Episodes

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 It’s a journey that requires addressing outdated processes, adopting new technologies, and most important, gaining buy-in from leadership and colleagues.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 Fargo, and Albert Bodine, Director of Commercial and Enterprise Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research,...

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 Javelin Strategy & Research, for a PaymentsJournal podcast and explored the landscape for instant payments....

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, and Jennifer Pitt, Senior Analyst of Fraud and Cybersecurity at Javelin Strategy & Research, delved in...

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, the proverb “knowledge is power” holds truer than ever. A financial institution’s familiarity with various ...

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 of Matera, and Elisa Tavilla, Director of Debit Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, delve into...

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 Product Management at Worldpay from FIS, and James Wester, Co-Head of Payments at Javelin Strategy & Re...

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 with inevitable challenges. Chief among them are the mounting operational costs that chip away at ...

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 of ACH Network Administration at Nacha, about what’s fueling that growth and where he expects ACH to be hea...

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 concerns from acquiring entities. PaymentsJournal turned to Carol Palmer, Head of Risk & Compliance...

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 splitting bills has created an opportune environment for malicious activities. As more consumers o...

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 potentially help solidify a long-term relationship with their customers. In a recent PaymentsJourn...

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” between the scammer and the victim, makes it exceedingly difficult for banks to detect and mitigate P2P ...

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 President and Head of Brighterion, a Mastercard company, and Tracy Kitten, Director of Fraud and Security at Javelin Strategy...

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 Nacha helps financial institutions and fintechs verify bank information to mitigate risk, reduce costs and me...

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 and credit unions lacking digital interfaces will be exempted. Advocates of this regulation argue t...

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 trends they saw unfold in payments last year and what they expect for 2024. Key Trends that Unfolded in 202...

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. In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Jon Paquette, Executive Vice President of Solutions and Product Strat...

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 with Jordan Hirschfield, Director of Prepaid at Javelin Strategy & Research, discussed the latest r...

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 current financial institution. What are these businesses looking for in a financial institution, and w...

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 complex—especially in the back office. In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, BHMI’s Chief Technology Officer, Michael ...

When it comes to business-to-business (B2B) payments, those funneled through automated clearing house (ACH) rails are increasingly popular. Although many businesses are still mailing checks as payment, more businesses are seeing the risks and looking toward ACH payments as a cost-efficient and convenient alternative. During a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Brian Holbrook, Director of Product Strategy and Integrated Services, LSEG Risk Intelligence, and James Wester, Director of Cryptocurrency ...

Embedded payments have been a mainstay for consumers for several years due to the rise of digital payments via smartphones and mobile apps. As consumers continue to enjoy the speed, convenience, and security of such payments, the business-to-business (B2B) space has been lagging behind. That is not to say that many businesses are content with this; on the contrary, more businesses would like to see embedded payments featured highly within the B2B payments space so they, too, can benefit from th...

The rapid improvements in the payments industry over the past decade have had the unfortunate side effect of making money laundering more of a challenge for institutions to detect and deter. With a greater number of methods for exchanging money and with most transactions happening digitally, it has become harder to chase after money launderers’ latest tactics. According to the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime, more than $1 trillion is now laundered worldwide. During a recent PaymentsJournal podca...

As financial fraud continues to become more intricate and more commonplace, and risk remains a deterrent for innovation, the inadequacies of “black box” solutions of third-party fraud vendors are coming to light. To effectively detect and mitigate fraud – and protect the FIs, their customers and their shareholders — banks need full transparency into the strategies, tactics and performance of their third-party fraud solutions. Transparency between parties is the key to successful fraud mitigatio...