What will it take to hit the instant payments tipping point?

Instant payments is an innovation that doesn’t require much explanation. Getting immediate access to money is an obviously better solution than waiting for the check to arrive in the mail, or constantly refreshing a mobile banking app to see if transferred funds have been cleared for use.

And, as Karen Webster noted in a recent conversation on digital disbursements with Ingo Money’s Drew Edwards, while it may not be conventional wisdom that consumers and SMBs want instant payments, it is well on its way to shifting from “nice to have” to “must-have.”

“We’re seeing over and over that this is what customers want, and it’s where market leaders are heading,” Edwards told Webster. “We’re not talking about whether we’re going to hit this tipping point in the future – we’re talking about when, and we’re talking about in the next couple of years.”

Getting to that tipping point is complicated, Edwards noted, and there are some big obstacles to overcome, even though market pressures are setting the pace at which companies must move to offer instant pay as an option. And, in many cases, the FinTechs are serving as the pace car.

 

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