As U.S. real-time payments adoption accelerates, the RTP network set a new daily record on October 3, processing 1,808,967 transactions valued at $5.2 billion.
Since its launch eight years ago by the Clearing House—a consortium of leading financial institutions—the RTP network has grown to become the largest instant payments system in the U.S. The platform now averages over 1.3 million payments daily, and RTP reports that over 1,000 financial institutions are participating in the network.
As the network’s footprint has expanded, so have its applications. RTP said its banner October day was driven by a diverse range of use cases, including gig economy payouts, bank transfers, digital wallet loads, and business-to-business payments.
A Successful Strategy
Expanding the use cases for the RTP network has been a top priority for the Clearing House. Businesses have been the most prolific users of the system, though most of these payments have involved consumers as recipients. To attract more B2B transactions, the RTP network increased its transaction limit from $1 million to $10 million last year.
This strategy has been largely successful. Bank of America was among the first financial institutions to support enterprise transactions up to RTP’s new limit, and the bank recently reported that payments exceeding $1 million now account for more than half the total value of U.S. real-time payments it processes for corporate clients.
Some of the primary use cases for these high-value payments include real estate transactions, corporate treasury operations, and portfolio settlements.
Delivering on Expectations
Payouts are also a key use case for real-time payments systems like RTP. Examples include marketplace platforms paying creators or ride-share companies paying drivers. Increasingly, gig workers expect to receive their earnings—regardless of amount—immediately after completing a job.
For merchants, meeting this expectation helps boost retention and engagement among contract workers. Real-time settlement also provides far greater visibility into company liquidity, enabling better cash management and financial planning.
The Bill Pay Use Case
Another growing use case for real-time payments is bill payment. In fact, Truist recently launched a bill pay solution for the RTP network that leverages an alias-based Request-for-Payment platform. This enables the solution to utilize the roughly 150 million existing mobile and email tokens to protect user data.
While this service is available to consumers, large corporate billers are the primary target audience for Truist’s platform. For these organizations, real-time payments offer several advantages—such as immediate acknowledgment of payment receipt, which can dramatically speed up the reconciliation process. In turn, faster access to funds can improve overall liquidity and cash flow management.
Not Ready for Retail
All of these use cases have dynamically expanded the scope of the RTP network. However, there has been much speculation about when real-time payments networks will take on a larger role in the U.S. retail payments landscape—much like Pix and UPI have taken off in Brazil and India, respectively.
Today, the National Payments Corporation of India handles nearly half of the world’s digital transactions, the majority of which flow through its UPI real-time payments system. The roughly 20 billion monthly transactions on UPI not only dwarf RTP, but also surpass leading payments networks like Visa and Alipay.
Several factors have contributed to UPI’s dominance, including support from India’s government and an aggressive expansion strategy. Additionally, many of the economies where real-time payments have surged were previously cash-based, making digital payments a substantial upgrade. In contrast, some have noted that the established financial infrastructure in the U.S. has slowed the adoption of instant payments domestically.
However, an additional obstacle is affecting both RTP and its rival FedNow, limiting their implementation in retail environments. Currently, the networks allow users only to send money, without a request functionality. This limits the scope of these systems because it is often the merchant who initiates the payment request, even when it is the customer who taps their card.
Although RTP and FedNow may not yet be ready for full retail deployment, adoption of both systems is rapidly accelerating. This suggests that new use cases and functionalities are likely to emerge in the near future.
