The title of a recent ACI Worldwide report makes no secret of the fact that it believes real-time payments are about to ‘have their day’ – it predicts a usage explosion in the coming years. The payment giant’s Prime Time For Real-Time 2022 report, measured 118.3 billion real-time transactions worldwide last year (representing 64.5 per cent year-on-year growth) and forecasts the annual total will hit 427.7 billion in 2026, or 25.6 per cent of all electronic payments. And for this third edition of the annual offering, real-time payment solutions provider ACI used analysis from the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) to quantify real-time payments’ economic impact – which it estimated was worth an additional $78.4billion in 2021 to the 30 countries studied. Of course, COVID-19 was the catalyst that squeezed a decade of payments evolution into 24 months as locked-down people were dislocated from traditional payment systems – and each other – and had to adapt.

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