Customers are increasingly demanding faster money movement. The evidence is here— they are actively abandoning financial transactions that take too long to complete due to slow money movement speeds/new account funding.

To learn how impactful the speed of money movement is on financial transactions, and where both risks and opportunities present themselves, submit the form on the right to download American Banker’s summary of the research.

This executive summary contains practical advice on how your organization can approach faster money movement and reviews what happens when money doesn’t move fast enough—consumers abandoning transactions—and who’s abandoning them at higher rates. It also covers how big the issue has become in today’s instant gratification attitude (“I need it now”) and more.

For the first time, credit unions surpassed $1.2 trillion for their total loan portfolio in April 2021. Total year-to-date loan originations increased by more than 20% in dollar terms over each of the past two years. This is an incredible achievement. However it’s important to ensure the success of the loan—from open to payoff.

In a recent webinar hosted by CUInsight, Mary Woodard, Chief Operating Officer of Granite Credit Union, and Mark Ranta, Payments Practice Lead for Alacriti, discussed how credit unions could have more valuable loans through digital transformation.

Download this article for a recap of the webinar.

Consistent, modern digital banking and payments experiences are now table stakes. Digital wallet providers, fintechs, and challenger banks can now deliver intuitive, customer-centric banking experiences such as embedded lending, real-time payments, and direct payroll deposit—and they are entering the market at an alarming rate.

In today’s landscape, what are customers really expecting for next-level service in payments? In a recent webinar hosted by ICBA, Carl Robinson, Payments SVP at Alacriti, and Jenn Markus, Director of Technology Partners at Glia, discussed the answer to this question.

To read more, download our latest webinar recap article.

The U.S. has come a long way to get to where we are today with real-time payments, with TCH and Zelle available in the market and FedNow just around the corner. However, only 3% of financial institutions are presently signed up for a real-time payments system.

In a recent Banking Exchange hosted webinar, Celent’s Gareth Lodge, Senior Analyst, Global Payments, and Alacriti’s Mark Ranta, Payments Practice Lead, discussed the findings in the Celent research report Real-Time Payments in the US: Speeding Up or Slowing Down?

Download this article for a recap of the webinar.

In many parts of the world, real-time payments are part and parcel of daily life and have been for many years. More than 50 countries have systems, with some more than 40 years old and many processing in excess of 1 billion transactions a year. Yet one country stands out. Of the largest 15 countries ranked by GDP, the U.S. is alone in not having significant volumes of real-time payments yet.

In this report, Celent, the leading research firm on technology for financial institutions, provides insight as to why this is and highlights that many of the perceived barriers are just that–perceived. In fact, they create a great opportunity. But more importantly, by not providing to their clients, financial institutions are ignoring their own clients’ demands. Learn why the time for U.S. real-time payments is in fact now.

In the market, there is some confusion between real-time payments and faster payments. Let’s begin here by clarifying the difference. Real-time payments are under the category of faster payments. However not all faster payments are necessarily real-time.

Real-time payments refer to payment clearing and settlement systems that share a few characteristics. First, they are real-time, initiating, clearing, and settling in a matter of seconds. Second, real-time payment networks are 24x7x365, meaning they are always online and available. Payment channels that don’t match these categories, but provide a greater advantage in respect to speed compared to heritage or legacy payment systems, are faster payments.

Download this article to learn about the several ways your community bank can connect to RTP.

COVID-19 hit every corner of the world, and people around the globe had to alter their everyday behavior in some way. People turned to technology for things like grocery shopping, cinematic experiences, and even banking.

With this sudden surge in an already tech-saturated society, the on-demand mentality of everyday consumers grew stronger. This way of thinking reached the world of payments, with apps such as Venmo and PayPal leading the charge. People began to expect immediacy when sending and receiving money

To further discuss payments technology modernization and the importance of implementing real-time payments for banks and credit unions, PaymentsJournal sat down with Mark Ranta, Payment Practice Leader at Alacriti, and Sarah Grotta, Director of Debit and Alternative Products Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group.

Listen to the podcast here and download our recap of the discussion.

The disjointed nature of services, products, and channels within a financial institution, is a huge pain point. Adding new functionality and innovation is necessary. However, legacy infrastructure traditionally involves working with various vendors. Having a patchwork of vendors creates a disjointed experience in terms of what accounts are accessible, what fees are being assessed, what products are available across channels, and the look and feel of the experience. As a result, financial institutions have been challenged with how to meet their clients where they want to be met with how they want to pay. How to drive flexibility within the FI’s core systems to change those services as new clearing and settlement channels arise is a key concern.

Our latest article summarizes PaymentSource hosted webinar, featuring speakers from Aite Group and Alacriti, as they discuss payments modernization strategy that works with an existing structure.