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Real-time payments take off

Hello and welcome to Protocol | Fintech! Why the U.S. lags in real time, Coinbase listing's impact and Ant Group's about-face.
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The pandemic accelerated the growth of real-time payments as the use of cash and checks declined. But will real-time payments become the de facto way to send money? And whose system will come out on top?
Most payments still take days. Real-time payments jumped 41% in 2020 to 70.3 billion transactions globally. But that's less than a tenth of the world's payments, according to a report by ACI Worldwide.
Moving money matters. Delays cause businesses to hold onto cash while they wait for payments to clear.
Real-time payments are taking off across the globe. The best examples are overseas.
There's some progress in the U.S. Here are the efforts to watch.
There's one big worry. Real-time payments can mean real-time fraud. That means fraud detection has to get much faster.
— Tomio Geron
The future is positively digital. Ready? Consumers, investors and shareholders are savvier than ever. Everyone needs to create more engaging experiences that keep pace with today's new expectations. See how you can stay ahead with next-gen technologies that deliver on what matters most.
Must read: Protocol's new Manual, "The Rise of Retail Investing," takes a deep dive into the trends upending global markets.
New opportunity: Social media has transformed the rules of investing. Some startups are jumping in to try to tame the chaos.
Timely warning: Regulation could ramp up, said Jina Choi, the former head of the SEC's San Francisco office. Companies shouldn't assume they can just ask forgiveness.What do you think is the most exciting fintech trend?
Data is opening doors and pushing boundaries on what is possible for financial services, from the products you create, to customers you serve, to the ways services are accessed. The onramp is huge but fast and the players are increasing and moving at warp speed: It is an extremely exciting time to be a part of the disruption and where it will all shake out.
What was your biggest professional blunder and what did you learn from it?
You forget that colleagues can't read your mind. One day I heard an employee describe the company in a way that no longer held true and I realized that I underestimated and assumed everyone knew what I knew. I wasn't communicating enough. It was a good reminder that I needed to establish regular feedback loops so that our entire team can operate on the same wavelength. Maintaining this commitment to communication has been helpful, as we've grown many times over in the past six years.
What problem in fintech would you like to see someone solve?
Owning real estate is the biggest traditional driver of wealth. Bringing more people into home ownership through mortgages without creating the systemic risk we saw from the Great Recession is a big idea. When people hear about the non-prime consumer and getting greater financial access, credit risk comes up. In context to the Great Recession, large mortgages were being given out without vetting to those who simply couldn't afford them. Today, using machine learning and AI to create highly intelligent underwriting algorithms, we're able to minimize that risk quite well. The more we can ease people back into the system through smaller products, the more people could someday get mortgages.
That's the loan-to-deposit ratio at top banks at the end of March. It hit the lowest point in 36 years of weekly Fed tracking as loans dropped and deposits jumped.
The future is positively digital. Ready? Consumers, investors and shareholders are savvier than ever. Everyone needs to create more engaging experiences that keep pace with today's new expectations. See how you can stay ahead with next-gen technologies that deliver on what matters most.
Thanks for reading — see you Friday.
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