never been more keenly felt, but the risk of big bang migrations has never been higher. What banks need is an incremental approach that provides a pathway to progressive modernization. But where to start?

Some banks are now being forced to address large scale payments modernization projects against a timeline driven by technology restrictions, rather than their own strategy, or risk non-compliance​ with new standards such as PCI 4.0. Financial institutions need is a partner who can help them plan their payments modernization roadmap, with clear milestones that deliver value throughout the duration of the project.

Spurred by a year of unprecedented disruption, 2020 saw real-time payments grow larger—in terms of both volumes and values—and faster than anyone could have anticipated. In fact, the growth was so rapid that it outstripped our prior year Prime Time report predictions.

2020 consistently underlined the need for digital payments infrastructures to be robust – able to cope with unanticipated transaction volumes – and real-time. Whether in markets with highly established real-time infrastructures such as the UK, or in emerging real-time markets like the U.S., the demand for these services increased exponentially over the past year. And it’s not demand we expect to see reversed. In fact, that demand is expected to grow beyond Account-to-Account payments and expand into a wealth of use cases.

Flexibility to adapt to emerging consumer and business demands is the hallmark of success for new real-time infrastructures. Those that experienced the largest growth during 2020 include a multitude of consumer, merchant and corporate use cases that facilitated contactless commerce during social distancing, and kept global economies transacting in times of great uncertainty.

New real-time infrastructures such as FedNow, Canada’s RTR, EPI, and the upgraded UK Faster Payments scheme will all need to deliver the reliability required of national infrastructure, as well as innovate at the speed of customer demand to keep pace with new digital payment requirements from consumer and corporate customers.

This panel explores planning for and developing the balance between robust and flexible payments infrastructures that can support the predicted volume, velocity and variety of transactions that grow from the evolution of real-time payments.

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.

Meeting ISO 20022 mandates for high value, cross border and real-time payments is a challenge, especially against deadlines. For both North American and European institutions there are a variety of domestic, regional and international deadlines across existing systems. As well as the imminent launch of new systems, and many more under construction and discussion.

But even as those compliance deadlines creep closer, the banks must widen their project scope. Compliance should be a catalyst for innovation, not an inhibitor. Innovation is the real driver behind the global shift to ISO 20022, and the new standards should support a slew of new services that drive value for customers. Achieving this requires a holistic approach to payments modernization, that recognizes the convergence of historically disparate payment types and seeks to leverage complimentary innovations and services across various lines of business.

This panel will explore real world use cases that are leveraging the new standard to bring innovation to market, as well as building a business case for ISO 20022 beyond compliance.