14 May 2026 Steve Ledford on Pay by Bank, Instant Payments Adoption, AI, Stablecoin

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Off the Rails from the U.S. Faster Payments Council - FPC 28 min 2 speakers 3 chapters transcribed 1 month ago

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Who is Steve Ledford and what is the Faster Payments Council podcast episode about?

Reed Luhtanen 0:23

I am Reid Lutanen, CEO of the U.S. Faster Payments Council, and this is Off the Rails from the U.S. Faster Payments Council. Today I'm joined by Steve Ledford, former executive at The Clearinghouse and current advisor to the University of Georgia's FinTech Academy students. But first, the headlines. The call for session proposals for the FPC fall member meeting is open. That event will be in Kansas City this November. And bonus opportunity, we're also accepting session proposals for the spring member meeting, which will be in March in San Antonio, Texas. Find all of that at FasterPaymentsCouncil.org, of course. And as always, a huge thank you to our fall and spring member meeting sponsors for 2026. First, our platinum sponsors, ACI Worldwide, North American Banking Company, and Visa Direct.

Reed Luhtanen 1:10

And our gold sponsors, Alloya. BNY, Brightwell, DeNovo Treasury, ePay Resources, Federal Reserve Financial Services, Finsley, MasterCard, Form 3, Plaid, Shazam, The Clearinghouse, PTAP Advisory, Trustly, Validify, Westpay, and Wysia. I will have a ton of new resources to share with you next time on the show, so keep an eye out for that on the website, on LinkedIn, and here on the podcast. But for now, it is time for my discussion with Steve Ledford.

Reed Luhtanen 1:56

We're joined by Steve Ledford. Steve, thanks for joining us.

Steve Ledford 2:00

Happy to be here.

Reed Luhtanen 2:02

And it's great to have you back on the show. Our most loyal listeners will remember that you were the very, very first guest we had on the show way back in February of 2021. At that point, I guess, especially after recording that conversation with you, I wasn't sure that we were going to... This was going to work. Now, you know, it's been more than five years. Unlike me, you're doing some different things than you were doing then. One thing you're doing is working with students at the University of Georgia and your students are launching a payments app. So talk about the program, the students, the project and how anyone listening might get in touch with you to recruit some of these talented kids.

Steve Ledford 2:43

Absolutely. This is actually a great story and it's actually a good example of what I think we could be doing in schools around the country to really raise that next generation of folks in the payments and fintech world. The Georgia Fintech Academy is sort of an umbrella organization working with universities across the state. It was actually developed in concert with a lot of the fintech companies that are based in Georgia. And what they do is they come up with ideas, you know, actually oversee introducing things like payments into the curriculum of universities. I live in Athens, Georgia. The University of Georgia is nearby. And Professor Bob Trotter actually runs the program for the University of Georgia, their Territory College of Business.

Steve Ledford 3:31

What they do is it's actually a concentration of, it's a certificate program. Students can get a certificate in FinTech. They need to go through four courses. And the most important thing is not just the courses. It's obviously things like learning how payments and how the FinTech technology works. There's a legal course as well. But it has a whole lot of hands-on. Even in the very first course, The students do a project. A team of students will really work with a sponsoring fintech company. And they come up with a kind of a consulting engagement, something that the company wants to learn more about. And the students actually can do a great job. They present them at the end of the session in what's called a Shark Tank environment.

Steve Ledford 4:24

And a lot of the ideas these students are coming up with end up being implemented by the companies. Also, a lot of the students that are on these get hired by the companies. So it works out that way as well. And the project that you were talking about was interesting. There was actually a hackathon about, I guess, a couple of years ago now. And at this hackathon, a student team over a weekend came up with this idea for a pay by bank application. And One of the things about pay-by-bank is you've got to give the folks who are going to be using the payment a reason to do so.