Sending Is the Next Instant Payments Test

Most financial institutions (FIs) have moved beyond the “simple” challenges of instant payment access. The Real Time Payments (RTP) network has processed more than 1.7 billion transactions and cleared and settled over $3.4 trillion instantly since 2017, and FedNow settled over eight million payments in 2025.

Now, banks are focused on safely deploying all instant payment capabilities across different transaction experiences. To accomplish this goal, banks must move beyond simple instant payment connectivity and toward orchestration, controls, visibility, and resilience across real-time and multi-rail payment ecosystems. Success increasingly depends on a bank’s ability to manage payment flows across multiple networks through a unified operating model rather than treating each rail as a standalone process.

The Send-Side Gap

Send-side enablement remains the largest challenge across instant payment implementation. Most banks have established receiving functionality, with 98% of FedNow participants having received an instant payment since the program’s launch. However, in the same time frame, send-side enablement has continuously lagged behind. The result is a widening disconnect between the ability to receive and originate instant payments.

Risk is a major cause of this adoption gap. Most FIs lack the ability to manage exposure, liquidity, compliance, 24/7 uptime, manage fraud exposure and customer experience – all of which are required to execute send-side transactions safely – with their existing architectures. Smaller banks and credit unions especially struggle to offset send transactions with comparable incoming instant volume, as a few large banks hold a disproportionate share of deposits — the top four alone account for roughly 44% so money tends to flow out toward those institutions faster than it flows back in. One reason these controls remain limited is that legacy bank payment infrastructure typically concentrates verification at the beginning of a transaction. This means recipient validation, sanctions checks, liquidity confirmations, and fraud screenings all happen at the start, without accounting for exposure that occurs when payments shift mid-flow.

Since ongoing transaction monitoring is difficult to operationalize, and the sending bank is significantly exposed if the right controls are not in place, FIs have, in the past, chosen to avoid send-enablement. Yet this option is no longer compatible with instant payment environments. Newer use cases increasingly demand the deployment of this capability.

Demand Is Moving Faster Than Enablement

The Clearing House (TCH) has outlined several use cases in which instant payments and, consequently, send-side enablement are important to modern payment flows. These use cases include:

1. Earned wage access: With many American workers living paycheck to paycheck, they are coming to rely on quick access to their earnings.
2. Corporate credit cards: Companies want to pay off their corporate card balance without worrying about processing delays.
3. Payroll: Many consumers want access to their paycheck after the work has been completed, not within the typical one-to-two-week window.

All of these use cases require the send-side enablement that many banks have yet to operationalize. Earned wage access and payroll can only occur if the FI serving the employer can originate the payment. Similarly, a company’s bank must be able to send funds instantly for corporate customers to pay down card balances without processing delays.

Operationalizing these use cases becomes more challenging in the face of multiple real-time networks. Each additional rail introduces another layer of complexity that banks must account for when sending payments.

Operating across FedNow and RTP

In the U.S., the two major instant payment networks are FedNow and RTP. While both rails provide 24/7/365 payment capacity, they differ in how they operate. FedNow provides instant payment services to eligible depository institutions through the Federal Reserve Banks, while TCH operates RTP as a private-sector network.

To fully modernize real-time payments, banks should be able to operate payment flows seamlessly across both. That means FIs must consider how to implement FedNow payment fraud controls and RTP risk controls simultaneously and continue those defenses as the networks mature.

For example, RTP and FedNow have both introduced request for payment (RFP). RFP capabilities allow companies to send e-invoices or instant bill requests to downstream parties. With RFP enablement, an FI has to manage risk verification across an entirely new initiation pathway.

The challenge is managing multiple rails and instant payment capabilities in a consistent, scalable manner. The right architecture will be critical to this endeavor for FIs wishing to maximize RTP scaling and volume growth.

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Building for Always-On Payments

As banks modernize their legacy payment infrastructure to create the capacity required of a multi-rail, send/receive instant payment environment, they will benefit from a high-availability architecture that can account for the following:

1. Risk: FIs must establish transaction monitoring throughout the payment lifecycle. This means embedded validation that can help banks surface errors early in a transaction. It also means implementing ISO 20022 messaging formats to provide structured information for analysis, as well as initial fraud controls like multi-factor authentication or data encryption. FIs should establish these alongside liquidity management functions, such as analysis of prefunded balances and intraday liquidity positions.
2. Orchestration: Instant payment success will depend on orchestration capabilities across the transaction experiences a specific bank supports. In practice, this means routing to the optimal rail to reduce downtime and failure risk. Emerging AI-driven and agentic capabilities are beginning to help banks improve payment routing, monitoring, and operational decision-making, as it allows payment operations teams to make faster, more informed decisions while monitoring transactions and identifying irregularities.
3. End to End Transaction Latency: Instant payment penetration will accelerate as networks achieve end-to-end performance measured in seconds, where the full round trip from initiation to credit confirmation at the beneficiary is completed within a few seconds. Low end-to-end latency is what transforms real-time capability into real-time trust: when senders and receivers can rely on funds arriving and being confirmed near-instantly, adoption compounds across use cases. Critically, this unlocks a large segment of person-to-merchant (P2M) transactions—a category that holds significant volumes globally and is currently dominated by credit cards.

By accounting for risk, orchestration, and latency requirements, FIs can begin the next phase of instant payment adoption with an always-on, confidence-based operating model that supports their operations.

From Instant Access to Instant Confidence

Instant payments depend not only on speed, but on safety, resiliency and availability which a modern architecture offers. While many use cases now require send-side enablement, FIs will receive minimal lasting value if their payments do not arrive securely.

Redesigning payment architecture to account for liquidity, exposure, compliance, and orchestration is necessary for the future growth of real-time payments. Banks that can orchestrate payment flows across rails, manage risk throughout the transaction lifecycle, and activate the full capabilities of modern payment networks will be best positioned to scale.

About Volante Technologies

Volante Technologies is a trusted cloud payments modernization partner for financial businesses worldwide.

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