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Consumers and businesses are embracing instant payments at a fast clip, even as volume growth makes double-digit increases harder to maintain. And while businesses account for a large portion of dollar volume, most of those blink-of-an-eye transactions involve consumers, says The Clearing House Payments Co., which early Wednesday released the latest statistics for its Real Time Payments network.
The New York City-based network, owned by some of the nation’s largest banks, has reached a pace of nearly 1 million transactions per day, with 343 million in 2024, up 38% from 2023. Total value for the year reached $246 billion, fully 94% over the prior year. For the fourth quarter alone, the transaction number came to 98 million, good for $80 billion in volume, up 12% and 16%, respectively, from the third quarter.
All in all, “we’re going in the right direction,” says a spokesman for the network. “We’re happy with the growth.” He shies away from making projections for 2025, however, saying such a forecast would be hard to make this early in the yea.
One encouraging development for TCH is that the system, launched in 2017, is seeing more million-transaction days, after witnessing the first one a year and a half ago, according to the spokesman. “Almost every Friday has been over a million,” he says, while noting that day is typically a payday. But “even Sundays tend to be over a million now,” he notes.
And while business dealings have for years accounted for the largest average transaction values, consumers are now involved in fully 88.5% of the network’s transactions, the spokesman says, with 11.5% being “pure business-to-business.” These consumer transactions typically involve wallet funding, earned-wage access transfers, gig-economy payouts, and sports bets, he says.
Consumers, indeed, are not only more aware of the speedy service, they’re showing enthusiasm for it, says the spokesman. “Once consumers or businesses see it, it’s ‘wow, that was super easy,’ they start looking for that [capability] and are even willing to pay a fee. We’re seeing it, and our banks are seeing it.”
Fees to end users are set by the banks. The fee levied by RTP to the financial institutions is a flat 4.5 cents per transaction to send. There is no network fee for receiving transactions. “We don’t know what the end fees are. We purposely stay out of that,” the spokesman says.
RTP’s results come as businesses and consumers increasingly embrace real-time service. The Federal Reserve, which launched its FedNow network in July 2023, recorded 336,487 transactions in the third quarter of 2024, good for $17.5 billion in value, according to the Fed. That payments count was up 115% from the second quarter.
