Spurred by a year of unprecedented disruption, 2020 saw real-time payments grow larger—in terms of both volumes and values—and faster than anyone could have anticipated. In fact, the growth was so rapid that it outstripped our prior year Prime Time report predictions.

2020 consistently underlined the need for digital payments infrastructures to be robust – able to cope with unanticipated transaction volumes – and real-time. Whether in markets with highly established real-time infrastructures such as the UK, or in emerging real-time markets like the U.S., the demand for these services increased exponentially over the past year. And it’s not demand we expect to see reversed. In fact, that demand is expected to grow beyond Account-to-Account payments and expand into a wealth of use cases.

Flexibility to adapt to emerging consumer and business demands is the hallmark of success for new real-time infrastructures. Those that experienced the largest growth during 2020 include a multitude of consumer, merchant and corporate use cases that facilitated contactless commerce during social distancing, and kept global economies transacting in times of great uncertainty.

New real-time infrastructures such as FedNow, Canada’s RTR, EPI, and the upgraded UK Faster Payments scheme will all need to deliver the reliability required of national infrastructure, as well as innovate at the speed of customer demand to keep pace with new digital payment requirements from consumer and corporate customers.

This panel explores planning for and developing the balance between robust and flexible payments infrastructures that can support the predicted volume, velocity and variety of transactions that grow from the evolution of real-time payments.