Blog

09 Apr 2024 Earned Wage Access: A Use Case for Instant Payments Explore the challenges and considerations of financial institutions meeting the demand for instant payments and how Earned Wage Access (EWA) has been gaining traction.

01 Feb 2024 Decoding the FedNow Service for Community Banks This blog highlights insights and common community bank questions from the ICBA webinar, FedNow in Focus: Maximizing Real-Time Payments for Community Banks, featuring Siobhán O’Malley, National Account Program Manager at Federal Reserve Financial Services, and Mark Majeske.

16 Jan 2024 The Future of Real-Time Payments in Banking Explore the evolution of real-time payments, aligning with modern expectations for immediacy and efficiency. Gain insights from industry experts Jim Colassano (The Clearing House), Jim Maimone (Citizens Bank), and Mark Majeske (Alacriti).

30 Nov 2023 What Are Payment Rails? When a payment is initiated online or at the point of sale, payment rails transmit instructions between relevant parties. Our blog examines four U.S. payment rails—ACH, card networks, RTP® network, and FedNow® Service.

15 Nov 2023 Unraveling the Future of FedNow for Credit Unions Explore the evolution of real-time payments with insights from experts. Learn about FedNow® Service’s fraud mitigation tools, charges for expedited payments, and the focus on domestic transactions.

26 Oct 2023 Unveiling the Future of Payments: A Credit Union Perspective on Instant Payments In today's digital age, credit unions are navigating the shift towards instant payments. Industry experts and credit unions dispel myths and discuss how real-time payments position credit unions at the forefront of this evolution.

14 Aug 2023 Business Use Cases: The Promise of Real-Time Payments Explore the transformative potential of real-time payments for financial institutions and businesses. With improved efficiency, enhanced security, and competitive advantage, see how the benefits shape the financial landscape.

08 Aug 2023 Demystifying the Top 5 Misconceptions about the FedNow Service Explore the FedNow Service and its potential impact on credit unions through a recent webinar debunking top misconceptions. This blog offers insights and discusses five misunderstandings to aid in financial institution decision-making.

14 Mar 2023 A Quick Run-Down on Real-Time Payments and Liquidity Management With real-time payments becoming ubiquitous, many credit unions have decided to move forward with adoption. This blog discusses the decision to use a funding agent or correspondent partner.

01 Feb 2023 Faster Payments Are Set to Revolutionize Modern Digital Payments When it comes to payments modernization, how does it fit into an overall seamless digital banking experience? This blog highlights the importance of ease of use and instant gratification in the user’s banking experience.

14 Dec 2022 Real-Time Payments Are Ubiquitous: Is Your Business Ready to Accept Real-Time Payments? As instant payments grow, so does the risk of fraud. This blog discusses what financial institutions can do to mitigate real-time payments fraud.

26 Oct 2022 ISO 20022: Why After Almost 2 Decades it’s More Important than Ever ISO 20022 is used by payment systems in over 70 countries. In this blog, discover its benefits and learn what it means for the U.S. market.

11 Oct 2022 3 Things to Know About FedNow, Now In a recent CUInsight hosted webinar, credit unions had the opportunity to ask questions regarding FedNow Service's upcoming launch in 2023. Here are 3 things that were discussed that you should know.

27 Sep 2022 What Are Real-Time Payments? Real-Time Payments or “RTP'' refers to payment rails (platforms or networks via which payments are made) that share a few characteristics. This blog highlights the different networks, common questions, and more.

13 Sep 2022 A Crash Course in Faster Payments Faster payments is an umbrella term for the various systems that support the move toward quicker, on-demand payments. This blog discusses four of the major systems that have evolved in support of faster payments.

26 Jul 2022 Zoomers: How Much Do They Value Real-Time Payments? How does Gen Z feel about real-time payments? What are the general perks of RTP, and how has COVID shaped this generation’s feelings about it?

08 Jun 2022 Real-Time Payments Without Borders In April 2022, EBA Clearing, SWIFT, and The Clearing House announced their plan to launch a pilot service for immediate cross-border payments. Here’s why that’s huge for payments.

31 May 2022 Faster Payments: Are You Ready? Bill payments have been identified as one of four use cases that could benefit the most from faster payments. Get ready to reap the rewards by offering a wide variety of new ways to pay in terms of payment channels and methods.

28 Apr 2022 What is Payments Orchestration? The words 'payments orchestration' appears to be all over the place, but what exactly does it mean? In this blog, we'll look at the journey of orchestration and how it handles a payment's whole end-to-end lifecycle.

28 Mar 2022 Real-Time Everything In banking and payments, innovation is on the horizon. In fact, the foundation for a real-time ecosystem is rapidly taking form.

22 Mar 2022 The Fastest Route to Faster Payments Success The road to faster payments doesn’t have to be a multi-year journey to the starting line. One use case, in particular, could be the fastest route to realizing the promise of faster payment’s potential disruption opportunity.

23 Feb 2022 Payment Services Hub Explained Depending on who you're talking to and what era of payments history you're looking at, "payments hub" might mean several things. In this blog, we'll look at what today’s payments hub has to offer and how FI’s can benefit from it.

13 Dec 2021 2021 Year in Review: Real-Time Payments, Crypto and BNPL Throughout 2021, our blog strived to keep clients updated on the latest industry developments and offer our views on future trends in billing and payments. As we close another unconventional year, we’ll revisit the developments we touched on earlier in the year.

02 Dec 2021 A Look at P2P Payments Person-to-person (P2P) payments are becoming more popular as consumers switch from physical payment methods like cash and cards to digital alternatives. Read about two of the biggest P2P solutions, Venmo and Zelle, in our blog.

30 Nov 2021 5 Request for Pay (RfP) Use Cases for Billers Billers and bill payees benefit from Request for Pay (RfP), a financial messaging scheme that allows billers to initiate real-time payments from bill payees with a single click. In this blog, we go over five use cases for billers.

10 Nov 2021 Faster Payments Use Cases – What Does the Future of B2B Payments Look Like? The market is quickly moving forward with their real-time payment projects. What does this mean for the future of financial institutions? Discover the answer to this question and more in this blog.

29 Oct 2021 Top RfP Test Cases, Use Cases, and Case Studies We're Watching Request for Pay (RfP) is benefiting bill payers and billers by making real-time payments easier and more efficient. It's transforming the way we pay our bills. In this blog, we explore different RfP test cases in today’s market.

08 Sep 2021 Payments Modernization - What to Look for in a Fedwire Solution? The U.S. is starting to adopt faster and real-time payments en masse, pressuring financial institutions to rethink their payments strategies. This leads to the question, what should you look for in a new payments platform?

20 Aug 2021 Request for Pay (RfP)—Exploring the New Frontier of Bill Payments The promise of real-time payments go hand-in-hand with RfP. In this blog we discuss the opportunity that RfP presents.

18 Aug 2021 Will Faster Payments Cannibalize Your Fedwire Revenue? The potential for Fedwire revenue being at risk is something that many financial institutions will have to grapple with as clients start to embrace them—both at a business level and for consumer money movement expectations.

04 Aug 2021 Improving Loan Portfolio Performance Discover three ways to improve your loan portfolio performance with consumer experience top-of-mind.

27 Jul 2021 Faster Payments: Full Speed Ahead Faster payments bring speed and efficiency to money movement around the world. Our blog defines faster payments, gives an overview of global and domestic systems, and provides use cases for B2B, B2C, and C2B transactions.

09 Jul 2021 Report: Modernizing Payments Infrastructure in the Era of Real-Time Payments We highlight some of the key points from our Payments Infrastructure Outlook: Real-Time Payments Take the Lead report with Mercator Advisory Group.

28 Jun 2021 New Players, New Games The best way to stay ahead is to prioritize your digital transformation. Offering ease-of-use and speed to compete with new competition is absolutely necessary and is a natural complement to the security already provided.

15 Jun 2021 Fintech Disruption: Creating Opportunities for Financial Institutions Fintech can help financial institutions deliver better customer experiences. This blog examines opportunities that fintech can help unlock in faster payments, conversational commerce, and data and analytics.

07 Jun 2021 Flourish or Flop: How to Follow Through on Your Payments Transformation It's estimated that 7 in 10 digital transformation schemes ultimately fail. What this often comes down to is an assumption that employees will effortlessly adapt to the new normal.

17 May 2021 Payments Modernization: An Account Holder View Having a unified, consistent experience is the key to the future success of your institution. But what does that mean from the perspective of your account holders?

14 Apr 2021 Faster Tax Refunds Using real-time payment rails could result in tax refunds finding their way from the IRS to your bank account in just a few seconds.

09 Apr 2021 5 Common Misconceptions FIs Have About Real-Time Payments There are common misconceptions about real-time payments that may be contributing to its slow adoption in the U.S. We put them to rest in this blog.

05 Apr 2021 What Faster Payments Can Do for Your Industry Whether it’s a financial institution, merchant, government entity, or individual, there are use cases for faster payments that touch all of us. Alacriti’s Payment Practice Lead, Mark Ranta, discusses more in this blog.

25 Mar 2021 Real-Time Payments and the Non-24x7 Banking Core 24/7/365 access to services is an often noted benefit of the digital era. Organizations that thrive in an always-online digital environment have gained a significant edge in the past year.

12 Mar 2021 What is Payments-as-a-Service? You’ve probably heard of SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) but what about PaaS (Payments-as-a-Service)? We define PaaS and outline its key functions and features in this blog.

09 Mar 2021 U.S. Faster Payments - What We Can Learn from the Rest of the World There are 56 real-time payment schemes currently operating internationally. In this blog we’ll hone in on three of the most interesting locations: Japan, India, and Brazil.

22 Feb 2021 Why RTP, Why Now? Everyone acknowledges the potential of real-time payments, but it’s still relatively new. So why use RTP?

10 Feb 2021 Picking Up Speed: FedNowSM Service to Launch in 2023 The Federal Reserve announced they are on track for a 2023 launch of their FedNowSM Service. We discuss what this means for faster payments in this blog.

04 Feb 2021 Nacha Rule Extensions Nacha has provided some leeway for compliance to their rules that were supposed to become effective in 2021. So, what does this mean for your organization?

01 Dec 2020 Faster Payments: What it Means for Credit Unions (Webinar Recap) The need for convenient and fast online payments has never been greater. For credit unions, this means getting ahead of the curve. Despite the growing demand, the burning question remains: Where do we start?

16 Nov 2020 Nacha’s New 8 Amendments Another sign that 2021 will be the year of faster payments.

03 Sep 2020 Transparency While Being Invisible With new real-time payments emerging, the demand customers have to know where their money is still holds true.

02 Jul 2020 How is COVID-19 Accelerating Digital Adoption in Payments? COVID-19 is changing how consumers pay for things, which is one area where some of the lasting impacts may be felt permanently.

19 Jun 2020 Payment Trends from the Stamford FinTech MeetUp On June 11th, Alacriti’s Payment Practice Lead, Mark Ranta, along with other industry experts came together to discuss the biggest topics moving the payments industry from AI to Faster Payments. Read Mark’s recap.

08 Jan 2020 Six Payments Trends to Watch in 2020 Six payments trends to watch in 2020 include unbridled industry change, cloud computing, unified commerce, frictionless data-rich payment experiences, real-time payments and increasing data security and privacy regulation.

18 Dec 2019 2019 Year in Review: Faster Payments, Digital Disbursements, and CAU In 2019, we reported on significant developments in the billing and payments ecosystem in areas including faster payments, digital disbursements, and card account updater. Here’s a look back at key themes we explored in our blog.

11 Nov 2019 The Road to Same Day ACH NACHA’s Same Day ACH is up, running, and expanding. Our blog recaps the road to Same Day ACH, including benefits for consumers and businesses, and what’s to come.

06 Nov 2019 What We Learned at AFP 2019 Alacriti attended sessions at AFP 2019 dedicated to the latest in payments. Our blog shares lessons learned about paper checks, refunds, and why it’s more important than ever to embrace payments innovation.

29 Jan 2019 What’s ahead for EBPP in 2019? Alacriti’s electronic bill presentment and payments (EBPP) experts reflect on key industry developments in 2018 and share their thoughts on what the future might hold for EBPP in 2019.

09 Nov 2018 5 Things We Learned at AFP 2018 Alacriti attended and exhibited at AFP’s 2018 conference in Chicago. Here are five things we learned during the payments-related presentations that were delivered at the event.

09 May 2018 NACHA PAYMENTS 2018 Recap Alacriti recently participated in NACHA’s PAYMENTS 2018 conference. Here’s a summary of our sessions dedicated to artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and chatbot technology.