Instant payment


Instant payment is a method of exchanging money and purchasing services. Compared with wire transfers, they allow the transfer of money from the payer bank account to the payee bank account almost immediately, instead of requiring a few business days.
These payment systems have been developed worldwide, as the need of faster and reliable transaction is the new economy's common requirement.
The Euro Retail Payments Board has provided a widely accepted definition of instant payments, that are:

Background

The growth of e-commerce has caused changes in people's spending patterns. Shopping is no longer confined to regular business hours, creating new challenges for funds transfers.
Similarly, merchants require faster and more reliable money transfer systems to keep up with consumers' demands.
Traditional electronic payments like wire transfers, that perform the electronic funds transfer within few business days, are not in line with user expectations.
It is predicted that, in the next year, instant payments will become the standard for electronic fund transfers, where customers will be able to digitally access their insurers and manage their funds.

Adoption

In 2017, Walmart, America's largest retailer, announced that it will start offering instant payments to its employees via a digital application, enabling them to access a portion of wages for the hours they have already worked.
In 2018, the on-demand delivery network Postmates partnered with Visa to enable real-time funds disbursement to their entire fleet. The new feature, called "Instant Deposits" runs on Visa Direct, Visa's real-time push payment platform, and is available to the entire Postmate fleet across the United States.

Examples of instant payment services

A non-exhaustive list of systems available today, and in the near future, is the following:
CountrySystem
ZENGIN, deployed in 1973
IBPS - Internet banking payment system, deployed in 2010
IMPS - Immediate Payment Service, deployed in 2010
UPI - Unified Payments Interface, deployed in 2016
Zelle, available since 2016;
Venmo, available since 2018
RTP - Real-Time Payments, available since 2017
RT1, available since November 2017
TIPS - TARGET Instant Payments Settlement, available from November 2018
NPP - New Payments Platform, available since February 2018.

Swish, since 2012 ; Denmark, MobilePay, since 2013 and Norway, Vipps, since 2015 - these three systems have got more than half of the respective country population as users, and has together with debit cards made many stop using cash in these countries.
Dutch Payment Association, Rollout completed on September 10, 2019 allowing payment within 5 seconds.
:ru:Система_быстрых_платежей|Система Быстрых Платежей - Fast Payments System. Since 2019

Comparison with digital wallets

In digital wallet based payment systems like Paytm, PayPal, Apple Pay, AliPay, WeChat Pay etc. users receive immediate notification of the transaction, but funds are transferred at best in the next business day.
The settlement time depends on the underpinning payment method chosen by the customer, while for instant payment systems, the funds are transferred within seconds or minutes.