Key Insights
- Brazil’s Pix shows how frictionless, instant payments can push banks toward safer assets and riskier loans to compensate.
- The euro area’s Instant Payments Regulation shows why fraud protection has to move to the front end of a transaction, not the back.
- Australia’s NPP demonstrates how shared infrastructure and third-party tools let community financial institutions (CFIs) compete without building their own systems alone.
“The check is in the mail” is a phrase that has probably been said millions of times. A customer who had missed a bill payment could always say it with a straight face. The check had been written, sealed, and entrusted to the postal system. Perhaps it was delayed by a weekend, a holiday, a misplaced envelope, or a slow processing desk at the other end. The phrase created a time lapse between a promise to pay and proof that payment had actually arrived, a gap wide enough for an overdue borrower, customer, or vendor to buy a little time.
That ambiguity is why the expression became a classic delaying tactic. It acknowledged an obligation while shifting the uncertainty elsewhere. Today, however, the window between sending and receiving a payment is rapidly shrinking. Instant payment systems can move money in seconds, around the clock, replacing the delays that once defined how payments moved.
The US is already part of that shift. RTP® launched in 2017 and the FedNow® Service followed in 2023, giving financial institutions access to instant payment infrastructure that operates 24/7/365. As adoption continues to expand, markets where instant payments are more established, including Brazil, the euro area, and Australia, offer useful lessons about what greater payment speed and mobility can mean for liquidity, fraud prevention, operations, and partnerships.
Brazil's Pix: Planning for “Always on” Liquidity
Launched by Brazil’s central bank in 2020, Pix lets anyone send money instantly, 24/7, using a phone number, email address, or generated code, without generally any individual fees or waiting periods. By Q1 2026, Pix boasted almost 200 million users, who use it to cover everything from lunch to payroll.
As Pix usage grew and deposits could now move in seconds, not days, Brazilian banks responded by holding more liquid assets and adjusting how they approached lending to reflect that new reality. The Pix case study offers an early look at how quickly a bank’s entire liquidity and lending strategy can shift once deposits become this mobile.
Deposit stability shouldn’t be taken for granted as moving money becomes faster and easier. As instant payments reduce friction, CFIs should understand which deposits are supported by strong customer relationships and which may be more sensitive to increased mobility. They should also consider how greater deposit mobility could affect liquidity needs as instant payment adoption grows.
The Euro Area's Deadline: Preparing Before You're Forced To
The euro area has accommodated Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) real-time transfers since 2017, with limited adoption until the 2024 Instant Payments Regulation made them mandatory. Now, banks offering standard euro transfers must also offer instant ones, settled within 10 seconds, 24/7, at no extra charge. Banks had until January 2025 to receive instant transfers and October 2025 to send them, with no exceptions for institutions that weren’t ready.
The speed mandate came with a free “Verification of Payee” (VoP) service that confirms a recipient’s name matches their account before the transaction clears. When payments settle in seconds, banks have limited time to catch mistakes or fraud. To remedy this, verification is built into the front end of the transaction.
As payments get faster, the moments where a bank can protect its customers shrinks. Protection must be inserted up front, not caught after the fact. CFIs can be proactive by auditing which systems still assume a business-hours world and taking into consideration what a VoP service would look like for their own customers.
Australia's NPP: Competing Without Building Alone
Instead of one institution building a new platform or regulators mandating a deadline, Australia’s New Payments Platform (NPP) formed through direct collaboration with 12 banks and the Reserve Bank of AUS. Launched in 2018, NPP is shared infrastructure that supports “overlay services”, or independently developed tools built on top of it. One service is PayID, which lets customers address payments with a phone number or email instead of a BSB (routing number) and account number.
A recent study from Crisil Coalition Greenwich and Australian Payments Plus finds that, while awareness is rising about the move to NPP, adoption is uneven. Companies with over $1B in turnover are roughly twice as likely to have started preparations (48%) as smaller companies (28%). For both groups, banks are guiding the transition to real-time payments.
Australia’s NPP offers a practical lesson for CFIs: smaller institutions gained access through aggregators rather than connecting directly to the infrastructure. As instant payment adoption grows in the US, CFIs can similarly look to correspondent banks and other third parties for access to payment rails, settlement, liquidity, and operational support. The next step is to identify which capabilities they can manage internally and where a partner can fill the gaps, not assuming they must build and manage every component themselves.
The experiences of Brazil, the euro area, and Australia show that broader instant payment adoption affects more than payment speed. It can change liquidity needs, require earlier fraud controls, and create new decisions about infrastructure and third-party support. As adoption grows in the US, CFIs can use the experience of more established markets to anticipate these challenges and determine where they need to adapt. Understanding where greater payment mobility could create liquidity or operational pressure, and where the right partners can help, can put institutions in a stronger position as instant payments become a larger part of the US payments landscape.
