The global movement towards real-time payments is reshaping the way value moves across economies. From accelerating domestic commerce to transforming cross-border trade, RTP systems are becoming the backbone of modern financial infrastructure. These systems hold immense promise – but they also introduce new complexities.
A vibrant, safe and innovative RTP ecosystem depends on conditions that are co-created by the public and private sectors. Whether jurisdictions are in the early stages of development or already extending mature systems, success is defined by three core imperatives: security, interoperability and digital extensibility.
A new report published by OMFIF and Mastercard, Future-proofing the architecture of real-time payments, finds that these three dimensions must be advanced in parallel to realise the promise of safe, inclusive and future-ready payments ecosystems that enable broad participation across stakeholders.
Three core imperatives
The first core component of a resilient RTP is safety, security and resilience. With rising transaction volumes and instantaneous value transfers comes a greater surface area for fraud.
Unlike traditional batch-based payments processing, where transactions are grouped and settled in cycles, RTPs compress the timeframe available to detect or reverse suspicious transactions. Once a payment is authorised and processed, it is typically settled and cleared within seconds, resulting in higher fraud rates.
Across multiple jurisdictions, fraud rates have risen sharply following the introduction of RTP infrastructure. When the UK first launched its faster payments system in 2008, this was accompanied by a 132% increase in online banking fraud. Fraud continues to pose a major threat, with the UK reporting over £1bn stolen through payments fraud in 2024. Ensuring consumer protection and system resilience is therefore of paramount importance.
Second, effective interoperability is a critical foundation for RTP ecosystems. Within many domestic markets, fragmentation persists where systems operate as closed loops or lack alignment with other domestic payment rails. If these gaps are not addressed, enabling linkages across borders becomes significantly more complex, creating inefficiencies and limiting scale.
Seamless interoperability is essential to deliver inclusive, efficient and connected RTP experiences. And domestic interoperability provides the foundation for cross-border success: once scale and stability are secured at home, these foundations can be extended outwards.
Third, in a rapidly evolving digital landscape, RTP systems need to evolve alongside emerging technologies and new forms of money. Any underlying or supporting payments infrastructure needs to be flexible enough to interoperate with these developments to meet both current and future demands.
RTP systems must ensure interoperability with other payment rails so that consumer demand and private sector innovation can continue shaping the evolution of RTPs, rather than being constrained by closed infrastructures.
Public-private sector collaboration is crucial
To effectively address these considerations, policy-makers and industry participants need to work together. While public authorities lay the foundation through regulatory frameworks and infrastructure investment, the private sector plays a critical role in driving technological innovation, supporting risk intelligence and providing advisory support that can help scale and secure RTP systems globally.
Central banks can accelerate this process by fostering open ecosystems, encouraging competition and involving private actors directly in the design and implementation of RTP systems at every stage. This is vital to ensure that the participants supporting these systems are operating sustainable business models that can fund continued development. The innovation for this continued development will stem primarily from the private sector.
OMFIF is grateful to Mastercard for launching this project and prompting an immensely fruitful exploration of a dynamic and exciting part of the payments industry. We are indebted to the many speakers from central banks and national payments networks who offered their insights and helped with the report.
Download Future-proofing the architecture of real-time payments.
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