The state of instant payments is that adoption is slow among big businesses; however, B2B use cases are emerging for instant rails that are earning these methods a place in the mix.
Among those trends is partnering to kickstart offerings like instant. Business payments firms are emerging as perhaps the primary avenue banks and corporates are taking, avoiding legacy hurdles with secure, custom APIs. They’re accessing RTP® from The Clearing House and the Federal Reserve’s FedNow® Service via specialists who know the nuances, and to whom instant rails are no mystery, just options in the payments toolkit.
According to the Federal Reserve Market Readiness Brief released in April 2025, 93% of businesses polled are interested in B2B uses of FedNow®, with the greatest curiosity like instant recurring bill payments (43%), and “just-in-time” payments (30%) auto-triggered by inventory systems that may auto-generate payment requests as well.
As for B2B payments at the enterprise level, the Fed is pinning its hope on those types of industrial-sized opportunities for FedNow®, and there’s demand building in other areas.
Those figures are up from the last major report issued by FedNow®. That was The Federal Reserve Payments Insights Brief 2024 Business Payments Study, whose data is now getting dated. July 2025 marked the second anniversary of FedNow® going live.
SMBS and the Need for Speed
Having mushroomed in the consumer space through the pandemic, instant peer-to-peer apps like Venmo do well with consumers who need that payment to eat and travel.
In B2B, instant is on a slower roll. "Businesses often operate on net 30 terms, which doesn't require instant payments," said Rodney Nilson, Vice President of Product Management at Bottomline, in a recent interview.
His point is that not all businesses will see a need to pay or be paid instantly. These will typically be large firms with a strong cash flow and considerable reserves.
Where things start to change drastically is among small and medium businesses (SMBs). Unlike their larger, well-capitalized competitors, SMBs often have cash flow needs that are better aligned with instant payments than with net 30 terms.
The April 2025 “Money Mobility Tracker®” produced by PYMNTS Intelligence notes that “...across major industries, most SMBs use instant payments at least some of the time. In fact, about four in 10 SMBs across transportation, hospitality, restaurants and healthcare cite an instant payment option — such as PayPal or instant bank account-to-account (A2A) transfers — as their most used way to send payments.”
That’s mostly about commonalities that may not translate to other verticals (a preponderance of hourly and “gig” workers, high frequency-low volume payments, etc.).
Even so, instant is finding its niche in business payments, as financial services companies show that speed is just appreciated differently in the B2B and B2C worlds.
Early Innings of Instant
There’s something anticlimactic about the fact that instant payments have failed to catch business payments by storm. It calls to mind “a solution in search of a problem,” but that figure of speech doesn’t fit this situation. Like so many things, instant payments are partly an ideal. It often takes time for an ideal solution to find its match in business.
As for eventual uptake, The Fed’s July 2025 FedNow® Service progress update: Two Years of Growth, Innovation strikes a hopeful tone. “Based on conversations I’ve had at recent industry conferences and customer meetings, I’d say merchant refunds, account funding, healthcare payments, and small business and online marketplace payments are use cases likely to emerge strongly in the next 12 to 18 months,” wrote Nick Stanescu, executive vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the chief executive of FedNow®.
“But I fully look forward to seeing unexpected use cases, because use cases very often bubble up in unpredictable ways,” he added. “The FedNow Service is uniquely use-case agnostic, and that’s by design — a flexible structure encourages innovation across industries and the broader payments ecosystem.”
Stanescu has reason to be optimistic. According to Federal Reserve statistics, in Q1 2025, FedNow handled 1.31 million transactions totaling $48.6 billion. But in Q2 2025, usage of the instant rail took off, as $245.76 billion and 2.13 million transactions moved through the service. For those breaking out their calculators, that’s just over 405% growth from one quarter to the next in the first half of 2025.
Why bury that lede? Because business payments remain a sliver of what’s passing through the FedNow Service and its instant payments peer, RTP® from The Clearing House. Many banks and financial institutions are waiting for a clear tipping point before going all-in.
After citing a Fed stat that 66% of businesses are likely to use instant payments if their primary financial institution offers it, Stanescu had a message for fence-sitting banks: “Participating in the FedNow Service can deliver wide-ranging benefits to your customers and members, like the ability to precisely time payments and better manage cash flow — and deliver cost-saving and customer retention opportunities to your institutions.”