What does the future hold for real-time payments?

What will decide whether real-time payments go global?

Real-time payments (RTPs) have grown rapidly in markets where they have gained traction, but their long-term trajectory depends on two open questions. First, will consumer RTPs ever take hold in large, card-dominated economies like the US and UK? Second, can RTPs evolve from domestic tools into internationally usable payment methods? The answer to both determines whether RTPs eventually rival card networks in scale and reach, or remain regional solutions.

Why card-heavy markets have been slow to adopt RTPs

Consumer RTPs are still not mainstream for retail payments in several major economies, including the US, the UK, France, Germany, and Japan. The underlying instant payment rails have existed for decades in some of these markets, and consumer products built on top of them—such as the UK’s Faster Payments Service and the US Federal Reserve’s FedNow, launched last year—have not achieved widespread retail adoption.

The reasons trace back to the basic requirements for any new payment method to succeed: buy-in from banks, consumers, and businesses. In large card-centric economies, that buy-in is incomplete:

• Banks: India and Brazil, where RTPs have succeeded, each have only a few hundred banks. The US alone has 3,985 commercial banks, making coordination far harder. US banks also earn roughly 2% in interchange fees on credit card transactions, giving them little financial incentive to push alternatives.
• Consumers: In markets where credit cards are deeply entrenched, RTPs face an uphill battle. US consumers redeemed nearly $35 billion in card rewards in 2022. To displace cards, RTPs would need to compete on rewards, credit features, or consumer protections.
• Businesses: This is the most promising front. Large US retailers like Walmart, which announced a pay-by-bank initiative in September, see RTPs as a lower-cost alternative to card acceptance. But even if consumers use bank payments at one major retailer, that does not necessarily change their behavior elsewhere.

Absent coordinated effort among banks and businesses, card dominance in these markets is unlikely to shift soon. US banks did unite to build Zelle for instant peer-to-peer transfers, but they have not extended that to retail use cases. Instead, banks are investing in card-based initiatives for ecommerce, such as Paze. Some fintechs are stepping in with workarounds: Stripe’s Instant Bank Payments, built into Link, lets US customers pay from a bank account in a few clicks, with instant confirmation, settlement in two business days like cards, and guaranteed protection against bank-initiated returns. Other companies offer instant payments drawn down from stored balances. If such solutions gain traction, they could create pressure on banks to invest in consumer RTPs themselves.

Could governments force the issue?

In India and Brazil, governments mandated RTP adoption to solve the coordination problem, motivated by goals like lowering payment costs, increasing financial inclusion, reducing cash use, and limiting reliance on foreign card networks. Some of those motivations—cheaper payments, less cash—could apply in the US or UK. Others are less relevant: in the UK, 97% of adults already have a debit card, and the US already hosts the dominant card networks, Visa and Mastercard. Moreover, the direct intervention seen in Brazil, where the central bank dictated everything from Pix button placement to menu details, does not fit the political style of US or UK governments.

Three paths toward global RTP coverage

Cards work almost anywhere in the world; RTPs today generally require a local bank account. Bridging that gap could happen through three routes, which are not mutually exclusive.

Path 1: Domestic RTPs expand into new markets. Wero started in Germany and France and is now launching as a single real-time payment method across France, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. BLIK is moving beyond Poland into Slovakia and Romania. This model works when a domestic RTP enters markets that lack their own homegrown solution. It struggles, though, where an imported RTP must compete with an established domestic one that has strong customer loyalty and business penetration. The result is likely subregional clusters rather than broad global coverage.

Path 2: Bilateral agreements between RTPs. India’s UPI has struck agreements that make it usable in Singapore, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Malaysia. The goal is not for local consumers to adopt UPI, but for Indian travelers to use it abroad. This works well on heavily trafficked corridors where both sides gain and where one partner already has a large user base. It is less attractive for smaller countries or pairs with little economic exchange. Scaling is also a problem: enabling every pair of countries would require nearly 20,000 separate bilateral agreements.

Path 3: Interoperability through a "network of networks." Rather than negotiating pairwise, countries join a shared framework and gain access to all other participating RTPs at once. Consumers keep using their preferred method while traveling, and businesses avoid reintegrating new payment methods for tourists. The approach is harder to negotiate up front because everyone must agree on a common standard, and it requires teaching consumers to "roam"—for example, a TWINT user paying in Sweden where the Swish logo is shown. Europe is piloting this through the European Mobile Payment Systems Association (EMPSA), which is testing commercial interoperability among TWINT (Switzerland), Bancomat (Italy), and Bluecode (Austria), and has announced peer-to-peer interoperability between Bancomat, MB WAY (Portugal), and Bizum (Spain). The Bank for International Settlements is exploring a similar concept via Project Nexus, which aims to connect the real-time payment systems of India, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand.

RTP growth is only beginning

Making RTPs truly global will likely require elements of all three paths: regional networks, bilateral agreements, and broader alliances. Different regions will weight them differently, but the value proposition of RTPs is strong enough for all parties that the pieces are likely to come together over the coming years. The last global payments revolution, credit cards, happened decades ago. With real-time payment networks now operating across many markets, the foundation for the next one is already in place.