14 August 2025 Kirsten Trusko from Payments as a Lifeline on Disaster Relief Payments, Digital Assets, and rehabbing a historic home
episode
Off the Rails from the U.S. Faster Payments Council - FPC
32 min
2 speakers
5 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
off the rails from the US Faster Payments Council.
I am Reid Lutanen, Executive Director of the U.S. Faster Payments Council, and this is Off the Rails from the U.S. Faster Payments Council. Today's episode features Kirsten Trusko from Payments as a Lifeline, or PAL.
What are the episode headlines and upcoming FPC events listeners should know about?
Kirsten and I talk about disaster relief payments, how fintechs, NGOs, and government can better coordinate, and how Kirsten supports the local art scene in Santa Fe. But first, the headlines. We can't wait to see our members at the FPC Fall Member Meeting in Portland, Maine, September 3rd and 4th at the Westin Harbor View. The link to book hotel rooms and register for the conference is live on the website, and you can see the fantastic agenda we have lined up for you there as well. This is going to be a great event with a ton of local flair, including a session featuring local small business owners talking about their payments experiences and exploring how Faster Payments can help them. And very relevant to this audience, as I've mentioned a number of times at the Fall Member Meeting, we'll be doing a live recording of the 100th episode of Off the Rails.
It's going to be a special episode with an unexpected guest, new games, and a fun twist. Hopefully most of you will make the arrangements to join us in Portland, but if not, of course you can listen to it here. And it was our first episode of September. And speaking of the fall, I am so excited to have FPC participating in events all over the country. You'll be able to find us as exhibitors and speakers at Payments First in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee in late August. Then Westpay, UMACHA, EPCOR, the Chicago Payment Symposium, AFP's annual conference, Merchant Advisory Group, probably a few more. A huge thank you to all these event hosts for including us in their events. And if you see us there, come by and say hi.
Introduce us to your friends and colleagues. Help us recruit new members. It'd be great. And then new resources. Head to fasterpaymentscouncil.org, go to knowledge center tab at the top of the screen, and then select resources. And there you can see everything, including the latest reports from our cross-border work group sponsored by MasterCard. This report explores how ISO 20022 messaging is enabling smarter, faster, and more inclusive cross-border payments. The report highlights three use cases. First one, buyer to supplier. Second, tourism and retail transactions. And finally, financial inclusion. Also, as you'll hear quite a bit about in this conversation with Kirsten, the FPC's digital assets workgroup published a blog post diving into the application of digital ledger technology to support digital disaster relief payments.
And that actually perfectly provides a segue to that conversation with Kirsten. So let's just get to it.
Okay, we're joined by Kirsten Trusko from Payments as a Lifeline. Kirsten, thanks for joining us. Delighted to be here. All right. First of all, let's start sort of high level talking about disaster relief payments and digital ledger technology. So I guess I want to start a little bit farther out and just kind of set the stage for us. How do we as Americans handle disaster payments today? And then I guess diving in a little bit deeper, how do digital ledger and blockchain technology present an opportunity there?
So, well, first of all, thank you for having me. This is really good timing, given the blog that just came out and that we're in the middle of hurricane season. So how does the U.S. address disaster financial aid and funds delivery currently? We're behind many other nations in the world, including lesser developed nations. So we have historically been as a nation very slow and clunky and with little data. So, one of the things that we're excited about, especially with faster payments, is there's great opportunity to improve. The technology is there, the speed is there, the data is there, and it's ways that have not been deployed in disaster and aid. So, PAL stood up in 2020 and said, Originally, we had a really tough time even getting invited to events, to disaster and government emergency management.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:05–0:39
2
What are the episode headlines and upcoming FPC events listeners should know about?
0:39–15:13
3
Who is Kirsten Trusko and what is Payments as a Lifeline (PAL)?
15:13–16:36
4
How are disaster relief payments handled in the U.S. today and where do they fall short?
16:36–17:27
5
How can digital ledger and blockchain technologies improve disaster payments?
17:27–32:17
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Off the Rails from the U.S. Faster Payments Council - FPC
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27 August 2026 Michael Sulla of Mastercard on Agentic Commerce
13 August 2026 Podcast Cathy Lesser Mansfield
30 July 2026 Podcast Erik Van Bramer from Federal Reserve Financial Services
16 July 2026 Callum Godwin of CMSPI on faster payments for merchants