What We Learned at Smarter Faster Payments 2022

In early May, Modern Treasury sponsored the 2022 Smarter Faster Payments Conference in Nashville. Over a dozen team members flew to the well-known city of honky-tonks ready to talk banks and eat some tasty bbq. It was our biggest engagement yet.

Modern Treasury at the Conference

Sponsoring the event’s mobile app brought recognition to our logo before attendees stepped on the show floor. To help familiarize them with what we do once they got to the show floor, we built our first booth and outfitted it with demos. It was a hub for our team to meet with banks and companies to hear about the not-so-subtle pains of moving high value payments today.

CTO Sam Aarons hosted a Deep Dive session called, “Open Banking for U.S. Corporates Avoiding the Pitfalls” with Daniel Chao, Senior Product Manager at Marqeta. Sam and Daniel fielded questions on what we can learn from open banking’s drawn out implementation in the EU, the need for standardization in open banking, and why open banking is an open frontier for companies.

Growing Partnership with Nacha

Smarter Faster Payments, organized by Nacha, hosted more than 2,000 banks and companies to discuss the challenges in the payments industry today while taking advantage of what is transforming it.

Attending Smarter Faster was a component of our growing partnership with Nacha. Earlier this year, Modern Treasury became Nacha’s Preferred Partner for Payment Operations. As part of our mission to modernize money movement, this partnership also underscores our commitment to the growth and development of the ACH ecosystem.

Four years ago, when Modern Treasury was started, our founders picked up a copy of the Nacha Operating Rules & Guidelines and spent the early days of the company combing through all of its details. Now, as Modern Treasury has grown to 140+ people, the milestone of sponsoring the conference arrives as we see ACH growing even more. Nacha recently raised the Same Day ACH per payment limit to $1 million in March and reported a 15.5% increase in business-to-business payments from the first quarter of 2021.

Key Takeaways: A Tech-Forward Path

So what mattered most to the attendees (the majority being banks) at this conference? Here is what we found out.

• For banks, technology is the future of customer relationships. Many of our conversations were focused on how else banks can meet the high expectations of customer relationships today. Our bank partners and tech-forward banks understand that a winning strategy for success includes the right software tools.
• Real-time payments are here. With the establishment of RTP and the pending arrival of FedNow, there were several sessions about the real time payments infrastructure, how the realities of RTP look for clients, and exploring more use cases.
• Compliance is jamming the queue. Running a compliance program is like trying to move through molasses. It’s slow. Speaking with one bank executive about it, they said that compliance was taking up 50% of their time. We knew this was a roadblock for some customers, but to hear more about this from attendees highlighted how much companies and banks need to make compliance a faster, smoother undertaking.‍

This tech-forward thread is not surprising. We saw it running through most of our conversations with bank representatives at the conference. Plus, the session topics filling rooms and sparking questions were all about real time payments, compliance, and fraud.

We owe a thanks to Nacha for bringing this conference back to in-person and for welcoming us to an event where we could discuss what lies ahead with ACH and the broader payments landscape.

Coming up in early summer, we're hosting a webinar on Managing Fraud and Risk on the ACH Network. You can learn more and register here.