FedNow Hurdles and Opportunities

Short Blog – Follow Up to Last Week’s FedNow Update 

I’ve got 4 blogs in queue with Part 5 – Future of Retail Banking coming next week. I’ve been asked to expand beyond my pro-network bent into areas like FedNow, PayPal, Stripe and Asia… etc and I will oblige. For today, drilling down on FedNow’s opportunity and the key barriers for “break out growth” (expanding on the last 2 bullets within 22 Feb FedNow blog).  Feedback appreciated.

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FedNow Update – Short Blog

My last blog on topic was less than a month ago Real Time Payments in US – Strategic Shifts (Jan 2023), and also FedNow (Dec 2021). Will thus keep this blog to summary bullets. 

  • FedNow launching this summer with almost 100% of US merchant focused banks participating. At launch, both credit and debit ( Request for Payment -RfP) transactions will be supported.
  • Great summary interview last week from FRB’s Mark Gould
  • Back in 2013, the Fed requested comments on a real-time payment system. In general, consumers don’t seek to pay their bills faster, nor do consumers have issues in receiving their payroll deposits late. The card environment works very well, particularly for debit. Emergency bill payment has been the only well-defined consumer need for speed (see Starpoint’s 2013 response to Fed). 

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SRC – Why Now and What is the Opportunity?

Short blog. What opportunity are top US issuers chasing with an SRC wallet?

During my talks with top acquirers, I gained new insight into eCommerce volumes. As a committed ApplePay user I was shocked to hear that ApplePay use in browser is significantly under 5% (even in iOS/Mac devices). Per my blog on intersections, the dynamic is due to both Chrome vs Safari and merchant adoption.

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Innovation in Networks – Part 4

The Strategic Innovation Era

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This blog has been sitting at 80% for almost 3 months. Sorry for the delay. This was a 30 page blog that I slimmed down to 16. Thus the long summary section. This blog is focused on networks and their ability to: 1) internally charter their own evolution, 2) grow network of supporting stakeholders, 3) stimulate network growth, and 4) encourage investment/innovation. Why read this? Payment innovation is set to grow Global GDV by 50% (above baseline) over the next 5-7 yrs. Today’s blog is a basis for this hypothesis.

A very long blog with 3 page summary below

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Real Time Payments in US – Strategic Shifts

Short Blog. I’ll expand on this next month. 

As I’ve written about since September, and seen in yesterday’s press (WSJ), top US issuers are have created a new consortium with a first phase product centered on a white labeled SRC wallet. For investors, 100% of payment types in this wallet will be existing cards (no new retail payment network). Their partners are the key eCom gateways (Stripe, Square, Shopify, …etc). 

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Part 3 – Internet 2.5 – The Next “Wave” is Here

Happy After Thanksgiving! Hope everyone was able to enjoy a wonderful time with family and friends. Today is the 3rd installment of the series, a long blog. 
The next big network wave is here. Call it web 2.5 or 3.0, but the integration of payments into “everything” is a major event. Payments are the “trust layer” that TRANSFORM anonymous nodes providing uncertain service into known, defined and guaranteed service providers. Effective communities require value exchange and “trust”. The payment trust function enables networks to evolve from “cost free” discovery and information sharing, into transactional resource/service exchange: from read-write to read-write-execute. Sure we could call the wave “trust” but the only ubiquitous “trust network” is payments so I prefer to keep payment wave as the naming convention.

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Part 2 – The Power of Bank Networks

The Bull Case for V/MA (24 pages). 

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Part 1 – US Payments Environment covered the complexity of the US payment environment and the challenges faced by top banks in modernizing their systems (where all systems live forever). There are many types of payments: bill payments, A2A, P2P, wires.. Today the focus is on how banks intermediate commerce. Banks MUST have networks as every bank can’t connect to every consumer/merchant. Effective Bank networks (aka rails) are NOT a commodity service, but one that allows the banks to leverage their unique ability to assume risk.

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Merchants Tokenize – eCom Wallet Challenges

UPDATE – Nov 29 2022 – Note that I have conflated the relationship between SRC and 3DS 2.0. 3DS 2.0 is the authentication protocol used by SRC. 3DS 2.0 has been widely adopted as a mandatory replacement to 3DS 1.0. Part of the driver for adoption was the EU SCA mandate. SRC has NOT been widely adopted as it is a fairly broken consumer experience at the moment. 

I’m at M2020 today and it has been a “back to normal” fantastic event. Let me put my “merchant hat” on for a story from their perspective.

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Part 1 – US Payments Environment

Assessing the Environment and Setting the Focus  (part 2  – Power of Bank Networks)

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Must read FT article “How JPMC’s plan to kill credit cards split the bank”. The article discusses Jamie Dimon’s internal mandate to drive a new payment network. I was shocked with the level of internal org quotes here.  In my view, Jamie is the best bank CEOs in history (based on performance and talent coming out of JPMC). As a former banker, I know how hard it is to move the ship.  However, FT is wrong. Chase’s efforts ARE NOT about killing credit cards, but rather creating something much bigger.

This is a long blog..

Continue reading

Pay By Bank – Where does it work and why?

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Friday I was a tad “let down” in the Sionic/TCH/MX release of Pay-by-Bank. Per my blog on Google/TCH launch and Google P2P I was anticipating something much bigger. To be clear I firmly believe that TCH is working on an “ApplePay Competitor”, which will entail TCH tokens inside of Google’s phone, but this will be 3-6 months out.  Per the blogs above, I see neither pay-by-bank nor TCH Tokens in Google Pay as a threat to V/MA. 

Today I thought I would drill down into “pay by bank”, the dynamics of why it works in some markets, and why I see little threat to V/MA in replacing core cards in eCom or at POS.

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