{
  "id": 3223203,
  "title": "Banks Turn Real-Time Payment Rails Into Customer Products",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/25/banks-turn-real-time-payment-rails-into-customer-products",
  "topic": "finance",
  "section": "Finance & Markets",
  "published": "2026-08-25T08:03:40.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "PYMNTS",
    "slug": "pymnts",
    "url": "https://www.pymnts.com/real-time-payments/2026/banks-turn-real-time-payment-rails-into-customer-products/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Banks are turning real-time payment rails into customer products, as Jim Colassano, senior vice president of product development and strategy at The Clearing House, explains. While participation in the RTP network is a baseline requirement for banks, the real challenge lies in designing useful products that leverage the instant payment capabilities. Colassano highlights the difficulty of adapting existing bank systems to handle individual transactions cleared and settled in real-time, 24/7. This shift requires banks to rethink their internal processes, which have traditionally been built around batch processing and batch clearing. A key customer-facing use case is enabling account-to-account transfers, both within the same institution and across different institutions. The immediacy of these transactions highlights the properties of real-time payments, such as transaction finality, confirmation, and 24-hour availability. Colassano points to examples like vehicle purchases, where instant payment confirmation is crucial for the seller, and early wage access and gig work, where payment timing is closely tied to work completion. While the RTP network can handle large transactions ($10 million limit as of 2022), the decision of which payment rail to use depends on the customer's specific needs and priorities. Banks are moving towards integrating various payment systems, such as RTP, ACH, wires, and upcoming FedNow, into a single payment service that offers customers the best-suited rail based on their requirements. This holistic approach to payment processing eliminates the need for customers to navigate separate technical options for each type of transaction.",
  "summary": "Watch more: Need to Know With Jim Colassano of The Clearing House For banks, connecting to real-time payments was the entry point. Making those payments useful requires considerably more work inside the institution, from back-office processing and account posting to deciding when a payment should travel over an instant rail at all. That is the […] The post Banks Turn Real-Time Payment Rails Into…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}