IBS Journal Supplement 2015


Real-time banking in the US: myth or reality?


One commentator at Sibos 2014 in Boston said that the drive for retail real-time payments initiatives stemmed from one key factor: customer expectation. The Federal Reserve Bank is the latest to confront the growing demand for ‘immediate’ banking with proposals for a new real-time payments infrastructure in the US.


Whilst real-time payments had been around for a while before, the UK Fast- er Payments initiative which went live in 2007 started a wave of projects which now appears at its crest. The FAST project in Singapore and the New Payments Plat- form (NPP) initiative in Australia have been well documented by IBS over the last few years, but other projects which have been simmering in the background for a while are now coming to the boil. One initiative


Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago ©Ken Lund, Flickr


of note is the European Retail Payments Board’s (ERPB) proposals which are due in the middle of this year, where it is expect- ed that there will be a more concrete plan laid out for a real-time network based on the SEPA infrastructure. This is seemingly a pre-emptive move by the ERPB (set up by the European Central Bank last year as a replacement for the SEPA Council), which hinted that it was taking proactive steps now to ensure that countries do not take a


siloed approach to immediate payments. Finland, for instance, is one country which is in fairly advanced discussions around building a real-time payments infrastruc- ture, albeit with the prospect of build- ing this out to cover the wider Eurozone in mind, whilst Denmark has gone live with a new platform delivered by Nordic outsourcing provider, Nets, in the last six months. ‘Solutions for instant payments should


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© IBS Intelligence 2015


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analysis: real-time payments


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