In a paper delivered late last week to a payments summit hosted by the Kansas City Fed, Bruce Summers - a career official with the Federal Reserve until his retirement in 2007 - lamented the lack of public interest governance in the US payments industry.
Taking the failure of the US to develop a mechanism for immediate funds transfer (IFT), such as the UK's Faster Payments scheme, as a key theme, Summers pointed out that neither the Federal Reserve Board nor prominent private sector organisations have either "the interest or the ability" to lead payment system development into the digital age.
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Taking the failure of the US to develop a mechanism for immediate funds transfer (IFT), such as the UK's Faster Payments scheme, as a key theme, Summers pointed out that neither the Federal Reserve Board nor prominent private sector organisations have either "the interest or the ability" to lead payment system development into the digital age.
"The idea that money in transit is digital information which can be processed immediately has not been readily accepted by the banking industry," he says. "Most bank-sponsored payment schemes depend on clearing and settlement systems that are designed around batch processing and delayed settlement, and these clearing and settlement arrangements are being nurtured as opposed to being re-designed around continuous, real-time processing."Read more at Finextra
