Real-Time Payments Gathering Pace

A number of you will know that I’ve been working on real-time payments with many clients around the world, and will have seen previews of some of the information in my forthcoming reports. One chart I have shown regularly is the likely adoption curve for real-time payments. This takes a classic innovation adoption bell curve. The top of the curve is where the market has reached 50% adoption. Of course, the question then becomes how many and of how many to plot where we are today. Many of the conversations I have with clients often start with a belief that there are only a handful of schemes globally. The truth is rather different. A good but not exhaustive scan showed that there were actually 35 systems globally. Using a set of criteria, such as levels of GDP, maturity of electronic payments, presence of an RTGS system, we estimate that there are 115 countries which we believe could adopt a real-time systems. That actually puts us just over 30% market adoption. At this point, I ought to point out that there are a few fudges to this figure. For example, note that we say systems, not countries, as some countries actually more than one real-time system (India for example). But it doesn’t detract from the underlying trend. Indeed, the use of the past tense was deliberate, as yesterday saw the announcement from the Finnish Federation of Financial Services of an RFI for a real-time payment system, bringing the total to 36. We also hear rumours of several other countries in advanced discussions. This also supports our other hypothesis. A study of the adoption of RTGS systems globally proves remarkably similar to both the shape of the adoption curve but also to the timelines. If we take that adoption pattern and project forwards, it would suggest that the next 5 years will see a flurry, if not significant numbers, of other systems being announced. It would seem that we are on the cusp of a revolution in payment processing – are you ready?