Whether the legacy payments players like it or not, the case is strong for much greater intervention by the Fed in improving payments. With July’s release of Part Two of the Faster Payments Task Force Final Report, which speculated that near real-time payments could/should be on the payments scene by …

Financial institutions are realizing that a smooth experience is as important to consumers when identifying themselves as the authentication strategy itself, regardless of the channel consumers use to access their accounts. This finding is part of a new study from NICE Actimize, a Hoboken, N.J.-based provider of risk-management and compliance …

There are still many unknowns, but siding and the roof are on order for the frame of the Federal Reserve’s faster-payments project. That’s the message conveyed Tuesday by Fed officials and payments-industry executives who participated in a years-long effort to speed up U.S. electronic payments as well as make them …

A number of daunting challenges face the U.S. payments industry as it sets out to make speedier transactions available everywhere in the country within three years, according to a report released this week by Aite Group, a Boston-based consulting firm. Among these challenges are the absence of an industrywide mandate …

This third and final installment of the Faster Payments series examines some ways the payments industry can get to “yes” on viable solutions—and thereby actually make some progress in making payments more secure and efficient as well as faster.  The Fed will have an indispensable role in fostering paths to …

Part I of this three-part series outlined the development of the realization by the Fed’s payments task forces that payments are complicated, difficult, and expensive to change in order to make them safer and more efficient.  This installment deals with the growing concern about security threats that are shaping the …

This article is the first installment of a three-part series this week on what the Federal Reserve’s Faster Payment Initiative means to the payment economy in the U.S., and how the payments ecosystem might get to “yes” on fixing what’s broken and deploying what’s possible. This part deals with the …

As the sweeping plan to update the U.S. automated clearing house network and other parts of the country’s payments system—an initiative known as faster payments—draws nearer, the first hints of what it could mean for merchants are being discussed. The faster-payments project, under the aegis of the Federal Reserve, will …

If creating faster-payment systems is like putting pieces of a puzzle together, another piece was added Wednesday when payment technology provider ACI Worldwide Inc. announced that processor Jack Henry & Associates Inc. will use ACI’s UP Immediate Payments service to connect its community-bank and credit-union clients to the new real-time …