Leading the way at Tyfone: Siva Narendra 

Siva Narendra, co-founder and CEO of Tyfone, is on the frontlines of enabling faster payments across the banking industry. 

The Portland, Oregon-based Tyfone helps banks and credit unions use the Federal Reserve's new FedNow payments platform, ensuring the industry can deploy real-time payments. The FedNow platform got a somewhat slow start last year but has recently been picking up speed.

Tyfone partnered with the first sender of a FedNow payment, the $10 billion-asset Star One Credit Union in California, on the Instant Payment Xchange service that helps financial institutions link up to FedNow. As of February, more than 20% of the credit union's external transfers now run on the FedNow network. 

Through a new credit union service organization, Payfinia, Tyfone is working to get other financial institutions on board with faster payments as well. 

"Today's consumers and businesses not only want quick, simple, and instant ways to facilitate payments, but they expect a unified, consistent user experience," Narendra said last year, adding that the company wanted to "scale this service and unlock the tremendous potential instant payments offer." 

It's the latest push in financial technology from Tyfone, which Narendra co-founded in 2004 and started leading in 2011. Narendra's been involved with 140 patents in digital banking, payments, decentralized cryptography, blockchain and other fields.

He previously co-founded Tozny, which offers decentralized cryptographic key technologies, and is on the board of the digital payments company Purs. He is also a board member of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Des Moines.

Narendra has a doctorate in electrical engineering and computer services from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before becoming a fintech founder, he was a senior staff scientist at the tech giant Intel.

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