The U.S. Faster Payments Council (FPC), a membership organization devoted to advancing safe, easy-to-use faster payments in the United States, published Guideline.01: Operational Considerations for Instant Payments Receive-Side Primer in its Faster Payments Knowledge Center.
The FPC Operational Considerations for Instant & Immediate Payments Work Group (OCWG), sponsored “by Form3, the cloud-native account-to-account platform, developed this first guideline as a resource for financial institutions supporting instant payment rails.”
The FPC Operational Considerations for Instant Payments Guideline.01 serves as a primer on operational considerations “for receiving instant payments, offering high-level insights on priorities to consider when adopting this new method of receipt.” The primer is meant to provide a springboard “for financial institutions to plan the journey to faster payments adoption by providing high-level insights of the various areas for consideration.”
Miriam Sheril, Head of Product – US at Form3 and FPC Operational Considerations Work Group Chair, said:
“While the conversations around faster payments have been going on for a while, with the recent launch of the FedNow® Service to complement the TCH RTP® private sector solution – it’s clear that the tactical HOW do we do this, is becoming more and more of the conversation. That’s why the OCWG was formed – to start pulling together information on how to actually think about operating a faster payment service specifically focused on those two new rails.”
As the first guideline in the series, the primer begins “with an introduction to instant payments operations and sets the stage on how instant payments are transforming the U.S. payments ecosystem and challenging long-held payment processing paradigms.”
Topics covered in the primer “include new message flows/processes in relation to existing payment flows, liquidity management, fraud mitigation, exception processing, staffing needs and training requirements, and more.”
While more detail will be “provided in the next guideline of this series around specific solutions and ways to address these areas, no two financial institutions are the same – therefore the problems shared, while universal, may not be solved in the same manner for each institution.”
Subsequent guideline series will “cover the send side of instant payments as well as non-value messages (Request for Information, Request for Payment, Request for Refund).”
