After recently surpassing the 500 million instant payment milestone at the end of July, The Clearing House’s RTP network announced expanded availability for its Request for Payment (RfP) capability. More participating RTP financial institutions now support the RfP feature, providing businesses and their customers a more streamlined and efficient way to request and make payments. Initial permitted RfP use cases include consumer bill pay, business to business payments, and account to account transfers.
The RfP functionality allows a business (biller) to request an instant payment from a customer. The customer (RfP recipient) can send an RTP payment in response to pay the bill precisely when they want (24/7) or schedule the payment for a future date. The payment occurs instantly over the RTP network with the biller receiving access to immediate and irrevocable funds, and the payer receiving immediate confirmation that the biller has received their payment. This setup provides customers with more control over their money and reduces the risk of insufficient funds when autopay is debited with ACH.
BNY Mellon and Citi collaborated with Verizon to be the first company to send RfP messages to consumers who bank with Citi in 2021. Today, Bank of America, Fifth Third, PNC Bank, U.S. Bank, and Wells Fargo, which provide banking services to many high-volume corporate billers, are also among the RTP participants offering RfP capabilities. Additionally, technology providers FIS, Fiserv, Jack Henry, and Open Payment Network, are certified to provide RfP to their RTP participating financial institution customers.
Similarly, the newly launched FedNow Service also offers an RfP capability. Several service providers, including ACI, Alacriti, BNY Mellon, ESC Fin, Inc., Jack Henry, Open Payment Network, Pidgin, and Vertifi Software have received certification to send RfPs on the FedNow network. The Federal Reserve also launched an industry work group to establish best practices for consistent customer experience using RfP in December 2022.
As financial institutions and their customers broadly adopt instant payments and enable the RfP capability, more businesses and consumers will have better control and customer experience in making payments.
