If you haven’t already reached out to your service providers about your instant payments journey, you should! Just as important as your own institution’s plan and strategy are the plans and strategies of your partners and providers. Ask them about their plans for supporting instant payments like FedNowSM to know if their offerings will meet your needs. It’s best to ask now so you don’t come across any surprises later!
As you begin to consider partners you may work with, here are a few steps you may want to take:
- Evaluate your own systems, processes and plan. Consider the impact instant payments will have on your operations and the types of services and experiences you’d like to offer your clients.
- Determine your service provider needs. Once you’ve considered your operational requirements, think about what you’ll keep in-house and what you’ll outsource.
- Match your needs with service providers. Your current service providers, including correspondents, are a good place to start as they may be expanding their services to incorporate instant payment offerings. However, you may find you need to enlist additional or different service providers.
- Talk with service providers about their instant payment plans. Talk to your own and other service providers to understand their plans and strategies for instant payments.
Here are examples of assessments to consider. Will your current service providers:
- Support all your instant payment needs, or will you need to partner with additional service providers?
- Offer services to support the needed updates to your online and mobile banking and bill payment platforms?
- Be able to support real-time processing and fraud mitigation tools?
You’ll also want to understand your service providers’ instant payment capabilities and integration process. When you talk with your current service providers about their instant payment plans ask:
- When will you be ready to support the FedNowSM Service on a 24x7x365 basis?
- What is your timeline for testing and implementing initial FedNowSM Service capabilities?
- Will you be able to support ISO® 20022 messaging standards for incoming and outgoing transactions?
- What tools and support will you provide to facilitate the integration of your current architecture and the solutions of other service providers if needed?
A good resource that can help you through this process is the FedNowSM readiness roadmap for financial institutions working with service providers. You’ll find this resource, which includes sample questions to ask providers, in the Planning Office on FedNowExplorer.org.
Want to learn more about faster payments? We’ve got you covered! EPCOR has partnered with The Payments Professor to help you bring everyone at your organization up to speed on RTP® and FedNowSM with THREE new on-demand Faster Payments curriculums. Click here to learn more! Or consider joining us for our When The Dollar Goes Digital webinar on October 18th or our Top 10 Things You Need to Know about FedNow and RTP webinar on November 29th.