Now that the Federal Reserve has released its plan for faster payments in the United States, observers are applauding the effort while expressing some impatience with what they see as the central bank’s overly deliberate approach. “The Fed is indeed headed in the right direction, but it is a slow …

In a blueprint released Monday for a faster and more secure U.S. payments system, the Federal Reserve called for industry task forces to form early this year and for a “framework” to emerge by 2016 to set rules for near real-time payments. The banking regulator also set out five broad, …

Dwolla Inc. has entered the race to simplify—and ultimately speed up—payments between individuals and between organizations and individuals. Starting Thursday, the 6-year-old Des Moines, Iowa-based payments provider is allowing people who don’t have Dwolla accounts to receive payments from Dwolla users and flow them directly into their bank account. The …

Financial institutions, processors, and regulators have been moving toward systems that speed up electronic payments, but ironically their success in replacing paper checks with electronic processing may undermine their efforts. That’s because image exchange, the process by which paper checks are replaced by electronic images for clearing, has driven down …

With non-stop data breaches and the coming of EMV chip cards, virtual currency, and mobile wallets, payments seemed to be all over the news in 2014. Here’s our annual review of the top issues in electronic payments. They all defy a soundbite solution. Heading toward its close, 2014 seemed to …

Our Guide spotlights how mobile payments and digital currency drive payments innovation. by John Stewart, Jim Daly, and Kevin Woodward Alternative payment schemes are becoming almost too numerous to count. A few months back, one payments-industry veteran listed all the mobile wallets he knew of and came up with about …

A fresh proposal to introduce a same-day settlement capability for the automated clearing house network is encountering cautious optimism mixed with a healthy dose of skepticism among expert observers. But NACHA officials clearly see the new proposal not only as a blueprint for speedier payments but also as a first …

How to improve the U.S. payment system? Figure out a way to make electronic payments faster and more secure, as well as a system that would connect various closed-loop payment networks with hundreds of millions accounts. And reduce regulation, too. Those were some of the ideas bandied about Thursday at …

When it comes to payments, the United States might be considered the land of the gap, according to a Federal Reserve assessment issued earlier this month. The assessment is the first of a three-part research study aimed at spurring the modernization of U.S. electronic payments, which many public-sector researchers and …

Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX) on Thursday announced that Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (FIS) will do the transaction processing for the nascent mobile-payments network owned by some of the nation’s largest retailers. MCX also said department-store company Kohl’s Corp. and the parent company of the Circle K convenience-store chain are …