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Ron Herman, CEO at Sionic and a member of the Faster ment (RfP), that could help move B2B payments into the
Payments Council, an industry group that has been guid- real-time era, and the Fed is said to be working on a simi-
ing the transition to real-time payments, is betting POS lar capability.
transactions will also migrate to real-time networks. "We
have built a POS integration platform that will be ready Because real-time networks are based on a credit-push
for testing in April," Herman said. In January, Sionic di- model, a consumer (or business) cannot give a biller per-
vulged an agreement with payments technology compa- mission to debit their bank account, as they would when
ny SpacePointe creating a pay-by-bank service that will paying by card or ACH. It's a feature devised to protect
enable a merchant to accept payments that get instantly account holders from fraud. TCH also uses tokenization to
transferred from customers' bank accounts to merchants' secure payments. "We think there's a lot of security we can
bank accounts. bring to the ecosystem," Waterhouse said.

SpacePointe merchants will use Ekikart, a mobile POS With RfP, a biller can send a request for payment directly
system developed for small business and white labeled by to a customer's FI through the network, whereupon the
SpacePoint. SpacePoint expects to enable the new payment customer gives the FI the okay to send a payment. Fiserv's
capability across "at least forty thousand merchant loca- Jain describes it as "a prompt for a credit," that can be sent
tions in the next 18 to 24 months," said Sayu Abend, the to consumers as well as trading partners. "We think [real-
company's CEO. time payments] is really going to gain a lot of traction with
small businesses once RfP becomes more common," Jain
Making real-time work for B2B said.
Business-to-business payments are the next frontier for re-
al-time payments. It's taking more time because B2B pay- Patti Murphy is senior editor at the Green Sheet and self-described pay-
ments are more complex, and there's a higher risk profile, ments maven of the fourth estate. She also is co-host of the Merchant
stated Aparna Girish, vice president of product at TabaPay. Sales Podcast.

TCH created a message format, known as request for pay-