U.S. Bank Teams Up With Tech Provider Kyriba To Bolster Real-Time Payments

The nascent U.S. real-time payments market took another step forward Wednesday when U.S. Bank and Kyriba Corp., a provider of financial technology for multinational corporations and banks, announced they are working together to enable instant payments for businesses.

Under their new pact, joint clients of U.S. Bank and Kyriba will be able to send real-time payments to customers, vendors, and employees using their current Kyriba dashboards. Payments will move over the RTP Network from The Clearing House Payments Co., of which U.S. Bank is a participant. In addition, joint customers will be able to send instant payments via Zelle, a payment service developed by Early Warning Services LLC, a tech company owned by some of the nation’s largest banks.

San Diego-based Kyriba claims more than 2,500 customers worldwide, including 25% of the Fortune 500. The company’s many products include the Kyriba Payments Network, which provides connections to banks globally, manages payments among multiple internal systems such as payroll, treasury, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) processes for managing multiple business operations. It also provides fraud control and related services.

Under the hood, the Kyriba-U.S. Bank service will rely on new payment connections run by application programming interfaces.

“We’re focused on streamlining the process of enabling instant payments for our clients to help them quickly experience the competitive advantage that comes with delivering payments in real-time, 24/7,” Anu Somani, head of global payables and embedded payments at Minneapolis-based U.S. Bank, said in a statement. “This is one of many ways we are bringing embedded payments to the market. With real-time APIs, we’re meeting our customers where they are, easily embedding our payment solutions directly into their existing systems.”

The service will reduce payment costs while increasing visibility into cash management and forecasting, according to Bob Stark, Kyriba’s global head of market strategy.

“Combined with Kyriba’s real-time fraud detection and account validation, Kyriba and U.S. Bank are delivering secure and compliant payment processing that operates at machine speed,” Stark said in a statement.

Kyriba says it manages more than 1.3 billion bank transactions per year and 250 million payments for a total value of $15 trillion.

The two companies would not disclose how many joint customers they have. A U.S. Bank spokesperson tells Digital Transactions News that the service will be aimed mainly at mid-sized and large corporations, though it also will be available to clients of the bank’s Elavon merchant-acquiring subsidiary, which serves thousands of small businesses.

This week, payments-technology company ACI Worldwide Inc. released research results predicting U.S. real-time payment transactions will grow 32% annually between 2022 and 2027, but will still account for less than 4% of paper and electronic payments in four years.