By Jessica Cheney, VP of Strategic Solutions, Bottomline
In today’s real-time economy, anything less than instant needs to be changed. In fact, according to the US Faster Payments Council’s 2025 Barometer, 80% of organizations consider faster payments a “must-have” – with 84% of financial institutions agreeing. And yet, many banks and corporations are slow to fully embrace this need for speed. This inertia isn’t due to a lack of rails, but often a lack of clear, immediate use cases.
The rails are here – FedNow and RTP offer 24/7 instant settlement – but adoption remains uneven. According to Citizens Bank’s 2025 Payment Trends report, nearly 75% of midsize businesses are already using RTP or FedNow for select payments, yet 60% report integration challenges with their ERP or accounting systems. Smaller financial institutions continue to lag, and many that have connected are still only partially enabled, due to a perception that corporate customer demand isn’t widespread enough to justify the full investment.
Faster payments, higher customer retention
Even when things are in place, meaningful integration into day-to-day workflows remains limited. However, we are seeing initial traction in specific, high-value scenarios: urgent supplier payments, earned wage access based payroll, insurance claim settlements, and faster customer refunds. These immediate use cases are proving the benefit of real-time movement. According to a recent PYMNTS Intelligence report, financial institutions that enable real-time payments report a 93% positive impact on customer retention.
That lag comes at a cost. Delayed payments slow cash flow, weaken supplier relationships, and obscure financial visibility. On the flip side, seamless, integrated payments allow businesses to initiate payments, manage liquidity, and access credit, all from within their embedded banking solution within their ERP platforms. This reduces friction, eliminates system switching, minimizes delays, and removes guesswork.
Embedded finance pays off
This isn’t just about streamlining back-office operations. The true shift lies in embedded finance, where financial services, including payments, are integrated directly into the operational tools businesses use every day. Commercial banking is moving away from siloed portals and toward an experience where finance is integrated directly into day-to-day workflows.
For banks, embedding services in this way isn’t just a convenience—it’s a retention strategy, a revenue opportunity, and a way to future-proof their relevance in a platform-first world.
But the opportunity is being slowed by execution gaps. Too many solutions ask businesses to jump through hoops, navigate disconnected platforms, learn new interfaces, and struggle with interoperability. The next generation of winners will be those who meet users where they already are.
That means building embedded payment solutions through APIs, not overhauls. It means integrating payment initiation, reconciliation, and analytics into the systems companies already know and trust.
Infrastructure must handle speed and complexity
We’re seeing this play out with the convergence of financial functionalities that allow for seamless integration of payments, invoicing, approvals, and insights. This consolidation of capabilities reduces fraud potential, facilitates advantages like early-pay discounts, and builds real-time trust with vendors through full transparency. For finance teams, it shifts the focus from processing transactions to driving value and strategy.
This isn’t just about catering to younger professionals raised on instant everything, though expectations are certainly changing. It’s about building a payments infrastructure that matches the speed and complexity of modern business. In a competitive, margin-sensitive environment, speed isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s a differentiator.
The rails are live. The demand is here. The time to act is now. Businesses can’t afford to wait days for payments in a world that moves by the second. Every delay is a missed opportunity, a strained relationship, or a lost advantage. Integrated, embedded payments – underpinned by the growing real-time rails – aren’t the future, they’re the new baseline. In 2025, if your payments are still dragging, so is your business.
About the Author
Jessica Cheney is Vice President, Product Management & Strategic Solutions at Bottomline Technologies, where she heads the Product Management team for the Digital Banking Group. She is responsible for working with financial industry leaders to develop strategic solutions that facilitate FI growth in the online banking and cash management markets. She has been with Bottomline since 2012.
Prior to Bottomline, she was Sr. Director – Business Analysis and Product Consulting for S1 Corporation, where she led global product strategy, solutions consulting and payments product management for the Financial Institutions business. Jessica previously held key product management and sales support roles at Clear2Pay and US Bank. She served on the US Federal Reserve’s Faster Payments Taskforce, NACHA Innovation Alliance and the US Faster Payments Council. Jessica is an Accredited ACH Professional and a Certified Treasury Professional.