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.