The payments processing giant Fiserv is in the process of getting all of its business customers set up for real-time payments.
It is not an easy lift.
While most of the Milwaukee-based company’s customers haven’t asked for real-time payments directly, the faster movement of money is what they want, Matt Wilcox, Fiserv’s president of digital payment solutions, said in a Feb. 27 interview.
Many customer requests come down to faster and more efficient movement of money, he said. Fiserv caters to those requests by offering access to RTP — a real-time payment network operated by The Clearing House and launched in 2017 — and FedNow — the Federal Reserve’s real-time payment network, which launched in 2023. The company also allows access to Zelle, a peer-to-peer payment network operated by the bank-owned Early Warning Services, which offers services for small businesses.
But moving money in a more expedient manner comes with many hurdles, Wilcox said.
Editor’s note: this interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Payments Dive: I want to talk about real-time payments, because that's a subject that comes up a lot in the industry. Is that something that your customers are asking for?
Matt Wilcox: I'll take a step back for a second. We saw real-time [payments] start to take flight with Zelle. That first use case is peer-to-peer payments, but we've created this connectivity that we're now repurposing for other real-time use cases [such as] account-to-account transfers and bill-pay. Our clients don't come to us and say, ‘Hey, we need real-time,’ but there's that expectation. So, the objective is to real-time enable all of our payment applications. We knew early on we weren't going to achieve 100% ubiquity of real-time on our own.
And so our network also works as a gateway. So, if we need to use FedNow to get from point A to point B and settle that way, we will do that. We are seeing an increase in demand for connectivity to FedNow and RTP. I think a lot of the onus falls on us and other providers to enable that in applications. The long-winded way to answer your question, we're seeing the desire and the necessary demand to enable all the applications and the endpoints [for real-time payments].
What I'm hearing is, customers might not be asking for real-time payments directly, but real-time payments provide a lot of the things that they want?
Yes. We spent a lot of time with financial institutions. Speed of payment, or accelerating the speed of payment is always in the top five of their strategies. And so that could mean different things to different institutions. But the demand to have that is certainly there.
You said that you want everybody to have access to real-time payments. Did I hear that right?
Yes. With Zelle, we've got north of 1,600 financial institutions that use it. Each one of those has a connection for real-time. As we roll out a new application, we're making sure the application can send payments in real-time, and two recipients on the end of that are in our network to accept and be able to get those payments in real-time. Peer-to-peer was the easy one. Transfers are an easier one. Bill-pay gets a little more complex, as you have to enable the billers to receive those payments in real time. But yes, that's part of our core strategy.
I want to fixate on that last part for a minute. The complexity is that that the person sending the money needs to be set up for real-time payments, and the person receiving it also needs to be set up for real-time payments?
That’s right. It's not enough just to create real time money movement for peer-to-peer payments, our network also has lots of different small businesses and billers and merchants in it. Those end-points need to be able to receive [payments] in real-time, otherwise, you won't see real -time payments take flight in the market.
Do you have your own real-time payment rail, or do you use RTP and FedNow?
Our Now network is our real-time payment network. It's a proprietary real-time network, but we've also made it a gateway so that it can be used to access FedNow and RTP. If you think about our network, we've got banks connected to it, we’ve got billers connected to it, small businesses are connected to it. If we couldn't settle within our own ecosystem, we would use RTP, or we'd use FedNow. That's why I call it a gateway as well, because it’s a gateway to the other networks.
Most people probably think of Zelle as a peer-to-peer payment system. But you're telling me that it's also a B2B payment system?
Yes. We offer Zelle Small Business. When we roll out our cash flow central piece, it will integrate Zelle Small Business into that as well. We see adoption with Zelle Small Business as well as just the Zelle consumer side [of the business].
