Instant payments used to be the headline. Now it’s table stakes.
Across corporate finance and treasury teams, the real shift is not only how fast money moves, but how well those payments are connected to everything else: data, workflows, liquidity, fraud controls, and user experience. Digital-first teams want business payments to feel as seamless as in their consumer lives. They expect real-time visibility, proactive status updates, and approvals that fit naturally into platforms they work with daily.
Those expectations will be front and center at Nacha’s “Smarter, Faster Payments” conference in April, where instant rails, new fraud rules, and emerging concepts like tokenized deposits will be filtered through a single question: how do we connect this all in a way that is natural and useful to the people actually working in the office of the CFO?
Nacha is the nonprofit that develops, governs, and administers the U.S. ACH (Automated Clearing House) Network, setting operating rules and standards for electronic low value payments, and it has a major interest in trends in payments modalities.
Bottomline’s Jessica Cheney is headed to the conference with embedded banking first among several priorities on her list. She is less focused on labels and more interested in what happens as digital-first finance teams increasingly demand banking their way: always on, seamlessly connected, with low friction across channels.
“Digital Natives” and the “Digital First” Unite, Resetting Expectations
In a recent interview, Cheney said she believes many banks are calibrating to an outdated baseline. “Banks are underestimating how quickly the digital native focus is coming to light,” she said. “Many banks still think that just offering instant payments in enough, but digital native teams are raising the bar to have instant be visible, embedded, and low friction.”
It begs the question: what is a “digital native” and a “digital first” payments team?
As Cheney sees it, “the digital natives” are not defined purely by age or generation. She likes the term because it captures both younger professionals who don’t remember a world without 5G mobile internet, and more experienced workers (“the digital first”), who are equally adept with digital tools. It’s a smart way to leverage skillsets and viewpoints.
What unites them all are expectations that come from our consumer lives. “We’ve long focused on things that are instant. That’s why everyone has Amazon Prime,” Cheney said, adding that, “Being a digital native goes beyond having a need for things to be instant. They’re expecting push status updates. They don’t want to go searching for information.”
In Cheney’s view, it’s the vaunted “consumerization” of B2B payments, finally scaling.
From Rail Access to Real Value
A shift in expectations is also changing what it means for a bank to compete in the faster payments game. Cheney drew a firm line between simply providing access to new rails and building a differentiated product on top of them. “Those that are merely making the rail available are not necessarily bringing in the value-add components,” she said.
“You might not be providing advice on how to use it as a liquidity tool,” she said, as one example. Deployed wisely, instant payments can also tighten working capital and make payment timing a precise lever instead of a blunt instrument.
On the receivables side, she sees chances to turn faster payments into relationship builders. When corporates accept real-time payments with clear remittance data, “they’re increasing their vendor relationship with buyers,” Cheney said.
Put another way, without advisory and the right tools, banks are leaving value (and money) on the table. She stressed that banks need to explain how to use instant to enhance collections, for data management around ISO 20022, “and as a conversational payment capability.”
Adding that kind of value is closely tied to how banks think about embedded banking itself.
Cheney believes embedded banking has “definitely hit the peak of its hype cycle.” What makes this moment different, she said, is that “it’s become a real business problem to solve, now, today,” and not just something for clever presentations.
Embedded banking can mean placing services inside an ERP system or enhancing a payments portal. Embracing open banking and APIs are core considerations in using this approach. Banks are “seriously thinking about open banking and how direct API access can be made easier for a larger population of customers,” Cheney said.
The net effect is broader than an integration checklist. “The whole thing has moved away from the tactical aspect of embedding capabilities into an ERP, to thinking about bringing the bank to the customer in any form, any place that customer wants,” Cheney said.
ISO, AI, And What Comes Next
Much is riding on the cutover to ISO 20022 that happened in late 2025. However, Cheney doesn’t expect banks to immediately harvest the potential. “I don’t think this is going to be the year we see banks taking advantage of the ISO 20022 benefits in a big way,” she said.
With a structured address deadline on the SWIFT side looming, she said “this is the cleanup year, the settling-in year, after the ISO and Fedwire changes last year.”
Cheney expects the most visible gains to begin when ISO 20022 data and AI tools mature more in unison. “The ISO format allows us to put a lot more tagged data into the payment flows,” she said, noting that AI is most valuable when it has a lot of data to digest.
She expects that combination to pay off in three big ways. First, “we’re going to be able to use that data set to help in deterring some fraud.” Second, she said “richer data paired with an AI tool will lead to operational efficiencies,” especially in cash allocation and remittance invoice matching. Third, using AI and data for behavioral analysis “may lead to improved cash flow forecasting in terms of understanding incoming payment behaviors and matching that to the strategies that we have for outbound payments.”
Having ISO 20022 as a ‘lingua franca’ for global payments is feeding directly into the growing willingness to explore new rails. Cheney pointed to “money movement on a distributed ledger, with stablecoin, with tokenized deposits,” as examples of “technology that’s been around for 10 years that finally people are finally considering.”
And if ISO 20022 followed a long arc getting to market, AI has been the opposite. Cheney said “Our collective comfort level with AI happened almost instantly” by comparison. To her, the next leap will be made by melding those two trends. Having “a common language, rich in data, with a tool [AI] that is ideally set to take advantage of it” is a foundation for new value creation. “We’re ripe for the next evolution of new things,” Cheney said.
At Nacha’s “Smarter, Faster Payments” conference, she expects these themes to play out directly. Cheney anticipates “a lot of discussion about the Nacha rule change in terms of obligation of payment originators from a fraud protection perspective.”
‘Faster payments’ is rather obviously on the Nacha 2026 agenda, and for good reason. “The numbers and volumes have started to pick up to the point where it’s been proven. It’s not a fad,” she said. “Now it’s more about how to make sure those payments are secure.”
Another hot topic will be tokenized deposits and related innovations. Attendees will be asking, “Should I be looking at tokenized deposits? Is it an opportunity or a threat? And if I don’t jump into this, am I going to be seen as a laggard versus an innovator?” Cheney said.
For any bank or provider trying to build an embedded banking strategy that endures, her message is unambiguous: understand the digital first audience, embrace the ISO 20022 common data language, and design for connectivity that users assume will available, mirroring their personal/consumer use of digital connectivity and payment technologies.