Too Small, Too Risky, Too Soon? Better Questions for Your Instant Payments Strategy

In most instant payments strategy conversations with community and regional banks and credit unions, I hear the same three objections:

Each one points to a real concern. But you usually have to dig a little deeper to get to the real question behind the comment.

Start with where the industry stands.

The Richmond Fed counted 1,725 FedNow® participants in the first quarter of 2026 and 1,193 financial institutions on the RTP® roster in June, out of fewer than 9,000 U.S. banks and credit unions. (updated October 2026)

And the gap between receiving and sending is still significant. Providers surveyed by the Faster Payments Council expect 70% to 80% of financial institutions to receive instant payments by 2028, but only 30% to 40% to send them.

Receiving is becoming increasingly common.

Sending is where more of the strategic decisions begin.

Are We Too Small to Adopt Instant Payments?

When I hear this, I usually do not think the real question is about size.

It is about focus.

A smaller financial institution does not need to support every possible instant payments use case. Very few should try.

The more useful question is which use cases actually fit the customers you already serve.

That might be payroll. Insurance disbursements. Transfers between a customer’s own accounts. Bill payments. Supplier payments. Government disbursements.

There is already plenty of evidence that these are not hypothetical use cases. Federal Reserve research and industry work continue to identify payroll, earned wage access, account-to-account transfers, bill pay, wallet funding and business payments among the areas where instant payments can create tangible value.

So I would not start with:

Are we big enough?

I would start with:

Which of our customers would actually notice if we could move money differently?

Many smaller banks and credit unions will connect through a provider, just as they did when enabling receive. There is nothing inherently wrong with that model.

But outsourcing the connection does not outsource accountability.

You still need to understand what you control, what your provider controls, and where decisions sit when something does not go as planned.

Are Instant Payments Too Risky for Us?

This one is also understandable.

Instant payments change the risk conversation because the money moves quickly and settlement is final.

But saying “instant payments are risky” can hide a much more useful discussion.

Which risk are we actually worried about?

The RTP network, for example, is an irrevocable credit-push system. That reduces some risks associated with unauthorized debits, but it does not eliminate fraud. A customer can still be manipulated into authorizing a payment they should never have sent.

And once the payment has settled, you do not have the same recovery mechanics or time window you may be accustomed to with other payment types.

So fraud prevention has to move earlier in the transaction.

The important question becomes:

Are we making the right fraud and risk decision before the money moves?

That is a different operating mindset.

For years, many financial institutions have managed payments and fraud as related but separate disciplines. Instant payments make that separation harder to sustain.

When the payment can be final in seconds, the fraud decision, authentication decision, payment decision and customer experience all start converging at the same moment.

That is one reason I keep coming back to the idea that payments and fraud increasingly have to be governed as one decisioning environment, not two separate conversations.

Is It Too Soon to Adopt Instant Payments?

Sometimes it is.

Waiting can absolutely be the right decision.

What I would be cautious about is letting “not yet” become the default without defining what has to change before the answer becomes yes.

That is where readiness becomes useful.

Can your leadership team answer questions like these with confidence?

• How would liquidity be funded outside traditional business hours?

• Who has authority to make an exception at midnight?

• Which transaction limits apply to which customers?

• What happens when a payment is disputed after settlement?

• Which decisions sit with your team, and which sit with a provider?

Those are not implementation questions. They are leadership questions.

And they help separate two things that sometimes get blurred together:

Being connected is not the same as being ready. And being ready is not the same as having a business case.

A financial institution can technically support instant payments and still have no compelling reason to send them yet.

That is fine.

But then the decision is not “instant payments are too soon.”

The decision is:

We have not yet identified a use case where the customer value, economics and risk justify moving forward.

That is a much more useful conclusion.

What I See in the Strongest Strategies for Instant Payments Adoption

The banks and credit unions that seem most comfortable with instant payments are not necessarily the ones moving fastest.

They are the ones that have made the questions more specific.

“We're too small” becomes:

Where could instant payments create meaningful value for customers we already serve?

“It’s too risky” becomes:

Which risks change when settlement is final, and where do we need the decision to happen?

“It’s too soon” becomes:

What would need to be true for us to move?

Those are questions senior leaders can actually work with.

And once those questions are answered, the conversation changes.

You are no longer debating instant payments in the abstract.

You are deciding where they fit in your business, what has to be true before you expand, and who owns the decision.

That is where strategy starts to become useful.

Go Deeper

Every Wednesday, The Instant Edge looks at the modernization decisions sitting behind instant payments, including liquidity, fraud, orchestration, customer use cases and the operating discipline needed to scale them with confidence.

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If your leadership team or conference audience would benefit from this conversation in the room, see my speaking topics.

About the Author

Marcia Klingensmith, the Instant Payments Maven™, is a keynote speaker and payments strategist with more than 20 years across Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Visa, LexisNexis Risk Solutions and FIS, where she led a multi-tenant instant payments Send product from requirements through production. She helps senior leaders make sense of payments modernization decisions across instant payments, multi-rail infrastructure, risk and emerging forms of money.