How generative AI can speed up instant payment adoption

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Generative AI could be the key to speeding up instant payments in the U.S., which has been slower to adopt the technology than places like Brazil and India where government mandates have facilitated immediate settlement.

Instant payments in North America in 2023 made up just 4% of all transactions, according to Capgemini's 2025 Global Payments Report. That's compared with a 28% share in Latin America and a 26% share in Asia Pacific, according to the report. Globally, instant payments made up 16% of all transactions and are estimated to account for 22% of transactions in 2028, according to Capgemini. 

That's not to say that instant payments aren't growing in the U.S., said Elias Ghanem, global head of Capgemini Research Institute for Financial Services. Between 2016 and 2023, instant payments in the U.S. grew at a compound annual growth rate of 59%, compared with 51% globally. 

"If we look at the U.S. to bring it home, there are three major initiatives building up: same-day ACH, The Clearing House real-time payments and the famous FedNow. The combination of the three will significantly accelerate consumer and then, later on, corporate instant payment solutions," Ghanem said. 

Banks are already prioritizing instant payments. Last month, BNY partnered with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia to allow cross-border payments to be available to the final beneficiary in less than 60 seconds, according to the investment bank. 

That was the culmination of a two-year process, said Carl Slabicki, co-head of global payments for BNY's treasury services. 

"Our value prop is really — given our size, scale, experience within this space, the reach of our network and our expertise and payments and kind of being at the bleeding edge of instant payments, both domestically and now internationally — our goal is to help clients send money across the globe instantly," Slabicki said. 

Access to information is key to facilitating instant payments, Capgemini's Ghanem said. "Instant payments require agility. Regulators are changing the game on a regular basis, so you must be able to adapt." 

Generative AI has multiple use cases in the payments world. In fact, 80% of payment executives said they are using or planning to use generative AI-based tools to support some part of their payments business in the next 24 months, according to the 2024 Emerging Payment Technology Report from Arizent, American Banker's publisher. Most use cases land in fraud prevention or customer experience, according to the survey. 

But generative AI can also be used to speed up instant payments, said Tom Hewson, CEO of RedCompass Labs, a payments modernization technology and consulting firm. 

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"AI can read every document you've ever written in the bank, and it can understand the context of it, and it can compare that to every rule that a regulator has written about how a payment needs to be processed," Hewson said. "And it can pull that information together and present it back to you in a way that your project team can help you catch up with the rate of change." 

In a separate RedCompass Labs survey, over half of the banks said they are planning to leverage generative AI for the shift to instant payments, while 42% are "actively considering the possibility," according to the company's AI in Payments: The Future of Payments Modernization report. 

Generative AI models are relatively simple at their core, Hewson said. "Brute force just says, 'I'm going to predict the next word. I've seen so many trillions of words, I'm going to predict the next one.'" 

That works well with modern-day payment structures, which are largely XML- or ISO-based. 

"If you look at the payment itself, the ability to read that payment is semantic," Hewson said. "The tag semantically says, 'Who's the sender?'" 

Generative AI can also run required checks against the ultimate beneficiary, he said. 

"But imagine that every payment has the ability to have an investigation against it. You're only limited by compute power," Hewson said. "We moved our payments into human readable code — XML — now the possibilities are limitless."