Instant Payments: Balancing Speed, Security, and Customer Expectations | Part 5 | Bottomline

There is a strong focus on the future of payments, as instant or real-time payments globally and the challenges and opportunities that come with them. The key message is clear: speed is no longer optional as customers, especially corporate clients, expect instant gratification in the payment cycle, and many will switch banks if they don’t get it. That expectation is pushing financial institutions to modernise quickly.

But speed also brings scrutiny, as the old phrase “faster payments, faster fraud” often gets thrown around, but Bottomline pushes back on this. Instant payments aren’t less secure, as the problem lies in how prepared banks are to handle them.

Payments are completed in seconds so therefore strong safeguards need to be in place before, during, and after each payment. Clean data, fraud checks, behavioural and transactional monitoring, and sanction screening all play a role in ensuring that speed doesn’t come at the cost of security.

A big part of this is pre-verification and Europe, it’s being driven by SEPA mandates, while in the UK, CoP has already shown significant results in cutting down APP (authorised push payment) fraud. Global initiatives like bank account verification, which is championed by the G20 and SWIFT, are also shaping the future of fraud prevention by putting protection up front, rather than reacting after the fact.

Beyond security, the discussion turns to the bigger themes of payments modernisation and SaaS. Two factors stand out as critical and are the competitive advantage and operational resilience. With a crowded marketplace full of new entrants and disruptive technology, it’s harder than ever to stay ahead however, at the same time, the global risk landscape, from cyber threats to geopolitical instability, has made resilience a must-have and not a nice-to-have. Payments modernisation and SaaS offer banks and financial institutions the tools to deliver both.

By moving away from, legacy infrastructures and towards modern platforms, financial institutions gain a unified interface that simplifies connections across real-time payments, local clearing, SWIFT, RTGS, and even open banking APIs. This infrastructure shift also finally makes straight-through processing a reality and and also opens the door to deploying smarter fraud prevention tools and scaling operations without being bogged down by legacy systems.

Instant payments are here to stay, and with them comes the responsibility to keep customers safe while staying competitive. Those who embrace payments modernisation and SaaS aren’t just protecting their customers from fraud, they’re building a future-proof platform for growth.