Real-Time Payments Expose the Cost of Legacy Technology

After eight years of industry outreach and infrastructure investment, instant payments are becoming familiar enough that businesses increasingly understand the product.

“We are successful in awareness,” Cheryl Gurz, vice president of Real Time Payments Product Management at The Clearing House, told PYMNTS.

“Transitioning into the next state is about integration,” Gurz added, explaining that companies may know what instant payments can do, but many still cannot access them inside the software, treasury systems and back-office workflows where financial decisions are made.

The transition could prove more consequential than the original rollout of real-time payments rails. It moves instant payments from the margins of banking infrastructure into the increasingly contested territory where banks, FinTechs, enterprise software providers and treasury platforms compete to control the financial workflow.

Instant Payments Integration Is the Foundation, Not the Finish Line

The deeper implication is that instant payments may provide an infrastructure layer for finance automation. Once a company has completed the difficult work of connecting payment rails to its treasury and accounting systems, it can begin adding automated workflows, artificial intelligence and more sophisticated decision logic.

“Once the integration work is done and you’ve put in the effort, the integration, that’s just the foundation,” Gurz said. “You’re now going to be adding workflow automation. You’re going to be adding AI onto it, agentic AI. You’re going to be automating routine tasks.”

That could reshape the role of corporate treasury. Instead of spending time initiating transactions, reconciling activity and handling repetitive exceptions, finance employees could focus on liquidity strategy, supplier relationships and balance sheet optimization.

The 24/7 nature of instant payments also creates opportunities that conventional rails cannot easily support. Consider an invoice offering a discount if it is paid within 10 days. When the deadline falls on a Sunday, a company using traditional banking hours may have to pay early or risk missing the discount. But with an always-on payment rail, it can hold the cash until the precise moment payment is due.

“You now have the ability to manage precision payments so that you’re paying on Saturdays and Sunday,” Gurz said. “This is a valuable new way of doing business once you get an understanding and your integration efforts complete.”

Instant Payments Move From Faster Payments to Real-Time Treasury

Fast forward to today, and payments speed is becoming a baseline expectation across industries.

“The competitive advantage isn’t speed anymore,” Gurz said. “It’s how the end users can use that speed to get economic or customer experience benefits.”

An instant payment offered through an isolated banking portal may be useful in an emergency, but it does not fundamentally change how a business operates. An instant payment embedded directly into an accounts payable platform, enterprise resource planning system or treasury workstation can alter how the company manages liquidity, releases inventory, pays suppliers and responds to exceptions.

“End users are expecting their providers to have it done,” Gurz said. “And if they don’t have it done, some will wait and work with them. Others will go find another provider.”

The strategic value therefore shifts toward the software layer. Banks must provide APIs and digital channels that allow companies to initiate and receive instant payments without leaving their existing workflows. ERP providers and treasury management platforms must decide whether to build real-time capabilities before customers begin treating them as expected functionality.

As for how the marketplace is responding, Gurz said adoption often begins with a broken process rather than a grand transformation strategy. She recalled a middle-market business that was placed on credit hold while waiting for construction materials. The company discovered instant payments in its bank portal, paid the supplier immediately and released the goods without delaying its customer’s project.

That experience changed the user’s perception of the rail.

“They’re like, ‘What? I need to use that all the time,’” Gurz said. “That’s what experience does. It takes away those education barriers.”

Such moments help explain why businesses that have used real-time payments tend to view them more favorably than those that have not. The benefits are easiest to understand when an instant transaction solves a specific operational problem.

Over time, individual use cases could accumulate into real-time treasury, in which payments, liquidity and working capital decisions are continuously managed across an organization.

The biggest barrier remains the legacy back office. Many companies still rely on decades-old payments systems written in programming languages that few current employees fully understand. Fear of disrupting these systems has created institutional inertia. But the arrival of a new rail gives businesses a reason to reconsider the entire architecture rather than adding another payment option to an aging stack.

“We’re going to now strategically look at payments as a strategic driver of value in the organization and get us to a real-time treasury, a better working capital, a better use of our funds environment,” Gurz said.

That is the more important story behind instant payments. The industry spent eight years teaching businesses that money could move faster. Its next challenge is helping them rebuild their operations around what becomes possible when it does.

Watch the PYMNTS TV interview with The Clearing House’s Cheryl Gurz to hear more about:

Why instant payments’ biggest barrier has shifted from awareness to integration. Gurz said businesses increasingly understand real-time payments, but adoption now depends on embedding them into ERP systems, treasury platforms, bank APIs and consumer-facing apps.
How the competitive advantage is moving beyond payment speed. The discussion explored why banks, FinTechs and software providers will win by helping businesses use real-time rails to improve liquidity, automate workflows and strengthen supplier and customer relationships.
Why instant payments could become the foundation for real-time treasury. Gurz said once integration is complete, companies can layer on intelligent routing, workflow automation and agentic AI, freeing finance teams to focus on working capital and strategic decision-making.