Episode Details

Instant payments have quickly shifted from an emerging capability to a competitive expectation. Yet many financial institutions still struggle to justify the investment required to support them. With implementation costs, operational changes, and fraud concerns to address, it’s fair to ask: Are instant payments simply a customer convenience, or can they deliver meaningful business value?

In a PaymentsJournal Podcast, Shankar Jayaraman, Director of Product Management, Real-Time Payments at Fiserv, Rusiru Gunasena, Head of Business Development for Service Providers at The Clearing House, and Ben Danner, Senior Analyst of Debit at Javelin Strategy & Research, explored why that question may already have an answer. As consumers and commercial use cases continue to expand, the decision facing financial institutions is becoming less about whether to offer instant payments and more about how soon they can.

Clearing the Concerns

Despite the fact that more than 1,500 financial institutions now offer instant payments through either The Clearing House’s RTP network or the Federal Reserve’s FedNow Service, more than 8,000 still do not. For many of these organizations, the barriers to adoption remain significant.

One key factor is the challenge of making a bank’s payments and processes available 24/7. In addition to meeting customer expectations for around-the-clock service, financial institutions must establish prefunding requirements and ensure the proper risk controls are in place. Since instant payments are generally irrevocable, fraud prevention is a critical concern that must be fully addressed before transactions begin.

For legacy banks, older, multi-tier technology stacks may not be capable of supporting instant payments. Overhauling these systems can be daunting, especially when the same payment processes have been in place for decades.

Fortunately, financial institutions don’t have to navigate the transition alone. Experienced third-party service providers can handle operations such as transaction monitoring, error handling, risk mitigation, and fraud prevention, serving as a critical first line of defense.

“If you are the financial institution, you’re not the first one,” said Jayaraman. “There is already someone who has cracked the problem. And there are many solution providers out there who are there to help you solve the problem.”

Benefits of Joining the Network

Whatever the concerns about adopting instant payments, the benefits often outweigh the risks. Most financial institutions that implement instant payments find that the customer experience improves immediately.

“When a financial institution goes live on RTP, their customers discover that they can go and pull their funds sitting in a digital wallet into the institution account immediately,” said Gunasena. “They were even willing to pay to get those funds, because now they have liquid funds in their financial institution.”

Instant payments also help strengthen the customer relationship by bringing it back to the financial institution. In addition, they provide rich, structured data that supports analytics and more informed decision-making. Both sending and receiving financial institutions can gain better vi