The United States still has no single rail for moving money between bank accounts in real time, and take-up of the two networks built to enable faster payments remains partial years after the first one went live. The Federal Reserve’s FedNow Service counts 1,900 participating banks and credit unions as of September 2026, according to the Fed’s own FedNow Explorer tracker. The Clearing House’s competing RTP network reports more than 1,357 participants as of August 2026, per its own published network statistics. Both totals have grown steadily since launch. Both still leave most of the country’s federally insured banks and credit unions connected to neither service.
Two networks, each still building critical mass
FedNow launched in July 2023 as the Federal Reserve’s own real-time gross settlement service, open to any US bank or credit union that applies. RTP, owned and run by the bank consortium behind The Clearing House, has operated since 2017 and is the older of the two. Neither network requires a bank to join. A bank connects through its core banking vendor or one of the networks’ certified service providers, a step that the Fed’s own list of FedNow participants and certified providers shows most smaller institutions have still not taken.
Where banks have connected, usage is substantial. The Clearing House reports 142 million RTP transactions worth $576 billion in the second quarter of 2026 alone, with a daily average value of $6.6 billion in August 2026. Since its 2017 launch, RTP has cleared more than 1.7 billion transactions worth over $3.4 trillion in total. That is real, growing volume for a rail built from nothing inside a decade. It is concentrated, too, among the institutions that connected early, mostly larger banks and the fintechs that build on top of them, while thousands of community banks and credit unions remain outside both networks.
The EU made faster payments mandatory. The US has not.
The clearest structural difference is regulatory. Under the EU’s Instant Payments Regulation, adopted in March 2024, payment service providers in the eurozone have been required to receive instant credit transfers in euro since 9 January 2025, and required to send them, at a price no higher than an ordinary transfer, since 9 October 2025, according to the European Central Bank’s own summary of the regulation. Verification of payee, a check that confirms the name on an account matches before a transfer is sent, became mandatory for eurozone providers on the same October 2025 date. Non-eurozone EU member states, and electronic money and payment institutions specifically, have later deadlines running out to 2027 and 2028.
There is no equivalent US statute. FedNow and RTP participation is voluntary for every bank in the country, and no federal law sets a date by which a bank must offer customers a real-time option. A US bank weighing the integration cost against how many customers are asking for instant transfers can simply decide to wait, an option a eurozone bank no longer has.
The UK has run on real-time rails since 2008
The comparison with the UK is less about a legal deadline and more about how long the infrastructure has existed. Pay.UK’s Faster Payments Service, the scheme that gives its name to this US keyword search, has operated since 2008. UK current account providers now build around it as the default way money moves between accounts, rather than treating it as an add-on layered onto an older batch system, a status confirmed on Pay.UK’s own Faster Payments statistics page. The US, by contrast, spent decades routing most account-to-account transfers through the ACH network’s next-day batch cycle before either FedNow or RTP existed, and both new rails are still being retrofitted onto that older base rather than replacing it outright.
Why US adoption still lags
Three factors, each visible in the networks’ own public materials rather than assumed, explain the gap. First, integration cost: a bank cannot simply switch a service on. It connects through a core banking vendor or a certified service provider, which is why FedNow and RTP each maintain a separate published list of certified providers alongside their list of participating institutions, a two-step structure that adds time and expense before a bank’s customers see anything. Second, irrevocability: a real-time payment settles immediately and, unlike an ACH transfer, cannot be recalled, which raises the bar on fraud controls before a bank will expose the rail to retail customers rather than limiting it to business use. Third, the absence of a deadline: with no mandate forcing the decision, integration competes for budget against every other project a bank is running, and it is often the one without a compliance date attached to it.
The gap shapes what fintechs building on top of these rails can promise their customers, too. A payments product that routes through FedNow or RTP still needs a fallback to ACH for any transfer where the receiving bank is not on the network, because neither rail can force money onto an institution that has not connected. That patchiness is the direct, practical consequence of voluntary adoption, and it is the reason a US real-time payment cannot yet be sold to a customer with the same certainty as a UK Faster Payments transfer or, from October 2025, a eurozone instant credit transfer.
None of this means the US market is standing still. RTP’s transaction volume in the second quarter of 2026 alone is a large multiple of what the network processed in its first several years combined, and FedNow’s participant count has climbed steadily since 2023. But growth from a voluntary base follows a different curve to growth under a regulatory deadline, and the distance between the US and markets that set one, the eurozone from October 2025 and the UK since 2008, is a difference in design, not in effort. Fintechly’s explainer on how money moves once it leaves an account covers the wider settlement chain these networks sit inside. Fintechly’s payments sector directory tracks the banks and infrastructure providers building out both networks.
