Main Street Matters Blog

A lot has changed in the 15 years that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been in federal conservatorship, including a restoration of the health of the mortgage market and the financial strength of these housing-focused enterprises. What hasn’t changed is the need for the federal government to follow established law and ensure its conservatorship of Fannie and Freddie is temporary.

FedNow launched on July 20—with eager anticipation from the payments industry. But in the past month, we’ve not heard much about transaction volume, use cases, or user experiences. Fortunately, our senior vice president of payments industry relations, Nick Denning, has been following FedNow closely and shared with me his insider’s view on where things stand for FedNow and community banks.

It’s been an exciting week at ICBA. After months of behind-the-scenes work to fulfill our vision of building an online national professional network exclusively for community bankers, our ICBA Community officially launched July 11. The numbers speak to its overwhelming reception by ICBA members.

We urged the FDIC to finalize the rule as proposed and applauded the agency for using an assessment base that will result in no special assessments for any community bank with less than $5 billion in assets.

The FedNow Service’s launch is a milestone in the Fed’s payments improvement journey, but it does not mark the end of the path. In the near term, ICBA urges community banks to focus on faster payments adoption.

July 1 is the compliance date for the “clarification” to Regulation II, which the Board of the Federal Reserve System approved in its final rule last October. While this requirement has applied to card-present transactions for a decade, it now also explicitly pertains to CNP payments.

In recent years, community banks across the nation have seen a drastic rise in check fraud. To compound the issue, many community banks are faced with challenges getting funds reimbursed from the banks of first deposit and are left to reimburse affected customers even when the community banks aren’t liable for the fraud.

They say, "success begets success" and in the case of the ICBA ThinkTECH Accelerator program this timeless belief holds true. Before we even hit the halfway point on our fifth accelerator program, which kicked off on April 24, we found out that we’d reached capacity for both in-person and virtual bank visits.

When it comes to digital payments, we’ve come a long way. Global mobile payment transactions are valued at over $2 trillion, and more than three-quarters of consumers cite their preference for banking digitally.

Friendly fraud is on the rise, now accounting for up to 75% of all chargebacks. From instances of kids using their parents’ cards to purchase items to flat-out falsification to reverse an overspend, friendly fraud occurs when a cardholder disputes a legitimate transaction as fraud with the hope of having those funds returned.