How to Develop Your Faster Payments Strategy
Responsibilities of the Team
Assemble an Internal Team
Think about the different areas identified in the environmental assessment and determine which areas should participate and why
- Business Innovations
- Compliance
- Finance
- IT
- Legal
- Lending
- Marketing
- Operations
- Product Management
- Risk
- Sales
- Training
- Treasury Management
* This list may not be all inclusive. Look within your own organization to determine what is appropriate.
Steps to consider when assembling an internal team
- Determine who will take the lead in implementing the strategy
- Decide the roles and responsibilities of team participants
- Make sure team members have the right level of authority and subject matter expertise
- Obtain executive management buy-in and/or participation as appropriate for your organization
- Agree upon team expectations, determine how the team will be held accountable, and communicate the process and reporting methods within the team and to executive management
- Develop a project charter to encourage team discipline.(link to sample of charter)
Review the environmental assessment
- Assess the marketplace and competitive analysis (SWOT)
- Set the landscape
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Articulate internal needs and the needs of both current and targeted customers
- What are your organization’s current and future needs?
- Who are your current customers and what are their current and future needs?
- Who are the new customers your organization wants to attract and what are their current and future needs?
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Questions to consider
- What are you doing today with existing payment systems?
- If you have a payments strategy already, how will faster payments fit in?
- Consider if your organization’s payments are outgoing versus incoming (payables and steps receivables/ODFI and RDFI)
Agree on the Analysis
- Determine to incorporate faster payments (or not)
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The benefits and opportunities in moving forward:
- Be relevant and competitive
- Retain current audience and grow new base
- Potential new products
- Operational efficiencies
- Be ready to launch faster payments when needed
- Better ability to serve specific use cases
- Stay central to your customers' payment needs
Interpret the Information
- What are the consequences if your organization does not change?
- Reactive response
- Reputation risk
- Start now because it takes time to be ready for market
- Your competitors won’t wait
- New types of competitors
- Keep up with the times and the evolving customer base
- Most likely won't continue to grow deposit base, and may lose it entirely
- Customer base and/or industry may ask why your organization is not able to keep up with fintechs or other financial institutions
- Competitors might go beyond traditional FIs, online FIs, Fintechs, etc.
Outline strategy
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Where does your organization want to go next?
- Solutions you want to support and offer to your customers
- Functional business requirements
- Timeline and milestones
- Identify success criteria and metrics to evaluate strategy
Build or Buy?
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Engage vendor on available offerings
- Consider other vendors if necessary
- Consider costs. Is it less expensive to buy versus build?
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Consider timing. Is it faster to use existing versus building?
- Evaluate timing considerations. Even if your organization is not acting right now, lead time is still needed
What are the high-level considerations to move forward?
- How does your organization get ready to offer faster payments?
- Tighten up policies and procedures
- Review faster trends
Review and refine strategy outline
- Solutions your organization wants to support and offer to your customers
- How you will execute given inputs and considerations identified earlier
- Timeline and milestones
- Identify success criteria and metrics to evaluate strategy
- Short and long-term actions