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With just five days remaining, organizations developing so-called faster-payments systems are submitting proposals for evaluation by a consulting firm retained by the Federal Reserve Board’s Faster Payments Task Force.
On Monday, The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC, which is building a real-time payments system with Fidelity National Information Services Inc., said it and FIS have submitted the blueprint for a plan the two companies say is expected to begin processing real-time bill payments early next year. It wasn’t clear Monday how many other proposals the task force has received so far. A Fed spokesperson told Digital Transactions News that number won’t likely be released until after the April 30 deadline.
It also remains unclear how, if at all, the evaluations will affect firms’ plans to implement faster-payments regimes independently of the Fed’s process. Besides TCH and FIS, a number of other processors and organizations have announced plans to speed up payments settlement. A prominent example is that of NACHA, the organization that governs the automated clearing house network. NACHA in September will take the first step in an 18-month process that will result in same-day settlement of ACH transactions.
The Fed announced late last month that it had appointed McKinsey & Co. to assess faster-payment proposals from task-force members. The consulting firm will weigh the proposed systems against a list of 36 so-called effectiveness criteria worked out by the task force, which is made up of 331 executives from the industry, and published in February. Working under the aegis of the Fed, the task force began developing the criteria 10 months ago. McKinsey’s evaluations will be available to the task force later this year and will be published early in 2017, the Fed says.
The criteria are grouped into six categories, which include ubiquity, efficiency, safety and security, speed, legal, and governance. Each criterion carries an effectiveness scale that can be applied to any given proposal.
