Digital fast payments aren’t just about technology, they’re about giving people greater control over their financial lives. As of June 2026, people and businesses in 137 countries have access to instant payment services on a 24/7 basis, making everyday transactions cheaper, faster, and more accessible.
What’s Driving Their Use?
The global fast payment market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 35.5% from 2025 to 2030, driven by interoperable participation by banks and non-bank providers, greater competition, and innovation. Overlay services, such as QR codes, aliases, and request-to-pay, combined with open-finance frameworks, support new products tailored to meet the needs of different populations, including people and firms often excluded from formal financial services.
Data from the World Bank Group's Global Findex 2025 show this momentum: last year, 62% of adults in low- and middle-income economies made or received digital payments, up 6 percentage points from 2021. Yet the impact of Fast Payment Systems depends not only on adoption rates, but on how deeply they are embedded in merchant businesses, government transfers, and commercial supply chains.
How Fast Payments Can Support Jobs and Growth
The just-released World Bank Group paper, Fast Payments as Macroeconomic Infrastructures, examines how fast payments affect the macroeconomy through two main channels. The first is liquidity acceleration: when merchants, suppliers, workers, or beneficiaries receive funds instantly, money otherwise tied up in settlement lags becomes available for immediate use, reducing the need for precautionary cash buffers and releasing working capital—especially for micro and small enterprises. The second is information acceleration: fast payments generate structured transaction histories that help providers and lenders assess cash flows, supporting access to finance for firms and households without conventional collateral, provided appropriate consent, privacy, and data-governance frameworks are in place.
In Thailand, PromptPay illustrates the potential scale of these effects: industry projections suggest the system could generate additional output equivalent to as much as 2% of forecast GDP. Similar projections estimate that Brazil's Pix could facilitate $49.9 billion in additional formal GDP by 2028, while India's UPI impact is put at the equivalent of 1.4% of GDP.
These channels are amplified by government payments and regional integration. Where government systems are connected end-to-end to fast payment infrastructure, funds can reach households and firms in real time, with significant benefits for vulnerable households and small suppliers, as the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated. Regionally, the recent admission of Albania, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia to the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) has reportedly cut the average cost of business-to-business transfers tenfold, potentially translating into more and better jobs for their citizens.
Fast payments are also showing potential in the gig economy, as highlighted in a recent World Bank Group study. Immediate, digital income eases liquidity pressures for workers with limited cash buffers, while repeated digital payments build transaction histories that can improve access to credit.
Fast Payment Systems can also help address persistent challenges in cross-border payments—high costs, low speed, and limited access—as envisaged in the G20 cross-border payments roadmap.
Looking Ahead
For countries without a Fast Payment System, implementation is the next step. For those where usage remains limited, the priority is deepening adoption and broadening use cases. Generating system-wide effects requires clear settlement-finality rules, broad interoperability, effective consumer protection, reliable fraud controls, data and privacy governance, government adoption and merchant acceptance. Both the public and private sectors have roles to play: central banks can coordinate the ecosystem and mobilize collective action (including through national payment councils or similar forums), while providers are central to designing new services.
The World Bank Group has been a strong advocate for this agenda, including through Project FASTT, which has contributed to 54 domestic and regional projects and supported capacity building in 64 countries around the world.
The broader lesson is clear: fast payments matter not only because they make payments faster, but because they can make economies more liquid, more data-rich, and more inclusive. When properly governed and widely adopted, they can help households receive funds sooner, firms use working capital more efficiently, governments deliver payments more effectively, and lenders serve customers previously excluded from formal finance. Fast payments should therefore be treated not as a narrow payment-sector reform, but as a core component of modern economic infrastructure.
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