LAS VEGAS — Is the future of person-to-person payments for financial institutions to charge users fees – or will the service produce plentiful results without any fees at all to members? Right there was a crucial difference in thinking among panelists at the BAI Payments Connect conference which opened Monday in Las Vegas.

The setting: a packed room, standing room only, for a panel titled: “Person to Person Payments: An Established Product That's Evolving.”

On one side: Sanjeev Dheer, president of the CashEdge division at Fiserv. By his thinking, users will gladly pay for the convenience of handling small and incidental charges with easy to use online tools.

On the other side: Arkady Fridman, financial innovations business development manager at PayPal who said, firstly, financial institutions would be saving money by not having to process paper checks and, beyond that, they will benefit by gaining visibility into transactions that had been opaque because cash was exchanged.

“This is much more valuable than fee income,” said Fridman.

Note, however, PayPal wants to collect fees on consumer-to-business transactions. Where it appears to want no fees is in true person-to-person.

Who is right?

The one fact – agreed to by all panelists – is that P2P remains very early stage. And how it will shape up is way too early to call. But now the battle lines are getting drawn.

Complete your profile to continue reading and get FREE access to CUTimes.com, part of your ALM digital membership.

Your access to unlimited CUTimes.com content isn’t changing.
Once you are an ALM digital member, you’ll receive:

  • Breaking credit union news and analysis, on-site and via our newsletters and custom alerts
  • Weekly Shared Accounts podcast featuring exclusive interviews with industry leaders
  • Educational webcasts, white papers, and ebooks from industry thought leaders
  • Critical coverage of the commercial real estate and financial advisory markets on our other ALM sites, GlobeSt.com and ThinkAdvisor.com
NOT FOR REPRINT

© 2024 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.