Recently Released Triennial Study by the Federal Reserve Notes Ongoing Trends in Payments

The Federal Reserve recently released their triennial 2019 Payments Study, which tracked payments across payment rails, including cards, ACH, wires, and Faster Payments. In addition, this was the first time person-to-person (P2P) payments volume has been tracked in the study. From 2015 to 2018, the value of P2P payments exploded, from $2.98 billion to $20.76 billion.

In addition, the study noted a number of interesting trends, including:

• The shift from “reloadable to non-reloadable” prepaid cards, with 29% growth in use of non-reloadable and 26% increase in stored value (non-reloadable) prepaid debit;
• Consumer adoption of wires to send money, growing 12.9% vs. commercial wire growth of 2.4% during the 3 year period (though overall, commercial wire volume dwarfs consumer wire volume); and,
• Increasing ACH volume, with debit volume outpacing credit volume in 2018.

This is the last Fed Payment Study that will not include significant volume in Faster Payments, such as the RTP Network. A possibility is that these credit-push solutions will siphon off even more volume from the ACH rail.