Real-time payments have revolutionized the global financial landscape, fostering greater efficiency, convenience and inclusion. Countries worldwide are embracing real-time payment systems to meet the growing demand for instant transactions. Real-time payments offer advantages such as reduced fraud, 24/7 accessibility and faster settlements for businesses and consumers.
Despite widespread adoption, challenges persist, including interoperability concerns and cybersecurity risks, necessitating ongoing innovation and collaboration among financial institutions, regulators and technology firms to shape the future of global real-time payments.
The United States has fallen behind most of the industrialized world in adopting real-time payments, largely due to the absence of unifying governmental efforts to establish such a system — until recently. The nation’s first big step into the real-time payments scene came in 2017, when The Clearing House launched the RTP® network.