How Adding Send for Instant Payments Spawned Good Surprises for BofA

Bank-focused instant payments have been around since 2017, when The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC launched its RTP network, and gained more attention with the 2023 debut of FedNow from the Federal Reserve. While thousands of banks and credit unions have signed up to receive real-time payments from these services, the number that can send is far less.

Bank of America Corp., however, is bullish on send. “It wasn’t a question of if, more of a question of when,” Miyoshi Lee, director and head of U.S. real-time payments for Bank of America Corp., said during a Transact 2026 panel in Atlanta last week. Starting with receiving capabilities was easier to get approval for, Lee said, and it was easier to integrate from an infrastructure perspective.

Bank of America went live with the ability to receive RTP transactions in November 2018 and added the send function the following March.

Many banks and credit unions enrolling in RTP, FedNow, or both, start off as receivers. It’s an easier integration and may be an easier approval to get from executives. To help financial institutions adopt instant-payments send functions, the U.S. Faster Payments Council released guidelines. An October 2024 survey from the organization forecast that between 70% and 80% of all U.S. financial institutions would be able to receive instant payments by 2028, but only 30% to 40% would have send capability.

When it came to originating instant payments, it was not just saying it would be built, Lee said. There was more to it. A couple of concerns focused on building the capability to be adaptable and assuaging concerns over a potential loss in wire revenue, she said.

BofA set out to design the send component “smartly.” “It was, let’s build this with the end in mind. Let’s build this smartly. Let’s not just build it for what we are seeing right in front of us,” Lee said. That was accomplished, she added.

As for wire revenue—Bank of America, according to its online fact sheet, processes an average of $1.9 trillion in wire transfers per day globally—the addition of instant payments did not erode it. “If you think about the pie with all of the different payment products as pieces of that pie, the worry was that the pie was going to shrink for wire in lieu of real-time payments,” Lee said. “But, that’s not what we saw. We saw the pie get bigger.”