Businesses Can Hone Competitive Edge With Instant Payments

Irfan Ahmad, managing director and head of U.S. payments GTS at Bank of America, said instant payments will get a lift from some of the most basic, proactive approaches from businesses and financial institutions.

“As simple as it might seem, education and awareness are still key,” he said in an interview conducted as part of the “What’s Next in Payments: Instant Payments: What Will Turbocharge Instant Payments Growth in 2024” series.

For any new payment rail, and for instant payments in particular, the initial value that is and will continue to be realized rests on financial value, as companies boost revenues or cut costs, he said.

But, he added, “what’s often lost with instant payments — and this is where the education and awareness come in — is that there are key features that go well beyond the speed of the payment.”

Those features allow businesses to differentiate themselves, with round-the-clock availability and transparency across a variety of use cases, he said.

Putting Fraud Concerns in Context

Fraud and risk management may be concerns, as the old saying goes that faster payments lead to faster fraud. However, Ahmad noted that banks are focused on ensuring safety and security across all transactions. In the United States, instant payments still exist only as “credit push” fund flows.

“The originator [is] in full control of when that payment goes out,” Ahmad said.

In the meantime, banks and other providers can pair the payment with other tools and features, which improves security with robust account validation and artificial intelligence-driven analysis done in real time, he said.

“As we start seeing more and more back-office systems for corporates move toward APIs, you’re going to have wires, ACH payments and instant payments all coming across APIs, and that’s going to give us the ability to start changing holistically all the tools we have in place to mitigate risk,” he said.

Interoperability will speed up adoption in the years ahead, and we’re already seeing various instant payment schemes being linked. (ISO 20022 is helping ensure that all stakeholders are speaking the same language, he said.)

In the U.S., “we’ve got plenty of precedents in place across the industry for interoperability,” Ahmad said.

He offered up a few examples. The Clearing House, which runs CHIPS, and the Federal Reserve, which runs Fedwire, both see volumes for large-dollar transactions. The corporates are generally unaware of which network their financial institution is using to handle a particular payment. While initially, the “choice” of which faster payments rail is used by a financial institution may be based on reaching an endpoint, over time as the RTP Network and the FedNow® Service continue to grow, financial institutions will route payments based on each network’s value proposition, whether that be user experience or the ability to use an alias.

As payment schemes become more closely linked, he predicted, nonbank players — including FinTechs and marketplaces — will find new revenue streams, embedding payments into the normal course of business, without interruptions for weekends or holidays. The result is that businesses will enjoy the benefits of better cash flows, and consumers will have access to better financial products and services that would otherwise not be on offer were it not for digital and real-time channels.

“All of a sudden, you’ve enhanced the features and functions they can offer and the value propositions they bring,” said Ahmad, “because now you can make a precision payment exactly when you want to pay it.”