Instant payments are fundamentally transforming the global payments landscape. The transaction value of instant payments is worth an estimated $60tn globally in 2025, and by 2030, this figure could exceed $129tn – representing a remarkable 115% growth. This explosive growth reflects a fundamental shift in how money moves across the economy.
Driving this momentum is a clear set of customer expectations fuelled by a range of instant payments services such as proxy payments, direct debits, request to pay, and more. Both consumers and businesses now demand speed, convenience, and 24/7 availability. To stay competitive, banks must meet these evolving needs or risk losing ground to more agile competitors. Account-to-account (A2A) payments are gaining significant traction at the point of sale, while instant payments are seeing increased adoption in B2B and B2C transactions where speed and efficiency are mission-critical.
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Meanwhile, regulatory initiatives and new payment networks across the United States, Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Asia Pacific are accelerating adoption. The growing integration and interoperability of domestic real-time payment schemes is expanding transaction flows toward faster, more efficient networks, complementing established systems like SWIFT and contributing to the evolution of payments infrastructure.
Bridging the readiness gap
Despite this remarkable growth trajectory, the banking sector faces a critical readiness gap. According to Capgemini’s World Payments Report 2025, banks are “seriously underprepared” for the acceleration of instant payments. Only 25% of banks can receive instant payments, and just 5% showcase high business and technology readiness to solidify their position as instant payment adoption leaders. This shortfall represents both a challenge and a significant strategic opportunity.
For institutions that modernise effectively, instant payments unlock substantial value: improved cash flow management, reduced operational costs, and entirely new business models. These benefits extend across use cases – from enabling gig economy payouts that provide workers immediate access to earnings, to facilitating efficient cross-border remittances and corporate disbursements that enhance treasury operations.
Adding to the complexity, alternative payment methods such as digital wallets and QR code-based payments are surging. Digital wallet users are estimated to surpass three-quarters of the global population by 2030, while QR code payments will grow from 454 billion in 2025 to 741 billion in 2030.
Meanwhile, the emergence of fiat-backed stablecoins is creating pressure for banks to orchestrate a multi-rail, multi-asset payments environment – one that supports coexistence of traditional rails with new digital assets for always-on value exchange. To compete effectively, banks must embrace both technological and strategic transformation to capture new revenue streams and meet evolving customer demands.
Technological barriers to overcome
To effectively capitalise on instant payment opportunities, banks must prioritise foundational technology modernisation. As transaction volumes grow and expectations shift toward real-time processing, there is an increasing need for platforms that can support continuous availability, high throughput, and intelligent orchestration. Advances in technologies such as generative AI are beginning to enhance how institutions manage operational complexity, enabling faster issue resolution, improved decision support, and greater process efficiency. At the same time, modern architectures must provide the flexibility to integrate emerging capabilities and adapt to evolving regulatory and cross-border requirements, ensuring payments infrastructure is resilient, scalable, and future-ready.
However, legacy systems present a fundamental barrier. Traditional monolithic, batch-based architectures are insufficient for the demands of instant payments, which require 24/7 availability and the ability to handle unpredictable transaction spikes. Data from SWIFT shows that inefficient exception and investigation handling costs the industry $2bn annually, impacting 700 million transactions. A SWIFT outage in July 2024 that impacted the European Central Bank and UK’s CHAPS system underscores the heightened exposure of payment ecosystems to operational disruptions in a real-time world.
The path to modernisation
Banks must transition to modular, microservices-based, and cloud-native architectures that deliver scalability, resilience, and continuous availability. Modern payment solutions leverage APIs, microservices, and multi-cloud deployments to enable dynamic scaling – automatically allocating resources based on real-time demand. This architectural shift allows systems to handle volatility, not just volume, ensuring they can respond to flash sales, payroll runs, or market events that create sudden transaction surges at any hour. By decoupling payment functions – authorisation, fraud screening, settlement, and notifications – institutions can scale specific services independently, maintaining performance and continuity even under stress.
Beyond architectural modernisation, banks must establish the foundational standards and connectivity frameworks that enable seamless, global instant payment flows. Central to this is the adoption of ISO 20022, the universal messaging standard that provides richer data, higher automation, and true global interoperability. Unlike proprietary formats, ISO 20022 embeds contextual information – such as payer identity, payment purpose, and invoice references – directly into payment messages, enabling higher straight-through processing rates, better fraud screening, and innovative overlay services like Request to Pay and real-time credit scoring.
Interoperability is equally critical, but it operates across distinct layers of the payments ecosystem. The interlinking of domestic real-time payment schemes through bilateral corridors, regional infrastructures like TIPS, or initiatives such as Project Nexus is largely driven by central banks, regulators, and network operators.
These efforts are shaping the future of cross-border instant payments at a systemic level. At the same time, banks play a crucial role in enabling value on top of this foundation by adopting architectures that can seamlessly connect to multiple networks, orchestrate flows across rails, and support consistent processing across jurisdictions. As global initiatives, including the G20 roadmap, accelerate progress, the ability of banks to integrate and leverage these interconnected systems will be key to delivering faster, more efficient cross-border experiences.
On the operational front, banks must enhance real-time liquidity and risk management. AI-driven forecasting tools provide visibility into global cash positions, helping institutions avoid the costly trade-off between overfunding settlement accounts and risking payment failures. Real-time fraud prevention requires dynamic integration with external fraud systems, enabling pay/no-pay decisioning within milliseconds. Meanwhile, 24/7 foreign exchange capabilities – with always-on rate engines, direct liquidity provider access, and corridor-specific hedging – are essential for supporting instant cross-border flows beyond traditional market hours.
To unlock competitive advantage, banks must adopt a multi-rail, modular architecture that unifies mass, high-value, instant, and cross-border payments under one system, as well as alternate payment models and digital-asset based money movement solutions.
An intelligent routing engine can evaluate each payment in real time, factoring in cost, speed, scheme reachability, and regulatory obligations to determine the optimal path. This approach reduces manual interventions, accelerates contingency management, and delivers highly reliable customer outcomes. Ultimately, success in the instant payments era isn’t just about processing transactions faster, it’s about designing for real-time value: transparency, reliability, and tangible business impact that drives both revenue growth and customer trust.
Radha Suvarna, Chief Product Officer, Payments, Finastra
