Community Banks Craft Business Cases for Real-Time Payments

The promise of payments that clear in seconds rather than days has moved from a bright idea to a strategic imperative for banks of all sizes.

Yet as real-time payments rails race ahead, many community and mid-sized banks still struggle to turn speed into strategy. They risk watching deposits follow the money, but an expert panel discussion on PYMNTS TV had a simple message for a complex problem: Build the business case first, not the plumbing.

“Bringing a brand-new payment rail into your institution is nothing anyone’s done for 50 years,” said Cheryl Gurz, vice president of real-time payments product management at The Clearing House (TCH).

The obstacle she said she encounters most often is not technology but time.

“Everyone’s busy, and sometimes stepping back and having a plan instead of reacting to what’s in your inbox is the largest hurdle,” she said.

For Tara Campbell, chief operating officer of Las Vegas-based GBank, the answer is disciplined product management.

“The [attitude] has to be, ‘Yes, we absolutely need to do this,’ then, ‘How do we start?’” she said.

Campbell twice shepherded real-time payments implementations — one bank-wide, one laser-focused on a single line of business. Both began with a segmentation analysis.

“What problem am I trying to solve, and who am I solving it for?” she said

At GBank, the initial target was the bank’s gaming technology clients, whose customers expect 24/7 access to winnings.

Campbell’s next step was risk. Before a single line of code, her team wrote the policy that sets transaction limits, user eligibility and monitoring protocols.

“If you start with the risk framework, you’re not getting ahead of your skis when the vendor asks, ‘What limits do you want?’” she said.

Equally vital is stakeholder alignment. Operations, accounting, IT and frontline bankers must all be at the table or adoption will stall after go-live, Campbell said.

Use The Ecosystem

TCH’s data showed that roughly 30% of financial institutions that have not yet joined the RTP® network cited the absence of a clear plan. Gurz’s prescription is to use the ecosystem. More than 9,000 U.S. banks rely on core processors that already maintain a single real-time payments connection.

“Your core provider has flipped the switch; you just need to sign an agreement,” she said.

Regional payment associations and the U.S. Faster Payments Council can supply checklists, playbooks and peer contacts. Most powerful is learning from banks that have already connected, Gurz said.

“The best resource is someone who’s done it before,” she said.

For executives intimidated by moving parts, Gurz said she reframes the conversation in a language bankers know best.

“We manage risk for a living,” she said. “This is a new business opportunity, not merely a tech project. It will retain the customers you have and attract the ones you want.”

Gurz and Campbell cautioned against a build-it-and-wait approach. Campbell’s gaming operators were vocal about weekend settlement delays, so GBank set up a purpose-built real-time payments channel through a third-party provider while a broader core-based project remains on the roadmap.

Gurz said she sees a similar pattern at other institutions. Product teams secure a “whale” corporate client to justify the spend, then expand to retail and small business segments once the engine is running.

The strategy works in reverse, too. Gurz said 80% of banks enable enterprises to send instant payments, yet fewer extend the same capability to consumers or micro-merchants.

“They solved a problem for one customer and stopped there,” she said.

Broadening access is both a revenue play and protection against FinTech encroachment, she said.

Speed Breeds Loyalty

Instant payments adopters are discovering that convenience translates into stickiness. One regional bank slipped real-time payments into its online account-to-account transfer tool with no fanfare and watched its net-promoter score jump.

“Customers never told them there was a problem,” Gurz said. “But solve it, and they notice.”

Campbell said she saw the same effect at her former institution, where consumer external transfer volumes spiked as soon as instant receive was enabled. At GBank, early testing with gaming operators has produced what she called “blown-away” reactions.

“Our expectation is a lot of referrals because it’s just not as readily available in this market as you’d think,” she said.

Beyond gaming, Gurz and Campbell spotlighted a roster of real-world scenarios:

Gig economy payouts: Rideshare and courier platforms let drivers cash out multiple times per shift to cover fuel.
Earned-wage access: Employers advertise same-day pay as a hiring edge.
Merchant settlement: Small restaurants want weekend card proceeds now, not Monday.
Healthcare stipends and insurance disbursements: Faster funds help caregivers and disaster victims.
Title and escrow: Irrevocable, time-stamped transfers reduce fraud risk on property closings.

“These are differences between a consumer paying bills on time or a small business keeping the lights on,” Campbell said.

In February, TCH raised the single-payment transaction limit to $10 million, up from $1 million, which was set in April 2022. Gurz said she expects the higher ceiling to fuel large-value B2B flows such as end-of-quarter liquidity sweeps and marketplace settlements.

The next frontier is request for payment (RfP), a message protocol that lets a business securely ask for money and receive an irrevocable credit push within seconds. TCH is already clearing roughly 500,000 RfP messages a month.

“Businesses want a receivables product, not just a disbursement rail,” Gurz said, hinting that pay-by-bank models could follow as the ecosystem matures.

With nearly 935 financial institutions live and transaction volumes climbing toward 35 million a month, Gurz said instant payments have crossed from optional to obligatory.

“It’s table stakes today,” she said. “It’s no longer a strategic decision, it’s just a question of finding the time to become an advocate and get it done.”