Special Interest Groups

The U.S. Payments Forum has one combined Special Interest Group (SIG) that brings together merchants and issuers to discuss topics and issues relevant to both communities. The SIG meets during Forum in-person meetings to share insights, exchange perspectives, and explore industry developments.

Current SIG leads are:

• Issuer SIG: Sara Walsh, Bank of America
• Merchant SIG: Joe Vasterling, Best Buy

In April 2025, the Special Interest Group met virtually to discuss data-sharing options across the payments ecosystem. Download this two-page summary to explore seven potential scenarios, including key considerations around technology, liability shift, benefits, opportunities, network dependencies, and business use cases.

Past SIG discussions have included topics such as:

• Current Fraud Trends
• Tokenization Liability Shift
• Open Banking / Pay By Bank / A2A
• Magstripe Elimination
• EMV 3DS
• Payments and Passkeys
• Payment Account Reference (PAR) on Chip

Birds of a Feather Sessions

In addition to SIG meetings, “birds of a feather” sessions are also held at Forum meetings to discuss topics or provide education specific to a technology or an industry stakeholder group. Past sessions have covered topics relevant to:

• Tokenization implementation
• Payment Account Reference (PAR)
• Secure Remote Commerce (SRC)
• E2E/P2PE Implementation
• Unattended EMV implementations
• Chargeback best practices
• Transaction time optimization

If you have questions or would like information about the Working Committees or Special Interest Groups, please contact Devon Rohrer at [email protected].