A Year In, Progress for Fed’s Payments Improvement Plan
A year after the Federal Reserve announced a plan to enhance the speed, safety and efficiency of payments in the U.S., the program has made substantial progress, the Fed reports. In late January 2015, the agency issued “Strategies for Improving the U.S. Payment System,” a report calling on payments industry stakeholders to join the Fed to create and implement new approaches to implement safer, faster and more ubiquitous payments in the U.S. A centerpiece of the initiative was the development of two stakeholder task forces—one focused on payments safety and the other on payments speed. In conjunction with the plan’s one-year anniversary, the 320-member Faster Payments Task Force released a set of criteria laying out its goals for a faster payment system and providing guidance to industry players for developing faster payments solutions. (The Secure Payments Task Force assisted in developing the security-related criteria.) The Fed’s initiative also has resulted in a plan to implement ISO 20022 standards for U.S payment transactions, a technical proof-of-concept for a business-to-business payment directory and “advanced plans” for the widespread implementation of same-day ACH, the agency said in its latest progress report.
Moving forward, the Fed outlined several developments to be on the lookout for in 2016, including the Faster Payments Task Force beginning to assess proposed solutions for faster payments, with the goal of publishing its analysis in early 2017. The Fed and its industry partners also will focus on barriers to entry to the payments system faced by small businesses and community banks, and work to develop tools for overcoming those hurdles to promote more widespread adoption of electronic payments. The also will be a continued emphases on payments security issues, the Fed noted.
Click here for a video clip of Esther George, president & CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, and Jerome Powell, Federal Reserve Board governor, discussing the Fed’s plan for improving the U.S. payments system.
Related stories:
- Fed Issues Paper Announcing Plan to Improve U.S. Payment System
- CFPB Issues 9 Principles for Faster Payments
- NACHA Pushes for Same-Day ACH Payments With Three-Step Plan
