Instant, Immediate, Real-Time, and Fast: The Payments Industry is Grappling with Speed

By Edith Rigler 
Senior Tutor, Transaction Banking Academy

Open a financial services publication or attend a payments conference and you are confronted with “instant”,“ immediate”, “real-time”, or “faster” payments. What is this all about? 

For decades, making a payment took time … and often quite a lot of time. Whether a payment arrived at its beneficiary the next day, or after three days, or a week depended on the country, whether it was a domestic payment or had to travel across borders, and how many banks were involved in the middle. In some countries payments moved faster than in others. The consumer had no say in the matter. Short of choosing a large-value RTGS system with immediate finality, the consumer was dependent on his country´s ACH system and its clearing cycle. 

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