Corporate treasurers in the United States have a new opportunity to influence the evolution of the nation’s payments system.

The US Faster Payments Council (FPC) is particularly interested in recruiting treasury teams to participate in a series of work groups, each focusing on a particular advancement or challenge. There are 11 work groups. Three established examples include Instant Recurring Payments, Cross-Border Payments, and Fraud and Scam Mitigation.

Treasury teams from Walmart and Netflix are already involved in the projects. Bentonville, Arkansas-based FPC has plenty of space for more treasurers, and the benefits are obvious.

“All 11 work groups are active and welcoming new members,” said Angela Hendershott, FPC’s Senior Vice President of Association Operations. “The FPC’s 2026 strategic roadmap places particular emphasis on expanding participation from business end users – especially corporate treasurers. Their involvement ensures that emerging standards reflect real world corporate needs rather than purely technical or theoretical perspectives.”

The most recently created work groups are Faster Payments User Experience, Instant Payments Data Optimisation, and Exception Resolution for Account-Based Payments.

The others are Education & Awareness, Financial Inclusion, Business Benefits of B2B Instant Payments, Operational Considerations for Instant & Immediate Payments, and Digital Assets in the Financial Industry.

New York-based global financial services giant BNY has representation in the Instant Recurring Payments group. Eralda Hasani, Head of Domestic Payments Products at BNY, tells Treasury Today that the work groups offer insights into industry best practices to benefit the broader financial community, including smaller institutions and the underserved.

“That collaboration is increasingly focused on practical outcomes for corporate treasurers: enabling just-in-time payments that reduce idle cash, improving vendor payment workflows and helping clients maximise yield on short-term liquidity by moving money more precisely and predictably,” Hasani said.

“We also see significant potential in agentic AI, systems that can autonomously manage payment timing, flag anomalies and drive cash flow optimisation decisions with minimal manual intervention,” Hasani adds, emphasising too that “the FPC is an important venue for establishing the guardrails and standards that will make that kind of intelligent automation trustworthy at scale.”

The FPC views these four work groups as particularly aligning with “day-to-day treasury responsibilities”:

• Business Benefits of B2B Instant Payments: defining ERP integration strategies and helping the industry transition away from legacy payment methods.

• Instant Payments Data Optimisation: shaping how ISO 20022 is leveraged to deliver the rich remittance data necessary for true straight through reconciliation.

• Exception Resolution for Account-Based Payments: designing protocols for disputes and errors in a 24/7/365 environment where payments are irrevocable.

• Cross-Border Payments: addressing liquidity management and operational friction as international payments move toward real time settlement.

Hendershott, who oversees the work groups, says “the engine of the FPC” is those groups.

“They bring together stakeholders from across the faster payments ecosystem – business end users, financial institutions, payment processors, service providers, and consumer organisations – to collaboratively advance faster payments in the US,” Hendershott said. “Their role extends far beyond discussion. Work groups identify opportunities and address the technical and operational challenges that stand in the way of faster payments ubiquity. They drive industry standards development and create practical frameworks that support interoperability, security and end user adoption.”

Corporate treasurers are vital to the endeavour because they provide “insight into liquidity management, internal controls, corporate governance, and the downstream impacts of faster payments changes [and can contribute to] shaping emerging workflows and highlighting onboarding challenges that technical stakeholders may overlook,” Hendershott added.

BNY’s Hasani further explains: “Our goal is to help shape the future of payments by fostering greater speed, transparency and security in transactions, particularly as treasury teams face growing pressure to optimise cash flow, accelerate receivables and gain tighter control over payables.”

The work group meetings are approximately 60 minutes once or twice per month, “focusing on iterative, practical outputs”, Hendershott said. The PFC holds two in-person member meetings annually.

To learn more or to sign up for a group, visit https://fasterpaymentscouncil.org/home or use Contact | Faster Payments Council.