A US Payments Update with Shonda Clay [Season 2 | Episode #21]

Podcast Intro 00:00:01 Hello. Welcome to P.I.T. Exchange, a podcast by Currency Research. Join us as we discuss the latest in payments innovation and technology with the industry’s most innovative thought leaders. Today’s payments are changing and moving around the world faster than ever before. An exchange gives you the knowledge and insights to keep up. Sit back and relax as we join currency research. Exchanging ideas with today’s special guest.

Jens Seidl 00:00:32 Welcome to another episode of The Pit Exchange Pit standing for payments Innovation and Technology. My name is Jens Seidl and I’m your host for this episode. And we’ve got a great guest from the US with us today, Shonda Clay, who’s with the Federal Reserve in Chicago. Welcome, Shonda.

Shonda Clay 00:00:48 Hi. Good morning. Thank you for having me.

Jens Seidl 00:00:50 It’s a pleasure having you. Thank you. From the as usual with my episodes, I’d like to start with a few, well, just three semi personal questions just to get to know the person. Shonda, before we jump into the the work related stuff. So we’ll start very easy.

Jens Seidl 00:01:04 Apples or oranges?

Shonda Clay 00:01:05 Apples.

Jens Seidl 00:01:06 Okay. And when you go on vacation, do you prefer beach mountains or the big city?

Shonda Clay 00:01:09 Beach.

Jens Seidl 00:01:10 Okay. Do you have a particular location where you like to go? Or is it any beach? When it’s warm and nice and clean?

Shonda Clay 00:01:19 Warm, nice and clean. Are definite requirements, but I really dig out beaches. Any place I go in the world, I try to find the best beach.

Jens Seidl 00:01:28 All right. Nice. And a movie or TV show that you watch recently and that you would recommend to people.

Shonda Clay 00:01:34 Movie or TV show? That’s a little more difficult. I’m a reader.

Jens Seidl 00:01:39 Or book if you prefer that.

Shonda Clay 00:01:39 But I did just complete with a book club. All the colors of the dark, which I would recommend. It’s it’s interesting book.

Jens Seidl 00:01:47 What’s that about?

Shonda Clay 00:01:48 You follow the life. You know, you follow the life of 2 or 3 different characters and and just the shades of what a lifetime can do.

Jens Seidl 00:01:57 Cool. Sounds interesting. Great. Well, thank you for that.

Jens Seidl 00:02:00 And now let’s let’s jump into the podcast and the professional side of things. Maybe if you want to just introduce yourself a little bit and what you do at the fed.

Shonda Clay 00:02:09 Great. Well, as you said, I’m Shonda Clay and I have responsibility working for the Federal Reserve and their payments division. So we call that Federal Reserve Financial Services. And my specific areas of responsibility are for the products, the payment products that we provide to financial institutions in the United States, and also for all of the external engagement that Federal Reserve Financial Services does with the industry, with an industry the size of the United States, with that many financial institutions, we’re very keen on collaboration and working with the industry, and that takes a lot of coordination and effort. So I’m really fortunate, lucky I get to be involved in that.

Jens Seidl 00:02:52 All right. Great. And the the timing of our conversation is not entirely accidental, because there’s been so much happening on the payment side in the Federal Reserve, and we thought it would be a good time to talk about at least some of these things.

Jens Seidl 00:03:05 And maybe if we want to start with the ISO 20022 implementation, because I think you just hit a major milestone on that. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that, please?

Shonda Clay 00:03:16 I would love to. And I love when you hit a milestone and then can talk about it. I first want to just express my excitement and congratulations to all the financial institutions in the United States who have completed with us the migration to the ISO 20022 messaging format for our wire transfer service, which we call the Fed Wire Funds Service. We worked for years, so this was a culmination of years of work to prepare with the industry. There are just so many players, of course, ourselves, the Federal Reserve, the financial institutions, the core processors that work with and for the financial institutions. And so forth. Lots of vendors involved. It was quite the effort, but they all came together. And last month we converted from the older format to this new ISO 20022, along with many countries around the globe that are also just or have have moved to ISO 20022 or in the process of doing so.

Shonda Clay 00:04:20 So it’s a major advancement in the evolution of the payments infrastructure. And I’m really pleased that we have that in the rearview mirror. And it went pretty well.

Jens Seidl 00:04:29 Okay. Excellent. And you said it has been quite a journey. I mean, how long are we talking here from the inception of the idea to now reaching that milestone?

Shonda Clay 00:04:39 Yeah. So before I was even involved in this, it’s been close to 8 to 10 years in that range of discussing, thinking about it, watching the progress and evolution, and then really heads down working within the United States for the last 2 to 3 years. We’re just investing a lot of time and energy and resources to help financial institutions adopt. Understand ISO 20022, adopt. The messaging to make, ultimately, is to make transactions more efficient and also to encourage innovation across the payment landscape. And this standard, as many of you know, allows for that kind of innovation. Now that it’s five for fed wire funds, and we settle just a little bit more than $4.7 trillion a day in wire transfers.

Shonda Clay 00:05:31 So the next step is certainly for the industry to lean in, to leverage the standard, to create value and to modernize payments. It’s just data rich. And so that’s what’s up for us, the Federal Reserve the rest of this year and into it certainly into 2026 is to really continue to work with the industry, to use the format to make the richness of it.

Jens Seidl 00:05:57 Yes, and I know that a lot of our listeners will know what ISO 20022 actually means and what it is, but I’m sure there’s also people who do not know the the detail behind that. So can you explain a little bit to us what makes up for that richness? What are the big differences really, between what happened so far and what ISO can provide and why it makes such a big difference?

Shonda Clay 00:06:19 Yeah. So certainly in this age or era where payments are very much electronic, to make a payment from the originator to the receiver, you have to be able to to have a common language, to speak the same language in that format when you’re sending and receiving.

Shonda Clay 00:06:35 So ISO 20022 provides a structured and very data rich common language that’s exchanged among the banking system. So you can think about corporates or consumers. Whoever needs to send a wire transfer going to their bank, their bank will use this standard to send that payment. It makes the actual exchange of money happen in a very efficient and effective manner. So that’s that’s really what ISO is. It’s a standard. It’s a language that the financial institutions can speak to each other so that the the data, the payment instructions, all of the appropriate information is exchanged.

Jens Seidl 00:07:16 Okay. And just to to give an example, maybe I’ve heard the example often being mentioned that addresses for instance in the old world he would just have address line one, address line two, and if you’re lucky maybe zip code and town. And now that’s a lot more granular. I will just specify it’s a street address or it’s this or it’s a postbox and so on and so on. Is that one? Is that a good example for the kind of enhancement of the data quality that we get out of ISO?

Shonda Clay 00:07:44 It is it’s very it’s data rich in that way.

Shonda Clay 00:07:46 But it also has payment instructions. So you can think about all of the information for the payment can go into the ISO standard, which is different than perhaps payment instruction going. But other information that you might commonly find in an advice or a bill would be separated. So this would allow for that kind of of information to happen in the payment itself, which makes it very data rich.

Jens Seidl 00:08:12 Okay, great. And and I guess as with all standards, the standard will only be able to deliver benefits if people actually use it, right? So I think one step is the technical implementation, but now it’s convincing users to actually fill all of that rich data. What’s what’s happening in that space.

Shonda Clay 00:08:30 Yeah, that’s exactly where we’re at now. It’s really working with financial institutions and in the industry more broadly. So corporates so that such that for broad adoption of the ISO format leads to operational efficiencies and benefits, right? So that’s why people will use it because there’s benefits to them. So when the messages can carry this richer data, the benefits are huge.

Shonda Clay 00:08:55 I mean, there’s a lot to it. But let me just go through some of them kind of the primary ones. So straight through end to end processing efficiency. And so this is really key before ISO, payments flow between FIs and as I mentioned earlier, the information about the payment flow between the sender and receiver. And then at the end of the day, someone on each side would reconcile all of that and make sure that all the payment information matched. But because the new format is rich enough, it can hold that information. So there’s it’s more efficient when you’re processing to match up the data. Also, when you think about business to business commerce. So in that context, this data contained in ISO 20022 can enable automation of the cash application when a payment is received by the payee, so the straight through processing reduces manual intervention, streamlines reconciliations and provides access to funds sooner than the payment than any other payment method. So all of that information is there and and the receiver gets those funds?

Jens Seidl 00:10:06 Yes.

Jens Seidl 00:10:06 Yeah, that makes perfect sense. But I guess another enabler that’s needed to make this happen is your standard software applications, right? Your your oracles, your SAP, your QuickBooks, Sage, whatever they’re called. I guess when they start adopting the standard as well, that will make it easier for the user to, well, almost automatically start populating that data. Is that do you see good adoption on that side as well? Is that on on those companies kind of roadmaps.

Shonda Clay 00:10:35 And those specific companies I won’t speak to, but I will say yes, we see that in roadmaps and we’re working on that this fall. We have multiple collaborative opportunities with many corporate treasurers and other software fintech companies to think about or to talk about that. And I know the financial institutions are definitely working with their corporate customers to utilize the data as well.

Jens Seidl 00:11:01 Excellent. Great. Well, we got a lot more to talk about. So if it’s okay with you, we move on from, ISO 20022 and talk a little bit about Fedwire Funds and NSS, and the, at least consultation around whether to expand the opening hours.

Jens Seidl 00:11:16 Do you want to tell us a little bit about that?

Shonda Clay 00:11:19 Yeah, I would love to. So the Fedwire Funds again, the wire transfer system that the Federal Reserve manages and NSS is our national settlement service that goes along with the the Fedwire Funds application. So last year, the Federal Reserve’s Board of governors collected comments from the industry at large on its proposal to expand the operating days of the Federal Reserve banks, Fedwire Funds. And now. So what they were asking about was expanding to include weekends and holidays. So the way that works. The board sends out a request for information and give some amount of days that that is out there. I can’t recall if this was 60 or 90 days, but it’s usually a very good amount of time and then the public can provide feedback should they choose. And they do. And so we have that feedback. The Board of Governors is currently assessing what the industry told us. But let me tell you about how fed wire funds and NSS operates today, which is Monday through Friday excluding holidays.

Shonda Clay 00:12:27 And then we operate Fedwire Funds22 hours a day in those five days, and NSS 21.5 hours across those five days. So as part of this comment process, you can see we’re looking to expand that to the weekend’s other central banks that we work with around the globe. We now have considered this are considering expanding their wire transfer business. Some have done, I think, similar kinds of requests to the industry. So so this has been really interesting, not only for us, but to work with our counterparts and see how they’re going as well.

Jens Seidl 00:13:05 Indeed, I guess we’re going to talk about faster payments in a minute as well. And the FedNow system, I guess someone could flippantly say, well, now that there is a real time payment rail and that is available 24 over seven, why would you have to extend those hours as well? What’s what’s the case for that? What’s the necessity?

Shonda Clay 00:13:23 It is and we do hear that and it is a good question. Bottom line the Fedwire Funds is a high value transfer system.

Shonda Clay 00:13:32 So it allows much larger dollars in our case to be transmitted per transaction. So it’s a penny shy of 10 billion. So that’s why this is different than that is a high value system. We think of it as a wholesale system and maybe FedNow our instant payments is more of a retail system. But but there are differences involved there. So that’s why they’re not a one for one exchange. They can be. I mean, if you have a lower dollar amount in a Fedwire fund that probably could and should be used and the fed now serves, we want we want the industry to have choice. But also there is an idea of right payment right rail. So we think about two.

Jens Seidl 00:14:15 Okay. And is there also an aspect you mentioned other central banks around the world that to enable again on a wholesale basis, cross-border payments, you’d also have to adjust your operating hours to make that happen as say, Europe or the UK or other places expand their opening hours for their rigs systems.

Shonda Clay 00:14:35 Yeah, those are the fun conversations to come, I think.

Shonda Clay 00:14:39 what does that look like? How would we think about a cross-border wholesale payment, those kinds of things. But certainly we all have different time zones, as you and I are in right now. So so we have to time zones is certainly one consideration, I think, among many that would have to be thought through as one would think about exchanging wire transfers, high value payments cross-border enough.

Jens Seidl 00:15:02 Yeah. So you said the board is now assessing next steps. Is there a timeline when we expect to hear, decisions around that or is that open at the moment.

Shonda Clay 00:15:11 Since they’re doing the assessment? I don’t have the exact timeline. It usually takes several months for them to because we get a lot of comments. So to go through the comments and categorize them, I don’t think it will be. Well, I don’t even want to speculate. How about that? But I’m pretty sure I know their timeline.

Jens Seidl 00:15:29 Okay. That’s great. Well, we’re going to watch this space and see what happens. I’m curious to see what the outcome is going to be.

Jens Seidl 00:15:36 Good. Well we mentioned FedNow in instant payment. Shall we move on to that. Yes. Good. So FedNow has been live for I don’t know. It must be more than a year now for sure, right? Yes.

Shonda Clay 00:15:47 We just had our second birthday.

Jens Seidl 00:15:49 All right, well, happy birthday. And we’ve heard this before. We also had episodes here on this podcast about how the adoption rate has been really good, actually exceeding expectations. So what’s what’s happening now from your perspective with that now, where are we now? What are the next steps.

Shonda Clay 00:16:08 Yeah. So it so instant payments we call that FedNow that is the product that the Federal Reserve offers. So what we’re seeing is adoption and demand and use cases are growing quickly. We also do some surveys and work within the industry. So recently most recently we’ve seen 86% of businesses in the US, and 74% of consumers say that they use faster payments or instant payments in 2023. So going back a little bit of time, and 74% of businesses and 79% of consumers look to their financial institution to provide these services.

Shonda Clay 00:16:49 So that’s really in the space of of FedNow that we’re kind of tracking what is that demand. So that’s demand outside from survey results. So we really think that offering an instant payment solution can help financial institutions with innovation retaining customers. Certainly some are looking at it as a revenue source driving revenue. And also there’s opportunity to save cost once you’re live on the system. So here’s where we are with the FedNow the instant payments rail. We have more than 1400 financial institutions, and we have them all across the United States to all 50 states have financial institutions that are engaged. And we expect the service to continue expanding. And this really will help us enable ubiquitous state for instant payments in the US. So that’s something that we’re really monitoring use cases. I get this question a lot, which is why instant payments, how would I use it? So let me tell you that the use cases we’re seeing across both businesses and consumers, as we work with the financial institutions, there’s digital wallet, defunding, instant payroll bill pay, real estate transactions, micro deposit account verifications, online marketplace seller payouts and things of that nature online and more.

Shonda Clay 00:18:11 So we’re really working with financial institutions and we’re open to the you know, the FedNow system is very open to the use cases that that are beginning to develop.

Jens Seidl 00:18:23 It’s instant payroll, I have to admit, is one that surprises me, because what I’ve heard in other countries is that payroll was was mentioned as one of those where you probably don’t have to migrate to instant payments because it’s very predictable, it’s very frequent at certain dates and actually including some delay in there to make sure you don’t make any mistakes could be a good thing. So what do you know what’s driving the demand for instant payroll?

Shonda Clay 00:18:49 What we’re seeing at this point is really in this gig economy. So you get a job, you get a gig today and you’re paid at the end of the gig, whether that’s today or tomorrow, but you get an instant payment and we are really seeing that take off. We’re also seeing it in some service industries, like fast food industry, where workers, you know, who are working within the fast food establishment are paid at the end of the shift, or maybe at the end of 2 or 3 days of a shift, but not weekly or bi weekly, which is maybe more common in the US for payroll, so that those are things we’re seeing to drive it.

Jens Seidl 00:19:29 That’s interesting that those are perfectly valid use cases. Absolutely. I’ve worked for a short time in the service industry as well, and it was usually you’d get your tips at the end of the day in cash. Now, with people paying less in cash, it makes sense that you want an instant gratification mechanism to have people take their tips back home.

Shonda Clay 00:19:48 Okay.

Jens Seidl 00:19:49 That’s very interesting. But also looking at some other countries where faster payments have really taken off in these, these hockey stick kind of adoption rates, often that included new functionality to use faster payments at point of sale. Is that also something that you’ve already seen developing in the US, or do you expect that to happen soon or are there no indications yet?

Shonda Clay 00:20:11 We’re working with financial institutions in the industry more broadly to to think about or where that’s possible. But we are hearing that there’s interest and looking further into it again, lots of steps obviously, to make that happen at point of sale. But we would be from a fed now perspective. Of course, we’re very open to to working towards that particular use case.

Jens Seidl 00:20:37 Okay good. And from a personal perspective also I’ve never used faster payments in the US. Of course living in in Germany myself. How’s the service priced from a consumer perspective? Is it the same cost as a normal wire transfer or is it more costly or how does that compare?

Shonda Clay 00:20:53 So we I don’t we don’t charge the consumers here. So it’s how the financial institution has set that up with their corporate clients or with their consumer clients. We charge just a base fee to the financial institution, and then they are packaging together instant payments with other payment services, perhaps, and just doing all kinds of things to think about how they are using it as a revenue source. So there’s there’s no one answer at this point, I think. And of course, there’s always competition between the financial institutions. But it’s new. And I think that will start to shake out a little more as we go.

Jens Seidl 00:21:31 Okay. Well that’s encouraging to hear that it’s being used in a competitive way because competition typically drives good consumer results.

Jens Seidl 00:21:38 Right. It was, at least different in Germany, where for a long time the faster payments were more expensive than normal wire transfers. And that put a lot of people off using them. And actually in Germany, regulation was passed. Then on Europe, regulation was passed to make sure it’s at the same cost. So let’s really change consumer behavior here. But it doesn’t sound like that’s that’s necessary in the US. If there’s already healthy competition and people packaging it differently and not the same across the board.

Shonda Clay 00:22:07 Right.

Shonda Clay 00:22:07 We will certainly see how it goes. We we looked carefully at other countries as we were not only building for now, but bringing it to market to see how they were doing things, which has been quite helpful. You know, we weren’t first, so it was quite helpful to learn from others.

Shonda Clay 00:22:23 Great.

Jens Seidl 00:22:23 Well, another topic that’s been discussed a lot, often in conjunction with instant payments, is fraud and scams. We’ve had lots of discussions around that at our payment focus conferences in the last couple of years.

Jens Seidl 00:22:37 And I know that the fed has also done some really good work in that space. So we wanted to talk a little bit about that. Maybe do you want to start with giving you a bit of an overview of what you’ve been observing happening in that space?

Shonda Clay 00:22:49 Yeah. So everything we’ve talked to this to this point has been exciting and interesting and new. And then and then fraud is something we have to talk about, but it’s not nearly as exciting. So just in the US. Fraud is growing. I think that’s most likely true. Other places for last year, 2024, the US Federal Trade Commission reported that consumers lost over 12 billion to scams, which was an increase of about 2.5 billion from 2023. So that’s a year over year increase. And and at the same time, scam reports. So those that were reported remained flat year over year. But the amount of money being scammed was higher. So of course that had all of our attention in the US as we think about fraud prevention.

Jens Seidl 00:23:39 Yes.

Jens Seidl 00:23:39 Well, it’s interesting you already make the differentiation between fraud and scam there, and maybe we should spend a bit of time exactly on that.

Shonda Clay 00:23:46 Yes. And I did want to say one thing about fraud we’re really seeing have seen a rise in fraud and scams, as I just mentioned, scams particularly, but really seen a rise. But we’ve really seen a rise up of reported cheque frog in the US, which is of course a growing concern to the overall payments industry. So let me talk a minute about the work we’re doing as from the Federal Reserve’s perspective, working with the industry. You know, as a system operator, we’re also a catalyst for payment system improvements. And so we’re trying to help educate, build awareness of the fraud landscape and and create resources to help financial institutions identify, talk about, mitigate fraud. And again, I’ve said this a lot already, but we really are working collaboratively with the industry here. As in everything else we do, it payments is a team sport. And so we’re working together.

Shonda Clay 00:24:44 So we’ve developed several tools. And so this gets to what are the differences. So the tools that we’ve developed to help the industry to really work with financial institutions. The first one I’ll mention is the scam classifier model. So this supports consistent detailed classifications I think using the same words, calling the particular kinds of scams the same things. And it also works towards the consistent reporting analysis. Identification of scams so that if we’re talking about them together, we’re using the same language. We can really try to facilitate proactive mitigation and preventions of the scam. And we also developed the first thing we developed, in fact, which is now five years old, was the fraud classifier model. And this addresses the industry wide challenge of inconsistent payment fraud classification. So again, giving the fraud a name and talking about it with the same language and being open and collaborative to share about the fraud so that we can work together as an industry to help prevent those. Yes. One more. I’ll just mention, synthetic identity is also something that we’re really working on in the US.

Shonda Clay 00:25:58 So we developed a synthetic identity mitigation toolkit to help educate the overall industry on identification and how to help mitigate to address synthetic identity fraud. This is an online tool as well. That is available across the industry. So there’s several reports. There’s lots of other things. But those are kind of the the models or the tools to try to help work with the industry to address fraud.

Jens Seidl 00:26:24 Okay. And I mean, you already mentioned, check fraud as one example, where I guess, kind of counterintuitively, we were seeing that picking up again. Sounds like old hat, right? It’s been around forever. Why would there be a renaissance there? But are there other areas where you also see things standing out where certain types of scams, certain type of fraud is, is picking up more than others?

Shonda Clay 00:26:49 So I don’t know if types of so scams are a type of fraud. And yes, that’s the one we’ve really seen picking up in the last several years. I think I don’t know the nature of it, other than people seem to be swindled a little bit from a scam perspective, and sometimes it’s the consumer is caught unaware they’re caught up in a scam.

Shonda Clay 00:27:11 That is a scheme. There are a few other types, but that seems to be the one most prominent is in the US right now, or at least that we seem to hear about from our the financial institutions.

Jens Seidl 00:27:24 Yeah, and I guess that’s the one of the big challenges that the industry is facing, that this is not so much about safeguard your Pin code and don’t give away your password and make sure your computer doesn’t get hacked or, or your credit card doesn’t get copied. But this is about people willingly making payments because they’re being tricked into doing so. It’s a very different quality of problem that we’re dealing with. Right.

Shonda Clay 00:27:48 That’s right. That’s that’s exactly.

Shonda Clay 00:27:51 From a scam perspective. That’s what’s happening. And in.

Shonda Clay 00:27:53 Fact.

Shonda Clay 00:27:54 To try to better understand and work in this space. Just recently, the Federal Reserve Board, along with the United States Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which we call the OCC, and the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation issued a request for information to all stakeholders.

Shonda Clay 00:28:15 So to the public in the US and what they’re requesting is input on potential actions to help consumers, businesses and financial institutions mitigate the risk of payments fraud. So you have these three organizations coming together to ask very specifically about fraud mitigation. So they really outlined in this and this is active people are responding right now. But they they ask in five potential areas for improvement in collaboration. Those include external collaboration among the agencies, consumer, business, industry, education by the agencies and the Federal Reserve banks to educate even more about payment fraud. The third area is regulation and Supervision to mitigate payments fraud, including opportunities that may be related to discussing cheque fraud. Fourth is payments fraud data collection. So again with reporting and data collection and information sharing. We have to share information in this space. And then finally the Federal Reserve Banks operator tools. That’s the area I’m in. The operator tools and services to help reduce payments fraud. We have multiple what else can we do? What what does the industry think we should be doing more of? So that’s where we are in the fraud space.

Shonda Clay 00:29:37 Again, team sport to work together to try to to mitigate, identify and mitigate.

Jens Seidl 00:29:43 Absolutely. And and I think another thing that’s been discussed often now is that that team needs to grow as well. And some new categories of team players need to come in, for instance, telecommunication companies or other social media companies, because a lot of the fraud and scams scans are enabled through telecoms, through social media. So there’s, I think, a growing awareness that there should be accountability with with those players in the market as well to help mitigate those risks.

Shonda Clay 00:30:13 I agree with you.

Shonda Clay 00:30:14 I was at a session last fall, so nearly a year ago thinking about just that, and I heard from a couple of telecoms in the US that that were very interested in engaging in being invited to be a part of that thinking and planning. So that’s really progressing. I think in a way that you’re describing it just must.

Jens Seidl 00:30:35 Absolutely. And actually, I’ve again, on a personal experience, I was very surprised. I had a phone call just last week where my phone was indicating this could be a fraudulent call.

Jens Seidl 00:30:47 I don’t know whether that was the phone’s operating system or whether it’s already the the network operator who’s providing that kind of information, but there’s definitely work being done in that space. So that’s that’s really encouraging.

Shonda Clay 00:30:57 I see similar. I will. Every now and then. See. This may be a scam or that you know I see. Little comments and that’s I that’s a lot of people in the industry working together. But that’s what we need even more of I agree.

Jens Seidl 00:31:11 Absolutely. Good. Well, we said this was one of the more. Well, not bleak, but more serious and harder to tackle kind of issues that we’re dealing with. But I don’t want to end our conversation on that. maybe if you’re up for that. I know nobody has a crystal ball. I assume you don’t have either, but if you’re trying to look ahead in the US, the next, say, 3 to 5 years in the payment landscape, what big, exciting things do you think are going to happen there, especially from a Fed’s point of view? Of course.

Shonda Clay 00:31:40 I think full adoption of of instant payments in the US is really exciting. The opportunities for innovation from all different spectrums of not only the financial services industry, but of corporate, of the corporates and the use cases they will have that they are just bringing to the table. It’s really going to help payments move forward a lot. And and who benefits is the receiver? Certainly. And in many cases the end consumer. So there is a lot of opportunity there. There’s a lot of work that you can imagine, a lot of work that we are doing to try to further those use cases. That’s that’s incredibly exciting. Secondarily, I have to mention from we talked quite a bit about ISO and the best is yet to come getting on the standard which job getting on the same standard for ISO 20022 was job one. But now working with the industry, working with the treasurers and corporates and so forth, to utilize this rich data again is so beneficial to the efficiency and the effectiveness of those payments. As we as we lean in forward, the next 3 to 5 years are exciting, just really exciting in payments.

Shonda Clay 00:32:51 the last 3 to 5 years were really exciting in pavement. So we picked a great industry.

Jens Seidl 00:32:57 Absolutely. And that’s why I love this industry as well, because there’s so much innovation and excitement everywhere where you look. People are really excited about the possibilities. and yeah, I’ll share your optimism and your excitement for the next 3 to 5 years. Shonda, I think our time is running out. So thank you so much for being with us today. Really appreciate that.

Shonda Clay 00:33:19 Thank you. I really appreciate being with you.

Jens Seidl 00:33:22 Thank you. All right. Well that concludes today’s episode. Thank you all for listening in. Please do like follow. Do whatever you need to make sure you don’t miss our next episode on your platform. And thank you for listening. Bye bye.

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