01/16/2018

Payment Panel Takes on the Changing Payments Environment

Karen Webster, CEO of PYMTS.com, was the moderator for a discussion centered around the financial services industry’s position when it comes to payments processing at the AFT 2017 Fall Summit, which took place at the Montage Deer Valley resort in Park City, Utah.

Joining her for a discussion about card networks, faster payments, the Fed’s roles, business models and other current hot payment topics was a panel including Bob Legters, Chief Product Officer at FIS; Greg Adelson, General Manager, Payment Solutions at Jack Henry & Associates; Ian Macallister, Vice President, Strategic Partnerships at Early Warning Services (which is launching Zelle, a new person-to-person payments network); Whitney Stewart, Senior Vice President, ePayments Product Management at Fiserv; and John Beisner, Senior Vice President, Client Services at Acculynk.

The dialogue kicked off by defining what does faster payments mean?

• Stewart: “We look at faster payments as instant payments. We get paid by enabling our customers, which are largely financial institutions and billers, to be faster. We look at ways to connect them using existing technologies. Faster payments equal happy customers.”
• Adelson: “Its 24x7, it is immediate posting funds availability, it is irrevocable. We’re building out our own payments hub, tying our cores together, we have a lot of complementary products that we’re working on incorporating into the initiative. It’s all about making the customers happy.”
• Legters: “For us it’s the settlement and movement of funds behind the scenes. It’s a hard ROI for a lot of use cases and probably the biggest challenge for us over the last 24 months. For us it is making sure we can move that money.”
• Beisner: “it’s all about tying technologies together to deliver that to consumers and businesses. It’s about as close to real time as you can get both in terms of the movement of funds as well as the interaction of the consumer and that business have with the product.”
• Macallister: “It’s not just about doing real-time payments and messaging as a network but doing it in a way that is a white label solution. Real-time payments is not just that one use case. It’s about leveraging partnerships in a way that is safe and secure for the industry.”

Other topics centered around ubiquity (Legters: “Ubiquity will come when it makes financial sense,”); what’s the business model? (Stewart: “You need to have multiple options and financial institutions need to differentiate”); card networks (Macallister: “It’s all about the consumer experience.”); governance and the role of the Fed (Adelson: “There could be some concern from financial institutions if the Fed is involved and that could affect ubiquity”) and use cases (Beisner: “As cost structures change in a regulation environment that is difficult.”).