Instant payments around the world: the main models

In much of the world, sending money to someone can still take a business day or more. Elsewhere, the transfer lands in seconds, even on a Sunday night. The difference lies in having a fast payment system (FPS).

This article compares the main models in use. It does not teach you how to use any app or recommend services. The goal is to show how these systems are organized and why some spread faster than others.

What counts as an instant payment

The Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI), a group of central banks linked to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), gave the most widely used definition in 2016. A fast payment service is one that makes funds available to the payee immediately, or nearly so, and that operates continuously, outside banking hours (CPMI, November 2016).

Both conditions must hold together. Being fast on business days is not enough. The system has to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

These systems handle retail payments: between people, from people to shops, from companies to employees, from government to citizens. Large interbank transfers still go through other systems.

According to a BIS article published in March 2024, people and businesses in more than 100 jurisdictions already had access to instant payments at that point (BIS Quarterly Review, March 2024).

The pieces every system has to decide

The same BIS article organizes the design choices into four groups. They help compare systems that look identical on a phone.

• User focus. Which uses the system accepts (person to person, retail, bills, government payments), whether there are aliases for accounts, links to other countries and open interfaces for companies to build services.
• Infrastructure. How banks settle accounts among themselves behind the scenes and how the alias directory works.
• Rules. Who can participate, how much is charged, what the per-transaction limits are and through which channels a payment starts: app, website, QR code.
• Governance. Who owns it, who operates it and who sets the rules.

Two terms appear in every system. The alias (or key) is an easy-to-remember piece of data, such as a phone number or email, that replaces the branch and account number. Settlement is the final squaring of amounts between institutions. It can be done transaction by transaction, in real time, or by netting: institutions add up what they owe one another and settle only the difference at set times.

A World Bank publication on the toolkit the institution prepared for interested countries points, among the trends observed, to the use of aliases such as email and phone numbers, the QR code as a new channel, request to pay and opening up to participants that are not banks (World Bank, January 2021). The text also notes that most systems were rolled out in phases rather than all at once.

Three governance models

The most visible difference between the systems is who is in charge. The BIS describes three arrangements, with examples (BIS, March 2024).

Public. The central bank is the owner and operator. This is the case of CoDi, in Mexico, and Pix, in Brazil. For Pix, according to the BIS, there is also a consultation forum with the private sector.

Joint governance. In India, UPI’s rules are set by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), an organization in which banks and the Indian central bank participate.

Private. In Sweden, Swish and the settlement system behind it are owned and operated by private banks. The central bank acts as supervisor.

No model is automatically better. But the design influences who joins the system, how much it costs and how fast it spreads.

India: UPI, the largest by number of transactions

UPI (Unified Payments Interface) is India’s instant payment system. In the BIS article, India appears as the world’s largest instant payments market by number of transactions in 2022, ahead of China, Thailand and Brazil.

According to the annual report of the Reserve Bank of India, the country’s central bank, UPI processed about 241.6 billion transactions in fiscal year 2025-26 (April 2025 to March 2026), totaling ₹ 314.2 lakh crore, or about 314 trillion rupees. Volume grew 30% and value 20.6% from the previous year. UPI accounted for almost 86% of all retail payment transactions in the country in the period (RBI, annual report published in May 2026).

In the BIS classification, UPI settles by netting rather than transaction by transaction. The system is also cited as an example of voluntary participation: no bank is required to join.

Brazil: Pix, the public model

Pix is the most cited example of a system created, maintained and operated by the central bank. How it works in detail is the subject of another article on the site. What matters here are three points the BIS highlights in its international comparison (BIS, March 2024):

• participation is mandatory for the larger institutions;
• the Central Bank built a new real-time settlement system for Pix;
• the cost to merchants, according to the BIS, is 0.22% of the transaction value, versus 1.1% for debit cards and 2.2% for credit cards.

In the same article, Brazil appears among the four largest instant payment markets by number of transactions and among the leaders in use per capita, alongside Thailand, where PromptPay operates, and South Korea.

United States: FedNow, a recent and gradual entry

The Federal Reserve, the US central bank, launched FedNow on July 20, 2023. On the first day, 35 banks and credit unions, plus a Treasury bureau, were ready to use the service (Federal Reserve, July 2023). Participation is voluntary. The system runs every day, including weekends and holidays (Federal Reserve Financial Services).

The numbers show a very different curve from India’s. In 2025, FedNow settled about 8.4 million payments, totaling US$ 853.4 billion. In the second quarter of 2026, there were about 5 million payments and US$ 274.7 billion, according to the Fed’s own statistics page, updated on July 6, 2026 (FedNow, volume and value statistics).

The average value per payment is high: about US$ 55,000 in the second quarter of 2026, based on Fed data. In the newsroom’s reading, this indicates use still driven by large transfers rather than small everyday payments. These figures measure FedNow alone, not all instant payments made in the country. The BIS lists FedNow among the systems open only to banks.

European Union: a legal mandate and shared infrastructure

In Europe, instant euro transfers follow a common standard called SCT Inst (SEPA Instant Credit Transfer), defined by the European Payments Council. The Eurosystem, made up of the European Central Bank (ECB) and the euro area central banks, runs TIPS, a platform that settles these payments in central bank money, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. According to the ECB, TIPS processes each transaction in under 100 milliseconds and settles payments in euros, Swedish kronor and Danish kroner (ECB, TIPS).

The most recent step was regulatory. The Instant Payments Regulation, adopted on March 13, 2024, requires banks and other providers that offer regular euro transfers to also offer the instant version (ECB, Instant Payments Regulation). The main rules, according to the ECB:

• the fee for an instant transfer cannot be higher than that of an equivalent regular transfer;
• before paying, customers must be able to check, free of charge, whether the payee’s name matches the account provided (so-called verification of payee);
• providers must check daily whether their customers are on financial sanctions lists.

Deadlines were staggered. In the euro area, banks had to be able to receive instant payments by January 9, 2025 and to send them by October 9, 2025. In EU countries outside the euro area, the deadlines run until July 2027. Payment and e-money institutions have their own deadlines, starting in April 2027.

The European model differs from the previous ones. There is no single app or brand. The rule mandates the offering, and TIPS, according to the ECB, accepts both payment service providers and automated clearing houses.

United Kingdom: Faster Payments, one of the pioneers

The British Faster Payment System has been running since 2008, day and night, 365 days a year, and accepts payments of up to £1 million. Each bank’s limits may be lower. In 2025, the system processed 5.55 billion transactions, totaling £4.84 trillion, according to Pay.UK, the body that publishes the system’s data (Pay.UK).

The same page records two access changes: in 2014, a program expanded the number of direct participants; in 2018, new rules allowed non-bank institutions to open settlement accounts at the Bank of England, and the first of them joined as a direct participant.

What explains adoption

The 2024 BIS article analyzed 13 jurisdictions, including Brazil, India, Mexico, Sweden and Thailand, with monthly data up to December 2023 (BIS, March 2024). The authors found higher use per capita when:

• non-bank institutions, such as fintechs, can participate;
• the system accepts more types of use (not just transfers between people);
• there are more connections to other countries’ systems;
• the central bank owns the system.

The type of settlement, real-time or netting, had no statistically significant effect in the study. This is a correlation observed in a limited group of countries, not a guaranteed rule. Factors such as the price for merchants, mandatory participation and the existence of already popular alternatives also matter.

Linking systems across countries

The next step is connecting national systems for international transfers. In October 2024, the CPMI published a report for the G20 on the governance and oversight of these links. The document identifies these issues among the main obstacles, because they involve multiple currencies, multiple jurisdictions and many possible design choices (CPMI, October 2024).

Project Nexus, from the BIS innovation hub in Singapore, proposed a single network instead of bilateral agreements between each pair of countries. In 2025, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand set up Nexus Global Payments to bring the project into live operation, and the BIS ended its involvement (BIS Innovation Hub, Project Nexus).

Risks that come with speed

An instant payment is usually final: once settled, it does not come back on its own. This is good for the payee, but it increases the damage from scams in which the victim is persuaded to transfer money. Europe’s verification of payee and the value limits set by banks are responses to this risk. If you use any of these systems, it is worth knowing the most common digital financial scams and how to react.

There is also operational risk. A system that never stops has no overnight maintenance window, and a failure affects millions of payments at once. That is why central banks treat these infrastructures as critical.

Instant payments are not new money. The money is still a deposit at a bank or payment institution. The debate over digital money issued by the central bank itself is a separate one, covered in what are CBDCs.

Key takeaways

• An instant payment requires two things: money available almost immediately and operation 24 hours a day, every day.
• Systems differ mainly in governance (public, joint or private), in who can participate and in how much is charged.
• UPI and Pix show mass adoption; FedNow is growing gradually and concentrated in high values; the EU uses the law to mandate the offering; the UK has run the model since 2008.
• The figures in this article are dated. Payment volumes change quickly, so always check the latest official source.