Treasury teams planning a payments transition should keep in mind several key factors that may affect the initiative's success:

Think through all the ramifications of 24x7x365 transaction settlement. Most existing payment systems and banking services function five days a week during business hours. They are closed on nights, weekends, and holidays. With new services like RTP providing payment settlement on a continuous basis, companies need to consider how activity during traditional off hours will impact accounting, liquidity management, and cash forecasting on both sides of the transaction.
Corporate treasury professionals should think about changes not just from a back-office processing perspective, but also from a marketing and sales perspective. How will the company leverage new payment options in interactions with their customers and business partners? How will it communicate about the new ability to more quickly process refunds, claims payments, urgent vendor payments, or instant collection of payments from first-time customers?
RTP leverages the ISO 20022 standard. Companies moving to real-time payments should consider the initiative a catalyst to move to ISO 20022, if they haven't already taken that leap. In addition, if a treasury team will use the ISO 20022 protocol for message exchange with their banking partners for their real-time payments, they should also leverage it for traditional payment channels such as wire transfers, ACH, and check services. Consistency across the payment types will reduce internal friction and may streamline future implementation of additional payment options.
Payment process transformations require strong project management. Although banking partners can help guide the initiative, and can provide resources to assist in the transition, organizations must also allocate sufficient resources to build effective connectivity with their banks and technology providers.

Throughout all steps of this process, the corporate treasury team should maintain an ongoing and consistent dialogue with internal stakeholders. Before the new payment method goes live, treasury should explore the change's potential impact—in terms of both benefits and challenges—to all the company's customers and business partners. This foundational knowledge will enable treasury to support corporate leadership and the project team as they develop an action plan and identify which initiatives to move on early, which to wait for, and what path to take moving forward.

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