How U.S. instant payments can catch up to the rest of the world
After a near-death experience in 2023, a shift in marketing has helped get the Real-Time Payment Network of The Clearing House back on a growth path. The launch of rival FedNow in 2023 also helped.
As David Watson, president and CEO of The Clearing House describes it, the early years of its Real-Time Payments Network passed in an atmosphere of “Kevin Costner, ‘If you build it, they will come. We’ll take any payment, every payment’.”
In Costner’s “Field of Dreams,” the ghosts of the Chicago White Sox, besmirched by the “Black Sox” gambling scandal, arrive after his character builds a baseball diamond in a cornfield. RTP, introduced in late 2017, the first new payments settlement system to come along in decades, didn’t prove so magnetic at first.
Watson joined The Clearing House — owned by 22 major U.S. banks — in early 2023. Soon after the future of RTP came before a concerned TCH board. The Federal Reserve was on the verge of introducing its own instant payments network, FedNow, and RTP’s usage was looking anemic compared to the significant role played by instant payments in other countries. With FedNow on the horizon, “a lot of people had sat back and waited,” said Watson. As a country, he said, the U.S. lost a few years of growth in instant payments.
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