Dive Brief:

• Payments sent by businesses and consumers via The Clearing House’s RTP network surpassed $1 billion on June 28, marking a single-day milestone for the network, according to a Wednesday press release.
• The overall second-quarter payments volume, and its value, were also records for the real-time payments network, according to The Clearing House’s release. RTP’s second-quarter payments volume rose 7% year-over-year to 82 million, which the value spiked 30% to $55 billion, per the press release.
• “The increase in transaction value is due to broad adoption of the RTP network across a number of use cases, including account-to-account transfers, title insurance and mortgage closing payments, gig economy payouts, earned wage access, and more,” Margaret Weichert, chief product officer at The Clearing House, said in the release.

Dive Insight:

The Clearing House, which is owned by a pack of large banks and is led by CEO David Watson, launched the RTP network in 2017.

About 460 banks and credit unions had signed onto the RTP network as of December 2023, a spokesperson previously told Payments Dive. 

“Banks and credit unions that have joined the RTP network are seeing how instant payments can grow deposits while meeting member and customer expectations for instant payment availability, 24/7,” Weichert said in the statement. 

The Clearing House partnered with Mastercard in January to improve the service. As part of the collaboration, The Clearing House’s developers worked with Mastercard to enhance the RTP network and its instant payment capabilities for customers.

Though the RTP network is processing ever more transactions at higher values, it handles a fraction of all the overall transactions passing through The Clearing House, which clears and settles more than $2 trillion per day in ACH, check image, wire and real-time transactions, per the press release.

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve’s FedNow real-time payments network has been growing its list of financial institutions since launching last year. As of April, FedNow had attracted about 700 financial institutions to its network, FedNow head of payments product Dan Baum told Payments Dive. 

As the Federal Reserve and The Clearing House integrate more banks and credit unions into their respective real-time payment networks, they may or may not become interoperable. At an industry conference in May, Mark Gould, chief payments executive for Federal Reserve Financial Services, said, “I think we should keep talking about interoperability.” The Clearing House’s Watson agreed, and expressed an interest in working with the Fed on that goal.