Payments in 2022: What you need to know

Financial institutions have had a lot to contend with, from consumer payment habit changes due to the pandemic to the need to modernize their payment solutions to support new payment methods and rails. In a webinar, Gareth Lodge, Senior Analyst, Global Payments at Celent, and Mark Ranta, Payments Practice Lead at Alacriti, discussed how banks should approach this opportunity to be at the forefront of change.

Here are 3 key takeaways from the webinar:

1. Wire modernization is well under way for every region—except the U.S. Twenty percent of U.S. banks reported they had no plans to update their wire platform. Because of the SWIFT MT to MX conversion, more than 9,000 banks globally had to migrate to that new platform to be compliant with ISO 20022 standards. Real-time payments go hand in hand with updating the wire plan. Lodge recommends that in 2022, financial institutions start with wires.
2. The American Bankers Association told the Federal Reserve in January 2022 that it supports their plan to migrate to ISO 20022 standards for their real-time gross settlement system (RTSG). And that a single-day switch should happen no earlier than November 2023. While 55% of banks have said they are updating wire systems now or over the next five years, that doesn’t leave the 20% who have no plans at all, a lot of time to respond. So planning is more critical than ever.
3. Celent did a 2021 survey on 200 plus corporates and 200 plus banks globally, where they asked questions around payments and data monetization. The research clearly showed that the corporates are asking for what they think the banks can deliver, but they have pretty low expectations about what a bank can deliver. The data demonstrated that a good number of corporates are saying they would swap a bank if their bank can’t provide real-time payments.

To learn more about what 2022 has in store for payments, watch the full webinar, Payments in 2022: What You Need to Know, featuring Aite-Novarica Group and Alacriti.