9 Oct 2025 Aaron McPherson of AFM on Stablecoins, Agentic AI, and Making Music
episode
Off the Rails from the U.S. Faster Payments Council - FPC
22 min
2 speakers
4 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Who are Reed Luhtanen and Aaron McPherson and what is this episode about?
Off the rails from the U.S. Faster Payments Council.
I am Ree Lutanen, CEO of the U.S. Faster Payments Council, and this is Off the Rails from the U.S. Faster Payments Council. Today's episode, I'll be joined by Aaron McPherson, principal at AFM. Aaron and I talk about stable coins, agentic AI, and making music or beer with AI. But first, the headlines. New resources are now available on the FPC website. Head to fasterpaymentscouncil.org, go to the Knowledge Center tab at the top of the page, and then click on Resources. There you will find the latest deliverable from our Operational Considerations Workgroup, Operational Considerations for Sending Instant Payments. This guideline, developed by the FPC Operational Considerations Workgroup, sponsored by Endava, provides financial institutions with best practices and detailed guidance for successfully implementing instant payments sending capabilities.
The resource covers a wide range of operational factors financial institutions must address when enabling SendSide functionality, including liquidity management, user experience, and interface design, real-time reconciliation, fraud mitigation, compliance requirements, and exception processing. Additionally, you'll find a new infographic that outlines the four resources developed by the Operational Considerations Workgroup and explains how financial institutions can use them effectively depending on the institution's implementation strategy and project phase. And finally, new research conducted by the FPC, the 2025 Instant Payments Adoption Quantitative Study. It's based on a survey of US-based third-party enablers to financial institutions.
Collectively, respondents to the study serve over 90% of the US market. FIs and... U.S. market FIs, and offer a forward-looking view into how instant payments adoption is expected to expand over the next five years. The study highlights how adoption is being shaped by use cases, perceived benefits, technology enablement, and emerging standards. It also provides us with a roadmap of the key technologies that, if widely implemented, can dramatically increase the adoption and usage of instant payments, particularly on the SENS side. And as I highlighted in a LinkedIn article last week, a key takeaway from the 2025 Instant Payments Adoption Quantitative Study is that there is a need to not only develop and implement fraud prevention technology, but also to develop standard policies and procedures for handling disputes, fraud, scams, and other exceptions.
And the FPC has just stood up our exception resolution work group to tackle that issue by developing recommendations and best practices as an input for the networks to leverage in their exception resolution rules and practices. If that work resonates with you, reach out to us at memberservices at fasterpaymentscouncil.org. And if you want to read the article, just head over to my LinkedIn profile and you can find it there. And with that, let's get to that conversation with Aaron McPherson of AFM.
All right. We're joined by Aaron McPherson. Aaron, thanks for joining us.
Thanks, Reid. It's great to be here.
All right. I'm glad to have you joining on the show today. How about we start with a high-level intro on yourself? So just so the audience kind of gets a sense of where you're coming from for this discussion.
Sure. I'm an independent consultant who focuses on payment market strategy for fintechs and banks. And I've been in the industry for about 25 years, got my start doing research and and also worked at FIS doing market strategy for them. All right. And you're an active member of our work groups.
And lately you guys have been working collaboratively with the cross-border and the digital assets work groups on a project. So why don't you tell us what that's about, what the purpose of that work is, and why it's going to matter to our audience of payments professionals?
Yeah, obviously stable coins are of a very high interest for a lot of the members right now. And we have two work groups, the cross-border payments work group and the digital assets work group that intersect along these lines because we think that cross-border payments is one of the early use cases for stable coins.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
Who are Reed Luhtanen and Aaron McPherson and what is this episode about?
0:05–5:04
2
What new FPC resources and studies should payments professionals know about?
5:04–19:03
3
How is the FPC collaborating on stablecoin and cross‑border work?
19:03–21:52
4
How do stablecoins actually move value — what are the on‑ and off‑ramp flows?
21:52–22:08
Speakers
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