A lot of ink has been spilled speculating about FedNow, the US government’s forthcoming real-time payments infrastructure — especially how and why it differs from The Clearing House’s RTP product, same-day ACH, and Visa Direct.
However, as Rocio Wu points out in her regular column for Forbes, few have considered whether businesses and consumers in the US will actually adopt RTP payments on the back of FedNow. In this story, she compares the American payments landscape with the rest of the world, much of which has already rolled out and adopted their own government RTP infrastructure, to see what lessons can be learned.
RTP technology has been most successful in countries where sparse card payment infrastructure fails to satiate a large appetite for electronic payments. In those countries, RTP has effectively leapfrogged card-based payments as the most popular payment method.