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As EVP and head of enterprise payments at Truist, Chris Ward works with clients large and small across a variety of industries, and speaks with many CFOs. We spoke with him at the 2024 Association for Financial Professionals Conference to learn which payments trends will be top of mind for finance professionals heading into 2025.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What are you hearing from CFOs about payments?
Everybody is trying to do more with less in today's world…People really want simplicity in the way they do things. When they're interacting with their customers or their suppliers, they're looking for ways to do things in a more simple way. They want things to be more speedy, and speed means also transparency… And then the last thing is, everybody wants to operate in a safe, sound, and secure manner. People want to know that when they're transacting and doing payments, they're doing it in a safe way, and they're protecting themselves.
I hear that real-time payments are catching on rapidly.
I think that's really the next frontier of where payments are going…During COVID there was an acceleration of 24-7 business. Because you were stuck in your house, you could transact any hour of the day…People [were] transacting on Saturdays and Sundays and expecting that to work like any other day of the week. Real-time payments really enable you to do that, and it also enables you to have a richer experience.
Say you have a delivery company and you ran over somebody's mailbox. If you could give them $50 in 30 seconds to adjudicate that, you've now turned a negative situation into a positive situation. It's all done, not, “Oh, I'm going to send you a check, and it might come in two weeks.” It’s a completely great paradigm shift. And if you think back to people wanting speed, people wanting transparency, people wanting simple, it's the way of the future.
Are real-time payments riskier?
I would say it's no more or no less risky than any other form of payment. You have to have the right risk and fraud mitigation services associated with that. You’ve got to verify who you're going to actually make the payments to. And there’s lots of tools out there to enable that to happen.
What do you see on the horizon for 2025 in payments?
I think there's going to continue to be more adoption of real time payments. As a CFO, you might be faced with upgrading your ERP system and moving it to a more modern approach. Being able to more tightly integrate with your bank for more seamless payment processing through APIs…is going to be the next wave as folks are coming off their ERP upgrades. They're thinking about transforming the treasury function and making it more digital and [having] more integrated payment solutions with their financial institutions. That’s probably on the horizon for ’25 and beyond.