PaymentsJournal

The evolution of digital card management has given financial institutions new opportunities to cultivate enduring customer relationships. By making consumers’ lives more convenient and complimenting physical cards, so consumers have the options that work for their lives at a particular time, issuers can foster ease of use and brand loyalty, leading to decades-long relationships.   In a r...

As fraud related to artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly sophisticated and accessible, many legacy lines of defense are no longer able to effectively protect financial institutions and their customers. Financial institutions need to take a more proactive approach to fraud. By collecting and analyzing real-time data and using AI to identify patterns, FIs can quickly detect suspicious a...

The rise in e-commerce fraud, combined with consumers’ increasing willingness to file chargebacks, has left issuers and acquirers scrambling to shore up their dispute management processes. With a complicated process that varies depending on the payment network involved, chargebacks have become a huge operational challenge for many merchants. In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Cheryl Fitzgarrald...

Successful companies must constantly change to preserve their success, but digital transformation may be the most radical overhaul most of us will ever see. For organizations to make this transformation a success, getting employees on board and fully engaged is a requirement.  As the head of Corporate Strategic Planning and Management for Wells Fargo, Amy Downey understands the optimal ways o...

Cognizant of the rise of credit-push fraud, Nacha has approved a new set of rules aimed at addressing it. Credit-push fraud uses social engineering and email phishing attacks to deceive someone into sending funds to a criminal-controlled account, whether through a compromised business email, vendor impersonation or payroll fraud. In a recent PaymentsJournal Podcast , Michael Herd , Executive Vice...

As businesses strive for innovation, efficiency, and scalability, the path to digitization is fraught with challenges. It’s a journey that requires addressing outdated processes, adopting new technologies, and most important, gaining buy-in from leadership and colleagues. In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Reetika Grewal , Executive Vice President and Head of Digital Transformation at Wells Farg...

With the Clearing House’s RTP network and the Federal Reserve’s FedNow, the demand for instant payments continues to grow from consumers and small businesses. How can businesses best accelerate this process? Debbie Smart , Senior Product Marketer at Q2, and Keith Gray , Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at the Clearing House, sat down with Elisa Tavilla , Director of Debit Payments at Javel...

As anti-money-laundering challenges escalate and new liability shifts loom on the horizon for 2024, fintechs must be prepared. Proactive measures are crucial for establishing a firm foothold in the fintech landscape. Reactive approaches will only leave businesses vulnerable to attacks and financial losses. In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Matt Herren , Director of Product Management at CSI, an...

The term “fraud” has become a catch-all for some financial institutions, which sometimes downplay these occurrences as mere nuisances rather than genuine threats. However, the stark reality is that fraud has given rise to a multitude of attack methods, each carrying its own nuances and varying degrees of impact on customers and financial institutions.   In an age of escalating cyberattacks, t...

As real-time payments expand globally, financial institutions confront the challenge of modernizing their legacy systems to meet the digital expectations of their customers. The positive aspect is that there’s no need to overhaul core systems. Instead, modern software can relieve core banking systems from real-time demands. During a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Carlos Netto , Co-Founder and CEO...

Open banking continues to spread worldwide and is heading for the United States, in what some have been calling its “smartphone moment.” The infrastructure is falling into place to support open banking, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has begun safeguarding the consumer protections necessary for this to happen. In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Amit Shastri , Senior Director of Pro...

Businesses often recognize that their success hinges on their ability to scale and expand. However, many businesses don’t anticipate the tightening of their profit margins on this journey to expansion. At first glance, it may seem counterintuitive. After all, one would expect that increased growth translates to higher revenue and greater profitability. Yet the reality is that business growth comes...

In 2023, the ACH Network added more than a billion and a half new payments, a year-over-year growth rate of 4.8%. With the economy doing reasonably well, employment levels being high, and payments continuing to migrate away from paper checks and cash, ACH is not just growing robustly but also poised to continue that growth well into the future.  We asked Mike Herd , Executive Vice President o...

No one, from merchants to processors to customers, likes handling disputed payments. Visa Compelling Evidence 3.0 (CE 3.0) intends to reduce these pain points . It provides a standardized framework for all parties involved in the chargeback process, enabling merchants to substantiate claims by sharing real-time information and preventing disputes. The latest update to CE 3.0 brought a new round of...

Faster and larger transaction flows have transformed the financial space into a lucrative superhighway, where bad actors can sweep in undetected and make off with substantial and ill-gotten gains. Among the most exploited gateways for fraudsters are account-to-account (A2A) and peer-to-peer (P2P) payment systems. The increasing popularity of these methods for repaying friends, making purchases, or...

With consumers’ growing demand for instant payments, convenience, and immediacy, instant issuance just makes sense. Providing a personalized, on-demand, active debit and credit card that promotes top-of-wallet use as well as boosts security—instead of making consumers wait for their card to arrive in the mail—can be a game-changer. By offering this service, financial institutions are doing more to...

Financial institutions are increasingly navigating a sea of scams and fraud. With the evolution of emerging technologies, new avenues for attack have opened, leaving banks, credit unions, and their accountholders more vulnerable. As peer-to-peer (P2P) payments become an expectation, the risks for banks and credit unions edge higher. The real-time nature of P2P payments and the “relationship” betwe...

Payment processing is much more seamless now than it was even a few years ago. The pandemic accelerated the pace of digitizing payments, and peer-to-peer payment networks continue to grow in popularity. But this has also meant that consumers and banks have faced a growing number of innovative payments scams.   In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Sudhir Jha , Executive Vice Pre...

Validating account information is key to ensuring ACH payments continue to be safe and reliable. In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Rob Unger, Associate Managing Director of ACH Network Development at Nacha, spoke with Elisa Tavilla, Director of Debit Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, about payment innovations to help safeguard banks and consumers. They discussed how Phixius by N...

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) proposed a rule in October that requires non-depository and depository entities to release certain types of data related to customer accounts and transactions to consumers and third parties. As a result, larger financial institutions will need to adhere to the compliance regulations earlier than their smaller counterparts. Initially, community banks...

Events in the payments space are moving rapidly. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI), point-of-sale technology, and real-time payments have left many merchants wondering how to keep up with customer expectations. Jeff Kump , CSG Forte President, and Daniel Keyes , Senior Analyst of Merchant Services at Javelin Strategy & Research, joined a recent PaymentsJournal podcast to discuss the tre...

As any seasoned treasury or finance practitioner knows from experience, organizations dealing with numerous banking partners must account for a broad and constantly shifting range of protocols when it comes to processing payments. For instance, if a business has relationships with six or seven banks spread across the globe, it could easily be looking at 25-plus variants of payment formats.&#1...

Disbursing funds in an efficient and accessible way is critical to a good customer experience. But new economic realities and mobile adoption have challenged organizations to evolve how they pay to meet consumer demands. In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, two experts from Blackhawk Network, Sarah Kositzke, Director of Research, and Scott Lapp, Director of Product Marketing and Incentives, along...

Small-business owners want to focus on serving their customers and growing their business, not deal with time-consuming manual processes that come with managing payments and invoices. And they’re not getting the help they need. A recent survey showed that 64% of small businesses were unsatisfied with their current payment offerings, and nearly 20% said they will leave or consider leaving their cur...

In the past decade, the payments industry has experienced more change than in the previous 40 years. The number of payment options for consumers is multiplying, and the adoption of real-time payments is soaring.   While this is an exciting time for the payments industry, financial services companies are facing tough challenges as payment processing requirements become increasingly c...