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Leaders In Payments
Leaders In Payments
Special Series: The Future of Modern Payments with Sal Karakaplan, Chief Strategy Officer at The Clearing House
Money doesn’t just move; it travels across rules, rails, and risk decisions that either create trust or destroy it. In the first of three episodes, we sit down with Sal Karakaplan, Chief Strategy Officer at The Clearing House, to explore how a century-old operator keeps reinventing the core of U.S. payments while shipping modern capabilities at scale. From instant settlement to tokenized data, this is a close look at what it takes to wire an economy for speed without sacrificing safety.
We start with the foundation: what TCH runs under the hood - RTP, CHIPS, EPN, and check image exchange - and why reliability and advocacy both matter when you’re operating the plumbing. Sal opens the strategy playbook: scan market trends, pick where to build, buy, or partner, and relentlessly prioritize use cases that create measurable customer value. That lens frames a practical take on open banking, where market innovation and regulation advance in parallel. Expect straight talk on security, DDA tokenization, liability clarity, and user consent that’s simple for people and robust for compliance.
RTP steps into focus with concrete momentum: growing daily volumes, expanding bank enablement, and use cases that resonate; account-to-account funding, B2C disbursements, merchant settlement, insurance payouts, and early wage access. We get real about adoption hurdles in a fragmented banking market and how to make the business case stack up. Beyond speed, the conversation highlights ISO 20022 and data-rich messages that reduce reconciliation friction and sharpen risk controls - critical for CFOs, treasurers, and operations leaders chasing working capital gains.
Then we tackle stablecoins with a bottom-up filter: where do they outperform existing rails? Cross-border stands out, from remittances to marketplace payouts, alongside emerging hypotheses in tokenized settlement. Sal lays out the next 3–5 years: push RTP to ubiquity, evaluate DLT and tokenized deposits with discipline, lean into AI for commerce and fraud defense, and elevate security and data as first-class features. It’s a pragmatic roadmap for banks, fintechs, and enterprises that want real outcomes, not buzzwords.
Welcome to the Future of Modern Payments, a special podcast series sponsored by the Clearinghouse, the U.S. payments operator that provides safe, reliable, and efficient clearing and settlement networks. In this series, we'll explore how innovation, collaboration, and client insights are shaping the future of payments. From real-world use cases to forward-looking strategies and the evolving voice of the customer.
SPEAKER_01:Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Leaders in Payments Podcast. I'm your host, Greg Myers, and today's special guest is Sal Kerakaplan, the Chief Strategy Officer at the Clearinghouse. So, Sal, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the show.
SPEAKER_02:Thank you, Greg, and thanks for having me. Looking forward to a nice conversation.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, me too. So before we dive into the clearinghouse and the meat of the show, can you give us a quick snapshot of your personal background, maybe where you grew up, where you call home today, a few things like that?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, sure. So I'm born and raised Turkish. So I have left Turkey, came to college in the US, and since then I've been here. I have lived in places like Houston, Texas, as well as central Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh. But for the last 20 plus years, I call New York City my home. I'm married with two teenager boys, and we love being here and uh you know being in the city.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Can you walk us through your professional journey and how you got to the clearinghouse?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, how does one how does one land in a clearinghouse is always a good question. So look, I have been in uh payments for now two decades, and that kind of at the macro level answers why YTCH. I've been at Card Network for a decade and doing jobs like product and strategy and corporate development and partnerships and so on and so forth. And then I've been uh in two large banks for a decade together as well, doing very similar work around payment strategy. So know this space very well, and so therefore, especially being part of a bank as well, know clearinghouse well as well. As part of my last role with the bank that I was with, I actually represented that bank at the clearinghouses PayCo board. And I have also kind of represented that bank in other bank consortiums in the payment space. So I know kind of the land of the consortiums very well, why they exist, how they exist, and how they're governed. My work with a car network always was my favorite because I kind of liked the network aspect of payments a lot more. And when the opportunity kind of presented itself to do that uh again on a network basis, I was able to do that with the clearinghouse. So I've been here now approaching two years and just kind of having a lot of fun, you know, solving some payment problems from the center.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, great. So for those that may not know, can you tell us what the clearinghouse does?
SPEAKER_03:So Clearinghouse, you know, is basically a privately owned payments infrastructure company for really safer, reliable, and efficient payments. That's what we do every day, and kind of as expected, you know, it's there every day, every moment, every second. But TCH also shapes the landscape of payments. In addition to kind of being an operator, it also shapes the landscape. And it really shapes the landscape in two ways. TCH also has an association where you have a voice in payments advocacy, which also helps shape the landscape of payments. But also, you know, with uh kind of new stuff that we look at and ultimately end up doing sometimes, that also shapes the you know landscape. One of those examples of new developments is the real-time payment network, which we have launched in 2017. That's a major development in the payments landscapes in the US in the last uh in the first rail in the last four years or so. But that's not the only rail we rerun. We obviously do have an ACH product called EPN and a wire product called Chips, and we do check clearing. Last year, TCH clear and settled more than$520 trillion. World GDP is, I think, about$120. So it is the payment rails underneath everything else, underneath the economy. And you know, we clear and settle about$2 trillion each day. And it's been around for like 107 years, right? It started with checks, and over the years, it added new rails, more electronic in nature. Over the years, it you know improved its collaboration around industry and was able to invent itself, reinvent itself over and over and over, and it's here again and kind of shaping the payments landscape. Just think of us as uh you know a payment rail that sits on everything that you do as an end user around financial services and payments.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, great. Thanks for sharing that. So you lead the strategy team. So, what does that mean by leading the strategy team at the clearinghouse?
SPEAKER_03:So the strategy team basically has four subfunctions. So, one is obviously kind of help the company work on its strategy and on strategic projects around the company. The strategy is about the trends and the externalities that impacts a certain industry and a market. So we, you know, we understand what the market is doing and understand the trends that are impacted that market and making sure that the clearinghouse is positioned properly. So that's kind of task number one. Task number two is out of that, you end up a strategy work almost always ends up with a decision to invest or not to invest. And if you decide to invest, there are usually three choices of how to go about doing that. You can build something to meet that customer and the client demand and the market demand. You can partner with somebody to meet that demand, or you can go and buy a company to meet that demand. And those are the three other aspects of strategy team. So we have partnerships that we talk to many companies to see what we can do better to meet our clients' demands via partnership. We have an MA thinking where we will look at stuff and see if that's appropriate for a company like us to do something there. And then we have what we call exploration and experimentation, which is really uh kind of new stuff and building. Those are the four aspects of strategy. We work on those and they're always kind of interwoven together. But that's the kind of thing that the team works on and try to answer those questions.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, great. So let's talk about a few hot topics in the industry, open banking being the first. What are some recent developments in the open banking space?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, it's a it's a it's a fascinating space. It's a very dynamic little piece of payments. It's almost one could argue that adjacent to payments. But look, what is happening is we are a very much of a market-based country. And what is happening in open banking today is there are many market-based developments by the participants and the regulations also going hand in hand in parallel and evolving and progressing in parallel. So I think that's kind of at the macro level, that's what's happening. Market-based activities and regulation and just kind of parallel, progressing. And in my opinion, this is healthy, and because that kind of thing is that will find the right balance in the market for it to scale on its own. And when you take it down to its components, maybe you've got you know data recipients, you got data providers, you've got aggregators, you have standard setting organizations. They're all trying to find their roles in this new evolving space, both with some strategic moves as well as understanding how regulations coming along. And then sprinkle a little bit legal stuff and lawsuits that is always uh you know makes it fun. So you have a very robust marketplace that is forming. I mean, that's kind of at the macro level what is happening today. And I think it has a little bit more runway to go. The beauty of this thing is the plane doesn't stop, right? I mean, everybody keeps doing certain things to kind of position themselves well while everything is trying to get to a place where we have reached a flying altitude. And underneath that, if you kind of peel down in one more time, there are a few things that need to be thought through. I mean, obviously, security is a big aspect of open banking. Like, we need to do these things in a secure way for all aspects of the ecosystem. We at TCH have a DDA token solution which is designed for open banking, where we help the participants not share the you know real routing number and DDA numbers, but we actually mask them so that when they travel, they are not compromised. Security is a big aspect of this, and you know, there's a solution there and it needs to kind of be top of mind. The other part of this is liability. I mean, obviously, consumers are initiating certain things and data is moving back and forth. Who's got the liability? I think that needs clarity, either in a market-driven way or regulations or a combination of. That's really important, in my opinion. I think the consumers and the end users should have clarity and controls around their data, meaning they are the ones who want to share, that is great. They need to know what they're sharing, they need to know that how frequently that's being shared, and if they have a reason to stop that, they need to be given that control to share that data. I think that's really important. And then again, from the end user's perspective, it needs to be friendly and needs to protect the end users in terms of if you go out and initiate payments, they understand what kind of payments they are and what kind of rights they have and protections they have with those payments. So to summarize, I think it's very much of an evolving space, very much like really intriguing with all aspects of it. But I think there's a little bit more to go here before we kind of reach the flying altitude and we'll see how all the players kind of play. TCH is in the middle of it through really, you know, making it more secure.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Okay. Yeah, I think we could do a whole episode on open banking if we wanted to. So another hot topic, of course, is real-time payments. So can you speak to the overall growth of RTP?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, so look, we've been at this obviously for a while, but I think we're pretty pleased with the last couple of years, you know, in our performance. We had close to$500 billion in volume in Q2, and we have over 100 million payments in Q2. So that's a healthy growth. We see now around 1.2 million payments a day. And the last I checked, we have more than 98% market share in this space, which is really important. It's being used by 7 million unique customers, clients, and then we have more than 300,000 corporations are also involved with this. We're happy with all of that. We are open to all banks and sizes and shapes, and we'd love to work with them. We now have more than a thousand banks that are using RTP and enabled for RTP, I should say. Good 90% of them are smaller, less than$10 billion in size banks. A few hundred of them are credit unions. So, again, a good representation, although we wanted to get better and get to ubiquity. And then I think the last I checked, we're very close to, if not, we're hit that number of 72% DDA reach. And when we talk to some of our corporates, in the use cases that really matters to them, it's reaching up to 90% DDA reach. So, with all of that, we're happy, but our eye is still on the ball. We need to keep executing, execute crisply, uh, year after year, to bring the usage as well as reach of RTP to the economy. Until we do that, we will continue to do, you know, keep going. So therefore, it's a focus, and it will continue to be a focus for us. I would say we're still early innings in terms of the match here, but happy where we are so far.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. So you mentioned use cases. So, in your opinion, what are some of the most interesting use cases?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, so look, what we're seeing most of the volume are around a few of them, right? So the one that comes to mind is what we call account to account or me to me payments. So a consumer taking funds from their banking account, sending to brokerage, or vice versa. Somebody taking funds out of a wallet and sending to their bank account, that's a good use case. We do see what we call B2C disbursements, businesses sending money to consumers. That's a good use case for us. That happens in thinking about merchant settlements, merchants that are settling with their processors, they're getting their funds in real time. You can think about insurance companies sending benefits to consumers, not necessarily with a check because that is costly and they want to get that out of the system. Moving into electronic with RTP, that's another AUC. And then what we call early wage access is another use case. It's a specialized disbursements, if you will, that is important. So this is a consumer who is works for a company and has a normal two-week cycle or a bi-monthly cycle of payroll, but they need the access to their funds earlier, and their employer gives some benefits around that, and that gets done uh through real-time payments. So those are some of the use cases. The other one is loan disbursement. So I think you're seeing somewhere you're as a bank providing financing through dealerships where they can actually sell their cars or their gears, and you know, you as a bank can give the dealerships money in an instant manner. Those are all the use cases. You're seeing, if you look at most of them, not all of them, but most of them, you do see a consumer at least on one end of that transaction. Right. So the consumer, I think what you know, the make maybe the macro level thinking here is you know, the consumers, as we know, in the last decade or so has been very digitized and has been very kind of on demand and expecting things to happen quickly and as they needed. And that shows up in behavior that the consumers are driving this real-time payments.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. So what are some of the adoption challenges that banks have related to RTP?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, so look, I mean, I think it's mostly really around prioritization and really business case, right? I mean, I think when you look at the banks in the United States, which is obviously a very unique banking market when you compare to other developed economies, meaning that it has about 5,000 banks, where every other developed economy, you know, a handful of banks will have 90% total aggregate market share. That's not the case in this country, you know, by design. So by design, we have a long way to go because it's a long tail of banks. But when you look at any bank, there are a lot of competing priorities. I mean, they are you know mostly in multiple businesses, and all of those businesses are going through change via technology and other things. So they have to prioritize these things. And almost all the time it requires technology resources, and that needs to kind of be thought through and put into some sort of a prioritization. So that's basically what's going on, and and you know, sometimes it's not prioritized. And of course, that ties to you know, business case, right? So you need to kind of for for you to be able to go to the top of the list, you need to have a very robust business case. And there are certain pockets, obviously, that are very clear in terms of business cases, and that's why we've got more than a thousand banks that are using it. But in some other cases, that's not that clear for that bank. So therefore, that could be a challenge. Another thing that you hear a lot about, which is real, but also something that we address is fraud and scams and kind of the this notion that if the payment is faster, so will the fraud and scam. This is not a binary, we won't do this kind of feedback, but it is more, well, we need to we need to understand it better. It may take us a little while in a while for us to get comfortable with our processes to be able to handle these transactions. So it's it's a more of a maybe a delay, if anything. But there we're having those conversations, and I think the industry as a whole have made a lot of very good progress around this, and everybody's kind of learning from each other. And I think that's another thing that that you hear that we can address very you know, very kind of targeted manner. So those are kind of some of the things that you're hearing on that.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, okay. So let's talk about the future of RTP a little bit. So, what do you see coming in the future for RTP?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I mean, so look, as I mentioned earlier, we need to keep executing, and we need to keep executing in a way that we wire the entire economy. What that means is we go and talk all the banks, talk to all the banks, and we make sure that they are enabled for RTP. So that's reach is gonna be there until we get to Ubiquiti. So that is important and ongoing, and it's not gonna go away. I mean, obviously, we are enhancing the capabilities around the message types and so on and so forth. So there's some product development that we continue to do as well with releases that we do on a recurring basis. That's also important, and we'll keep doing that as well. Lastly, probably not lastly, but there, you know, maybe for this purpose, another one that I can mention is we will need to kind of keep re-evaluating the use cases, right? I mean, so there are a few that are kind of showing up today and showing up healthily, but there are others that could actually be turned on. So we will continue to do that work and identify the next set of use cases and see how rich data and instant payments can actually help the next use case and the next use case. Because it's not always about the instant real, I mean, I know the naming is real-time payments, and so therefore everybody goes into the instant nature of this. But remember, the other aspect of this payment rail is the data-rich environment, the ISO 2022 standard. And so that you can travel, you know, more data can travel, which could again be a lot better for you know risk and reconciliation and so on and so forth by the users. So we'll need to look at those aspects of it as well and find the next level of use cases that we think will be next.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Well, let's turn to another hot topic, one that is talked about almost everywhere these days, stable coins. So what I hear is that most banks are still in the very early stages of exploring stable coins, but where do you see it heading?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, it has taken over the the waves, the media waves for sure. So look, I mean, it is very early, but it is moving very fast. I mean, I think you cannot deny in that, like every morning you wake up and you see two to three press releases from legitimate parties on legitimate activities. The way we look at this thing is a bit more uh bottom-up than top down, right? So we're not in the mode of, well, let's go and make an investment in stable coins and go change the markets. Some participants are doing that and it's more appropriate for them to do. What we're doing is, you know, is really like what is the problem to be solved, right? And what is this new thing doing that the existing things cannot do, period, or cannot do well. So therefore opening up a possibility in the market for an entry. That's kind of how we think about it. That's how we work with the banks, you know, as well, who think about the same way. When you look at it from that perspective, there are some areas where you can say the stable coins can solve some problems, right? One of them being cross-border payments. The cross-border payments with let's call traditional rails are not bad, but can they be better? Yes. They can get faster, they can get more transparency, and possibly, depending on the model and the provider, it can get cheaper. And I think that's kind of one area that we're looking at. But when you stepping back from that for a second, when you look at stable coins today and how it's being used, there are only a handful of use cases that have real scale. One of them is on-ramp, off-ramp to crypto, which is real because crypto investing is real by the end users. So therefore, stable coins is real there when they're buying and selling. The other one that you see, it is not a US-centric use case, but it is real globally, is these end users in, let's say, either high inflation and or capital control kind of markets. Think about Argentina, Venezuela, Turkey, maybe, where the consumers are looking for access to USD and maybe outside of the banking system and to protect their wealth in kind of hard currency. You see that use case happening as well, which is real. International remittances, which ties back to the cross-border use case that I have mentioned earlier, is another thing. I think the other ones that are very, very early days, but some promise there is kind of B2B cross-border. You could see pockets of this kind of being impacted by that, especially around kind of maybe big B small B, meaning like a marketplace where the funds need to kind of travel from one business to another on a platform. Think about Airbnb or Amazon and that kind of hayout is important. And then the other hypothesis is again, this one is very, very early days, but it's uh it's more of a hypothesis is if the capital markets gets tokenized and the securities get tokenized, so then the creating and settlement of those securities where actual dollars are needed as well, then will require very much atomic settlement and you know instant settlement. So then you can see kind of stable point there as well. So those are some of the use cases. Where do I see it going? I mean, I think it's very, I mean, I said, you know, the RTP was early innings. This is like way earlier than that. And you will see a lot of the market participants, both the legacy and the new ones, are gonna make their strategic moves. And it will take a little while for this to check out and see where there's scale, in addition to the ones that we see on ramp, off-ramp, and the capital controls one, where it's gonna scale. So it's a little uh, I don't think I I want to be in the business of guessing that. Uh, and obviously we have multivariable you know stuff happening here, and we're just kind of trying to understand and and position the company as best as we can.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. All right. Well, let's talk about the future as the chief strategy officer. What are the top two or three priorities that you're focused on for the clearinghouse in the next, say, three to five years?
SPEAKER_03:Sure. So, I mean, I think as I mentioned earlier, instant payments and scaling of instant payments will be a priority for us for a while. I think that is important. It's again in Uriel after decades, you know, in the US. And so that doesn't happen overnight, and we will continue to focus our execution on that and a crisp execution to get a scaling of instant payments. I think DLT and distributed ledger technologies and stable coins and tokenized deposits are also uh, you know, will be here, and we will pay a lot of attention to that and see how we can make TCH compete appropriately and effectively in the market. That's another area. The other one is AI and specifically AI for commerce and payments, agentic commerce and all of that. I think it's gonna be something that we're gonna need to kind of lean in and understand. What does it mean for our Rails if you know agent initiates a payment and you know what are those use cases? What do we need to think about? All aspects of that is another area that you know we will lean in. Security is gonna be another one. I mean, obviously, with RTP and instant payments, frauds and scams, and as well as the DDA tokens that I mentioned to you, going back to who we are, secure, efficient, reliable, that's at the heart of that. So we will continue to look at that as well. And then maybe the last one that I think I'd like to look at a little bit more is kind of this promise of data and ISO 2012 and rich data in in instant payments, and maybe kind of understand how to turn that promise into reality for the users. So those are some of the areas that we will continue to spend our time on.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Well, when you step back and look at the payments industry as a whole, and you may have mentioned a few of these in the last answer, but what are the biggest trends that you're seeing that are reshaping the industry?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, so look, I have been incredibly lucky to be in this space for the last 20 years, and I feel like it has been changing drastically. You know, as long as I've been in it, it was by no means by design, it was by luck that I stumbled into it, but I very much enjoy it. But when you look at that journey, it's almost always under the same headings, right? I mean, it's new technology, right? It's the end user demands and change or what they're looking for, and then and then regulation, right? So here, regulation you can also combine with geopolitic stuff as well, as one header. And here it's still the same, right? I mean, obviously the subheadings underneath that change a little bit, but you know, new technology in terms of AI and DLT is gonna be you know something that we're gonna need to keep in mind and see if that's uh you know, there are reasons for us to kind of lean in and invest there. In terms of end user demands, again, I mentioned a little bit about this. End users are looking for on-demand satisfaction, they're looking for security, they're looking for choice, they're looking for easy, basically. And all of that is kind of informing the product designs for everybody, and that's not staying static. It has been changing drastically throughout this time. And then regulation, right? I mean, regulation also doesn't stop. Um, you've got the Genius Act for stablecoin, you've got 1033 for open banking, you've got, you know, infrastructure bill that is being discussed uh in DC, you have USD as a reserve currency as a geopolitical thing, and you know, as something that at least people in DC think about directly, which impacts us as well. So those are the things that will continue to be the headers, the regulation, the end users, and technology. Business models is a fourth one. Uh, business models also change embedded finance, buy not pay later, and so on and so forth. They're always there as well. And so those are the headings, really.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I love that framework you gave there. That's a good way to look at it. So, a couple final summary questions. So, what's one thing that banking and payments leaders that are listening today should be thinking about right now?
SPEAKER_03:There are many things that we should be thinking about. I mean, I think what I would tell you is like, let's start with the end users, right? Like, you need to kind of listen and understand the end user needs. I think that's kind of where we all start. And then from there, understand the problems to be solved, the needs that they have, and then taking that and turn it into like what are the jobs to be done from those problems that they have, and try to meet them in a secure and easy in a manner that gives them choice. I think if we all do that, then the market works perfectly and the water will flow where those answers are being met the best, and you will come out on top. So I think the takeaway for me is the end users, the need, the problems to be solved, the jobs to be done. I think that's the way one really needs to think about it. It's really not a payments answer per se. It's really generic, more general, you know, business answer. But I think if you continue to do that, you will come out on top.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Well, Sal, this has been a great discussion. Any final thoughts before we wrap up the show?
SPEAKER_03:I guess the last thought would be a plug for me. You know, we will have our annual TCH conference in uh early November, November 4th and 5th, I think. And this is a very well-received conference. It's smaller in scale by design, where you bring in uh both the kind of payments operating kind of topics as well as payments advocacy topics together. And it's only two days and it's kind of contained well uh in downtown New York. So anybody who is in the business of payments, you know, they will benefit a lot from joining this conference. So that would be my last thoughts. A plug for TCH.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Well, Sal, thank you so much for being on the show today. I know your time is very valuable, so I really appreciate you being here.
SPEAKER_03:My pleasure, Greg. Thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_01:And to all your listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well. And until the next story.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you for listening to today's episode. To learn more about how the clearinghouse is powering the modern payments infrastructure of the future, please visit www.theclearinghouse.org.