Real-time payments explained: which rail does what, who is on it, and where AI sits

Which real-time payment rails exist, and which is the best payment network for banks?

A real-time payment rail moves money from one bank account to another in seconds, at any hour, with funds the payee can use at once and no reversal by the sender's bank. Six account-to-account rails matter for most banks: the Federal Reserve's FedNow Service and The Clearing House's RTP network in the United States, the European Payments Council's SEPA Instant Credit Transfer scheme (SCT Inst), the UK Faster Payment System run by Pay.UK, India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI) run by NPCI, and Brazil's Pix run by the Banco Central do Brasil. On top of them sit overlays and push-to-card products that customers often see instead of the rail: Zelle in the US, Visa Direct and Mastercard Move.

The honest answer to “which is the best payment network for banks for real-time payments” is that the choice is made by geography first and use case second. Outside the US there is one national or regional rail and, increasingly, a legal duty to be on it: euro-area payment service providers had to be able to receive SCT Inst payments by 9 January 2025 and send them by 9 October 2025 under Regulation (EU) 2024/886. In the US there are two interbank rails and no mandate, and the deciding facts are reach and volume. RTP carries most of the traffic: 271.6 million payments worth $1.06 trillion in the first half of 2026 (The Clearing House, statistics through June 2026), against 7.7 million worth $546 billion on FedNow over the same two quarters (Federal Reserve Financial Services, July 2026). FedNow has more connected institutions: more than 1,800 by July 2026, against RTP's 1,378 as of September 2026. A bank that wants to send to and receive from the most accounts joins both, and the largest banks are on both: TCH describes RTP users as ranging up to “the nation's largest FIs”, and the Fed says FedNow participants range from under $500 million to over $3 trillion in assets (FedNow town hall, March 2026). The next section shows why.

Sources for the table: Federal Reserve press release of 20 July 2023, FedNow town hall of 22 July 2026 and transaction-limit release of 9 September 2025; The Clearing House RTP page (September 2026) and RTP Rules Interpretation of 29 October 2025; the EPC SCT Inst page and its May 2026 scheme update to the ECB's AMI-Pay group; Regulation (EU) 2024/886; Pay.UK's Faster Payment System page and the PSR's 7 October 2024 notice; NPCI's UPI overview, statistics and 10 September 2026 release; the BCB's Pix statistics, SPI annual report and MED guidance. Limits shown are network maximums; every bank sets its own lower limits by customer and channel.

How do FedNow and RTP compare in volume, value and price?

The two US rails publish their own statistics, and they tell different stories. RTP is the high-count consumer and business rail: in 2025 it processed 447.2 million payments worth $1.45 trillion, an average of 1.23 million a day, and in the third quarter of 2026 alone 150 million payments worth $621 billion (The Clearing House). FedNow processes far fewer payments of far higher average value. Its 2025 total was 8.4 million settled customer credit transfers worth $853.4 billion, and in the second quarter of 2026 it settled 5.0 million worth $274.7 billion, an average of $54,957 a payment (Federal Reserve Financial Services, updated 6 July 2026). Computed from those figures, RTP carried about 97% of the two rails' combined payment count in the first half of 2026 but about 66% of the combined value: the average RTP payment was about $3,900, the average FedNow payment about $70,700.

Two cautions on reading these numbers. FedNow's statistics count settled customer credit transfers only and use calendar days, and its value line jumped in 2025 (up 2,134% on 2024) in the year the limit was raised twice; the count is still small next to RTP's. RTP's count includes Zelle payments that banks clear and settle over the network, which is one reason it is so much larger: The Clearing House's fraud-reporting rules distinguish “RTP-native” payments from “RTP/Zelle Messages”. The Federal Reserve called the September 2025 increase “our second transaction limit increase this year”; the earlier 2025 step is not detailed in the documents cited here.

How do banks choose between FedNow and RTP?

Most large banks do not choose; they join both. The reason is reachability. An instant payment can only be delivered to an account at an institution that is on the same rail, and the two networks' memberships overlap without being identical: RTP has the traffic, FedNow has more participants, and many institutions on either connect through a core processor or a certified service provider (FedNow counted more than 40 such providers in March 2026). The Fed put its own reach at more than 1,800 participants in July 2026, up from more than 1,400 in September 2025; The Clearing House put RTP at over 1,378 participants in September 2026. A treasury client paying thousands of suppliers or employees wants every payee reachable, so the bank routes each payment to whichever rail the receiving institution is on and falls back to ACH when neither is.

Below the largest banks the decision is about cost, effort and customers. Connecting to FedNow runs over the Fed's FedLine network, which serves more than 9,000 financial institutions directly or through agents, and its 2026 fee schedule charges the sender $0.045 per credit transfer with the first 2,500 a month discounted to zero. The Clearing House does not publish RTP prices on the pages cited here. Many institutions reach the rails through their core or payments vendor: Commerce Bank runs FedNow on Temenos and Central Bancompany chose TCS BaNCS partly for pre-integrated FedNow and RTP support (both in the computed table at the end of this page, with sources).

What is not on the record: neither operator publishes a list of which banks send versus only receive, and no large bank has published the share of its instant payments that runs on each rail. The Fed's participant counts and TCH's participant count are the only public denominators.

Where do Zelle, Visa Direct and Mastercard Move fit among real-time money transfer solutions?

Customers searching for “real time payments money transfer solutions” mostly meet brands, not rails. Zelle is a bank-owned consumer and small-business service: Early Warning Services, owned by JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, PNC, Truist, Capital One and U.S. Bank, reported $1.2 trillion sent over Zelle in 2025, up 20% (Banking Dive, 9 February 2026). Zelle is an overlay with its own directory of emails and phone numbers and its own rules; the interbank leg can clear and settle over RTP, where TCH's current rules treat Zelle payments as a separate message class. Visa Direct and Mastercard Move are push-payment services on the card networks that deliver to debit cards, accounts and wallets, and cross borders. Visa Direct processed more than 12.5 billion transactions in fiscal 2025, roughly eight times its 2019 volume (Visa annual report 2025); Mastercard Move reaches more than 200 countries and territories, more than 17 billion endpoints and 150 currencies (Mastercard, 18 February 2026).

For a bank the difference is who carries the risk and the data. On RTP and FedNow the bank sends a full ISO 20022 message and settles finally with the receiving bank; on an overlay the network or scheme operator sets rules for directories, disputes and fees. See the Visa and Mastercard profiles for how each network describes its AI and money-movement strategy.

How do SEPA Instant, UK Faster Payments, UPI and Pix work, and what do the rules require?

SEPA Instant. The EPC published the SCT Inst rulebook in November 2016 and the scheme became operational in November 2017. Regulation (EU) 2024/886, the Instant Payments Regulation, amended the SEPA Regulation in April 2024 and turned instant euro transfers from an option into a duty: payment service providers in the euro area had to offer receiving by 9 January 2025 and sending by 9 October 2025, with non-euro Member States following by 9 January 2027 and 9 July 2027. The payee's provider must make funds available within 10 seconds of the payer's provider receiving the order; charges for instant transfers may not exceed those for ordinary credit transfers; payers must be offered a free verification-of-payee service; and providers must screen their customers against EU sanctions lists at least daily rather than screening each instant payment. By April 2026, 2,817 providers adhered to SCT Inst, 80% of SEPA credit-transfer providers and 93% in the euro area, and SCT Inst made up 35.6% of SEPA credit transfers in Q1 2026; full-year 2025 volume was 10.1 billion, up 73% (EPC update to the ECB's AMI-Pay, May 2026). Verification of Payee, one of the obligations that took effect on 9 October 2025, had 2,768 adhering providers by April 2026 (same EPC update).

UK Faster Payments. Pay.UK's Faster Payment System has run since 2008, 24 hours a day, for payments of up to £1 million, and processed 5.55 billion transactions worth £4.84 trillion in 2025. The UK chose a liability rule rather than a speed rule: since 7 October 2024 the Payment Systems Regulator has required sending firms to reimburse victims of authorised push payment (APP) scams on Faster Payments and CHAPS, up to £85,000 per claim, usually within five business days, with an optional excess of up to £100 that cannot be applied to vulnerable customers. In its first 18 months to 31 March 2026, 88% (£316 million) of money lost to in-scope APP scams was reimbursed and 82% of claims were closed within five business days (PSR dashboard, 30 July 2026).

UPI. NPCI piloted UPI with 21 banks on 11 April 2016 and banks published UPI apps from 25 August 2016. In September 2026 UPI carried 24,068.38 million transactions worth ₹29,37,396.67 crore (about ₹29.4 lakh crore) across 756 live banks (NPCI). Pix. The BCB launched Pix in November 2020; its settlement system must settle 50% of payments within 2.8 seconds and 99% within 4.6 seconds and charges institutions nothing to send (SPI annual report 2024). Pix had 887 participants on 1 October 2026, more than 7 billion transactions in January 2026 and a single-day record of 313,339,828 on 5 December 2025 (BCB).

How do banks use AI on instant payment rails?

Irrevocability changes where fraud detection sits. On a card, a disputed transaction can be charged back weeks later; on an instant credit transfer, once the payee's bank confirms settlement the money is gone and the only routes back are a request to return funds or a recovery mechanism. That moves the decision to the seconds before authorisation. The sending bank scores the payment against the customer's behaviour, device and session signals and the payee's risk, and decides to send, hold for review or block; on SEPA it has to do so inside the 10-second budget the Instant Payments Regulation sets for the whole transaction. The receiving bank, increasingly liable for mule accounts, scores inbound payments as well. Figure 2 marks both points.

What the operators are building

• Federal Reserve. FedNow participants can set account activity thresholds and, since 28 April 2026 for early adopters, call a network intelligence API that returns receiver account-level data observed over the service so the sender can proceed, hold or review a payment; the Fed is also adapting its Payee Name Verification service for real-time use (FRFS, 23 April 2026). Its ScamClassifier model is a structure for consistent classification, reporting and analysis of scams and related trends, so that banks' reports and labels line up (FRFS). Consistent labels are what supervised fraud models are trained on.
• The Clearing House. RTP participants must report unauthorised payments with the FRAD code and, from 31 March 2026, payments a customer was tricked into sending with the UAPA code, through a return-request message; from 1 March 2027 those reports are due within two business days. TCH monitors the network and sends system-level and participant-level alerts, for example on unusual fraud rates at a receiving bank (RTP Rules Interpretation, 29 October 2025).
• Pay.UK. In June 2023 Pay.UK gave Visa, Synectics Solutions and Featurespace historic Faster Payments data from participating banks under a data-sharing agreement, for them to build AI and machine-learning models that flag suspicious flows across banks; Confirmation of Payee has run since 2020.
• EPC and the EU. Verification of Payee checks the payee name against the IBAN before authorisation and tells the payer whether the name matches, almost matches (showing the registered name) or does not match; adherence reached 2,768 providers by April 2026.
• NPCI. MyUPI, launched on 10 September 2026 and built on NPCI's small language model FiMI, adds a Safety Switch to decline debits after a suspected compromise, payee context before a payment and automated chargebacks.
• BCB. Pix's Special Return Mechanism lets a victim claim within 80 days; the central bank maps the accounts the money moved to, receiving institutions block funds and decide within seven days, and confirmed fraudsters are marked and cut off from Pix at that institution.
• Card networks selling into account-to-account payments. Visa's enhanced A2A Protect (1 September 2026) combines Featurespace technology into a unified fraud score with plain-language reasons and opt-in network intelligence, and Visa says it raised detection by 75% in the first six months of deployment.

The common thread is data sharing under time pressure: a single bank sees one end of a scam, the operator or network sees both, and the new tools send the network view back to the bank before the payment leaves. Banks still own the decision and, in the UK and under RTP's rules, the consequences. For the model-risk and vendor questions that follow, see our AI fraud detection page.

What do named banks disclose about instant payments and AI?

Few banks put numbers on the record for either. Bank of America reported that its corporate clients' RTP transaction volume rose 48% in January–July 2026 against the same period of 2025, and that corporate RTP transactions above $1 million rose 351%, led by liquidity management, intercompany transfers and cash concentration after the limit increase (Bank of America, 29 September 2026). JPMorgan Chase, a part-owner of Zelle's operator, has published no instant-payment fraud figures. The table below is computed from this site's bank profiles: every profiled bank whose recorded AI or technology use case mentions FedNow, RTP, real-time or instant payments, or Zelle, with the strongest entry per bank and its source.

Read the table for what it is: the record is thin. Among these profiles, Société Générale's Mosaic models are the only bank-disclosed AI with a stated result on instant payments, and SoFi sells an AI/ML real-time payment-risk platform to other institutions; the rest are platform choices (Temenos at Commerce, TCS BaNCS at Central Bancompany) that make FedNow and RTP possible. None of the largest US banks has published a fraud rate, false-positive rate or loss figure for its instant-payment models. For the wider set of payments AI disclosures, see the payments hub and individual profiles such as Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Commerce.

1. FedNow Service Volume and Value Statistics — Federal Reserve Financial Services, Jul 6, 2026 (frbservices.org)
2. FedNow Service Town Hall: Three Years of the FedNow Service — Federal Reserve Financial Services, Jul 22, 2026 (frbservices.org)
3. FedNow Service Town Hall (March 2026): network participants and service providers — Federal Reserve Financial Services, Mar 25, 2026 (frbservices.org)
4. FedNow Service will raise transaction limit to $10 million to meet increased demand — Federal Reserve Financial Services, Sep 9, 2025 (frbservices.org)
5. Federal Reserve announces that its new system for instant payments, the FedNow Service, is now live — Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Jul 20, 2023 (federalreserve.gov)
6. FedNow network intelligence API empowers participants to send payments with confidence — Federal Reserve Financial Services, Apr 23, 2026 (frbservices.org)
7. FedNow Service 2026 Fee Schedule — Federal Reserve Financial Services, Jan 1, 2026 (frbservices.org)
8. The ScamClassifier Model and Effective Scam Reporting (webinar page, accessed 16 Oct 2026) — Federal Reserve Financial Services, Oct 16, 2026 (frbservices.org)
9. Real Time Payments (RTP network overview, figures as of September 2026) — The Clearing House, Oct 16, 2026 (theclearinghouse.org)
10. RTP Network Volume and Value Statistics (annual, 2026 year to date through June) — The Clearing House, Jul 15, 2026 (theclearinghouse.org)
11. RTP Rules Interpretation: Fraud Reporting and Acting on Alerts — The Clearing House, Oct 29, 2025 (theclearinghouse.org)
12. SEPA Instant Credit Transfer (scheme page) — European Payments Council, Oct 16, 2026 (europeanpaymentscouncil.eu)
13. EPC Update on Payment Schemes and VOP (AMI-Pay meeting, Pres EPC065-26) — European Payments Council via European Central Bank, May 6, 2026 (ecb.europa.eu)
14. Regulation (EU) 2024/886 as regards instant credit transfers in euro (Instant Payments Regulation) — European Parliament and Council (EUR-Lex), Mar 19, 2024 (eur-lex.europa.eu)
15. Faster Payment System (system page, 2025 volumes) — Pay.UK, Oct 16, 2026 (wearepay.uk)
16. Groundbreaking new protections for victims of APP scams start today — Payment Systems Regulator, Oct 7, 2024 (psr.org.uk)
17. APP Scams Reimbursement Dashboard — Payment Systems Regulator, Jul 30, 2026 (psr.org.uk)
18. Pay.UK partners with Visa, Synectics Solutions and Featurespace on pioneering fraud detection and prevention initiative — Pay.UK, Jun 28, 2023 (wearepay.uk)
19. Unified Payments Interface (UPI) Product Statistics — National Payments Corporation of India, Oct 1, 2026 (npci.org.in)
20. Unified Payments Interface: Product Overview — National Payments Corporation of India, Oct 16, 2026 (npci.org.in)
21. RBI Governor unveils new UPI capabilities at GFF 2026: AI-powered customer support and tap-and-pay — National Payments Corporation of India, Sep 10, 2026 (npci.org.in)
22. Pix em números (Pix statistics) — Banco Central do Brasil, Oct 1, 2026 (bcb.gov.br)
23. Instant Payments System (SPI) Annual Report 2024 — Banco Central do Brasil, Jun 30, 2025 (bcb.gov.br)
24. O que é e como funciona o Mecanismo Especial de Devolução (MED) — Banco Central do Brasil, Sep 18, 2026 (bcb.gov.br)
25. JPMorgan, Nacha to share data via blockchain (Zelle 2025 volume) — Banking Dive, Feb 9, 2026 (bankingdive.com)
26. Visa 2025 Annual Report: Chairman and CEO message — Visa, Dec 15, 2025 (annualreport.visa.com)
27. Visa Launches Enhanced A2A Protect Innovations to Help Financial Institutions Stop Fraud Before Money Leaves Accounts — Visa, Sep 1, 2026 (investor.visa.com)
28. Ericsson and Mastercard enhance global digital money movement and accelerate digital financial inclusion — Mastercard, Feb 18, 2026 (mastercard.com)
29. BofA Clients Accelerate RTP Use, Led by Liquidity Management — Bank of America, Sep 29, 2026 (newsroom.bankofamerica.com)
30. 2024 APP scam performance data: before the reimbursement requirement was implemented — Payment Systems Regulator, Feb 15, 2026 (psr.org.uk)