For banks eyeing what they must do to get on board the FedNow Service to meet customers’ expectations for faster payments and integrate with the first new payments rails in the United States in four decades — the challenges are numerous.
Form3 Chief Operating Officer Eimear O’Connor said in an interview with PYMNTS that some lessons have already been learned outside of the U.S., particularly in Europe, where real-time payments have been a mainstay.
“What we’ve seen in other markets is that the biggest integration challenge for many banks and financial institutions is not so much the access to the new payment system itself,” she said, contending that “the biggest challenges are more often than not within the bank’s own internal systems and processes within their back offices.”
Those legacy systems were never deployed to operate in a real-time environment, she said.
“If banks haven’t yet made that investment to update their back offices to implement modern cores and platforms, this is where the integration challenges are by far the greatest,” O’Connor said.