Market Research
How Instant Payments Are Transforming the Financial Landscape (McKinsey, August 2026)
A McKinsey Financial Services Practice article comparing instant payments adoption across four markets. Instant payments reached nearly $22 trillion in value across the 15 largest adopting economies in 2024, expected to grow 15-18% annually over five years. India's UPI became the world's largest instant payments system at over 19 billion monthly transactions (~30% of national volume), driven by zero fees, government subsidies, digital public infrastructure simplifying identity verification, and is now expanding abroad. Brazil's Pix reached ~30% of transaction volume in waves: P2P, then P2B (~40% of SME sales mix), then installments competing with credit cards, with B2B next. Mexico's CoDi and DiMo stalled under 5% due to voluntary bank participation, weak incentives, and cash reliance. The US lags despite dual RTP/FedNow rails: roughly 447 million RTP and 8 million FedNow transactions in 2025 versus Zelle's 4.2 billion. Three archetypes emerge: a primary rail, a complement, or a competitor to entrenched habits. Each has different value-chain consequences for banks, acquirers, and schemes.
Raf's lens
Rails alone do not create adoption. India and Brazil combined broad participation, near-zero pricing and a steady expansion of useful features; Mexico and the US did not. The commercial tension matters. Instant payments eat into card interchange, so banks have little reason to promote them unless they can rebuild revenue through treasury, liquidity or installment products such as Pix Parcelado.
Topics: instant payments, UPI, Pix, FedNow, RTP, ISO 20022, cross-border payments, payment monetization