Businesses appear to be in favor of real-time payments, according to a survey by U.S. Bank, and a better payment experience is one of the top drivers. And they want to be able to choose which rails to use.
“We are building intelligent routing,” said Anu Somani head of global payables & embedded payments at the bank. “Clients can come to us for a one-stop bank and we can connect to any instant payment rail that meets their business goals."
In payment transformation initiatives planned for the year ahead, 53% want to improve vendor and customer payment experiences, 48% want to increase the efficiency of front office payment transactions and 47% want to create a B2B payment experience similar to consumer person-to-person payments. Operational interests lag slightly behind — 46% want to automate payments (e.g. initiation and billing/remittance data).
But two of the bank’s top payment experts say they are puzzled that the rate of adoption lags behind what people say they want.
Somani said she understands some of the hesitancy.
“If it’s not broken why should I fix it? Checks may not be efficient, and checks may have some of their own issues, but at least people get paid.”
It is not a trivial change, she added. Often companies have to undergo a payment infrastructure update, and that takes time, money, planning and technology. The bank recently announced it is working with Kyriba to let clients of both U.S. Bank and Kyriba send instant payments over the RTP Network and through Zelle.
The bank want to meet customers where they are and make using instant payments as simple as possible, Somani said. For high volume customers that will probably be an API connection.
“We also have a developer portal that has a directory of APIs which any company can to connect with us in real time for our payment rails. Customers can also do ad hoc payments within our core systems — we call it SinglePoint.”
