The Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) has historically been a method of transferring payments between countries that use the Euro. Now it’s attempting to evolve with a new initiative called ‘instant payments’. As the name implies, it’s a way of transferring funds almost immediately. This kind of feature isn’t widely available today, but is it poised to take off?

Right now, we make an average of 54 person-to-person payments every year. If you consider the number of times you go to buy a cup of coffee in the morning or make a trip to the grocery store, 54 payments doesn’t seem like much. Why do we make so few person-to-person payments? If you think about how inconvenient a person-to-person payment is compared to just walking into a store and swiping your card, it quickly becomes evident why there’s such a huge gap. Jamie Pearson discusses.

Why do we have to queue up when the checkout process itself is so convenient? Even with all of today’s available technology, we still have to get in line to check out at the local supermarket, department store, or gas station. Jamie Pearson muses on the (hopefully) dimishing checkout lines made possible through convenient online payments. For more payments insights visit our payments blog: http://www.ir.com/blog?cat=3

Scale is the biggest challenge banks face when monitoring payments in a high volume environment. This podcast discusses: monitoring payments to meet SLAs, detecting payment exceptions early to proactively alert, streamlining payment applications without customer disruptions, ensuring confidence with complete payments visibility and more. To read this blog click here: https://goo.gl/5wZWcW

This podcast explores how real-time analytics in payments systems are used to predict future occurances. Prediction involves taking the insight you get by looking at historical data and working out what’s going to happen over time. Instead of just looking at whether or not something that’s currently happening is normal, we can take a look into the future, maybe hours or even days. Listen to our last podcast on how to real-time analytics analyzes historical data here:https://soundcloud.com/fintech-podcast-by-ir/how-historical-data-helps-real-time-analytics-in-payments

Real-time analytics allow us to take historical data and apply it to things that are happening right now. It’s a mixture of traditional data analytics and insight into what’s happening inside your payments system. this podcast covers; detecting normal patterns, customized alerts and the power of real-time analytics. For more information about IR Prognosis for payments visit IR.com

Credit card companies are taking constant steps to protect cardholder data. Subsequent versions of compliance standards have become more strict to combat fraud and banks get audited to ensure that they’re meeting standards. The cost of running a payment system has increased. Small payments companies are moving towards hosted payment environments.

In the next two years, new rules are taking effect that will change the way payments are handled. If you’re paying a bill or transferring money from one bank account to another, it typically takes three days until the transaction is finalized. After the new changes take effect, it will take a matter of seconds. It’s a huge change, and it means that banks are going to have to re-examine their technology to make accommodations.

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