Top five countries in the world with the most real-time payments (RTP) in 2023

Real-time payments, or RTP, were commonly used in Asia-Pacific in 2023, with transactions in India being almost 10 times higher as in China. RTP is important in India due to its implementation in the country's Unified Payments Interface or UPI. An expanded ranking on the number of instant payments per country places India at the top with a figure that was higher than 43 other countries combined. India is expected to keep this position by 2028, although its predicted CAGR will be lower than Brazil, the United States, and Indonesia.

UPI (India) and Pix (Brazil) are the two main systems

Real-time payments generally have two main characteristics that make them appealing: One, as the name suggests, payments can be initiated and settled almost immediately, allowing consumers, businesses, bank to send and receive money across the world within minutes. Two, these schemes are not bound to the opening times of a bank, and are available "24/7" and 365 days in the year. These traits matter especially to countries with a complex payment market that need to be digitalized — such as in India with its UPI system, but also in Brazil (PIX). UPI in India and Pix in Brazil together reached nearly 100 billion transactions in 2022.

A2A payments: An enabler of real-time payment technology

UPI and Pix are both also examples of applications that allow for A2A payments. A2A or account-to-account payments refers to direct payments from one party to the other without the need for an intermediary. Such intermediaries are card rails from the likes of Visa and Mastercard, which are essentially bypassed in A2A. These typically domestically developed payment options come from banks. A2A apps were more common in Latin America than in other parts of the world in late 2022. It should be noted that sources sometimes interpret A2A in different ways, as bank transfers (push requests) and direct debit (pull requests) can technically be a part of A2A as well.