Take On Payments

In our year-end webinar last week, the Retail Payments Risk Forum team provided our perspective on several major developments and issues in payments in 2022. Since our time was limited, we wanted to share some additional thoughts and wishes for payments in 2023.

Nancy Donahue: Earlier this year, the Board of Governors finalized guidelines for evaluating nontraditional financial institutions' requests to be granted master accounts and access to the Fed's payment services. Fintech firms have held the promise of greater financial inclusion and wider access to financial services, so it will be interesting to follow this space in 2023.

Scarlett Heinbuch: I am intrigued by cash acceptance in the United States and efforts being made to require brick-and-mortar merchants to accept cash for payment. It will be interesting to see what happens with cash access for people nationwide. I wish for people to be able to pay for goods and services in a way that meets their needs and choices.

Dave Lott: I am especially interested in seeing the uptake by financial institutions and consumers of instant payments with the introduction of the FedNow service. I wish that the issue of consumer liability for electronic peer-to-peer, or eP2P, in cases where the legitimate accountholder initiates the transaction is quickly resolved.

Claire Greene: Like Dave, I'm excited to see the product innovations that I hope will result from the widespread availability of instant payments. The information that must flow with B2B (business-to-business) payments and the plethora of business accounting systems used to record payments and receipts make innovation in this space challenging. These challenges, however, also make B2B payments ripe for change. Let's see what happens.

Catherine Joseph: Although check usage has declined, I plan to continue to follow trends in both consumer and business checks, particularly trends in check fraud, and what actions the industry is taking to increase security and help curb check fraud.

Jessica Washington: My hope is that we can take steps as an industry to improve payments data collection, analytics, and sharing so that we can better inform policy and business decisions. I especially look forward to seeing improvements in fraud and threat data sharing so that we have the room to innovate and improve payment systems.

We want to wish our readers all the joy of the holiday season and best wishes for 2023. Our Take on Payments blog will resume on January 9.