The Last Mile of Real-Time Payments

The transfer is the easy part

Moving a payment in under ten seconds is a solved engineering problem. Deciding what happens when it fails, reversing it, reconciling it against a ledger written by a system from 1994 — none of that got faster.

We shipped instant payments and discovered our support queue was the bottleneck.

Banks that treated real-time as a network upgrade are now rebuilding operations around it. The ones that treated it as an operations problem from day one are quietly ahead.