The biggest threat to instant B2B payments isn’t competition from cards or ACH. It’s that finance teams already think their current setup is fine — and a new PYMNTS Intelligence report, produced with The Clearing House, shows just how high that comfort bar really is. The pipes for real-time rails are laid. The accounting software on the other end still isn’t plugged in.
Why “Good Enough” Is the Real Competitor to RTP
According to the PYMNTS Intelligence report “Ready and Willing: B2B Payments Are Headed for Real-Time Rails,” 94% of businesses say they pay suppliers on time and 86% say their accounts payable processes are efficient. When asked why they hadn’t used the RTP network in the past 12 months, 24% of nonusers said other payment methods work well enough — the single most common reason given. For FedNow nonusers, the figure was 16%.
That reframes the entire sales motion for banks and FinTechs. Real-time payments aren’t a rescue mission for broken treasury operations; they’re a performance upgrade for shops that mostly work. That’s a harder pitch — the buyer isn’t in pain.
If you’re a payments product team selling into mid-market finance leaders, this is the difference between leading with “stop missing payment deadlines” and leading with “close your books two days faster.” The former lands on deaf ears when the AP team is already hitting 94%. The latter forces the buyer to imagine a better version of a process they already like.
The industry has been pricing speed as the product. Speed is table stakes. The product is what speed unlocks inside the GL.
The ERP Integration Gap Is Where the Money Hides
The report found that 22% of businesses said better ERP, accounting or treasury integration would most improve B2B payment performance. Among companies pulling in at least $25 million in annual revenue, that share jumped to 29%. The bigger the company, the more the bottleneck shifts from “can we send the money instantly” to “can our systems do anything useful with the fact that we did.”
The unsexy reality: the rail is rarely the constraint. The constraint is the gap between the rail and the journal entry. An RTP transfer that lands in seconds but takes a finance analyst three days to reconcile against a PO defeats the purpose. Real-time becomes batch the moment a human has to touch it.
Imagine a controller at a manufacturing firm doing $80 million a year. Their AP team already pays on time. What they actually want is a same-day cash position view and automated three-way matching the moment a payment clears. That’s not a rail problem. That’s an integration and custom API problem — webhooks into NetSuite, posting rules in the treasury workstation, an approval router that doesn’t break when a vendor switches from check to RTP.
The vendors that win the next 24 months won’t be the ones with the fastest rail. They’ll be the ones who showed up with a working NetSuite connector and a reconciliation engine.
What the 53% Adoption Plan Really Signals
The headline number is striking: 53% of businesses said they plan to adopt the RTP network within two years, and nearly 30% are targeting adoption within six months. That’s not a hype curve. That’s a budgeted, calendared procurement wave heading toward banks and FinTechs starting roughly now.
A six-month adoption window is too short to rip and replace a treasury stack. It means buyers are looking for overlay solutions — middleware, gateway-style connectors, and embedded payment modules that sit on top of what they already run. The companies that already operate fintech and banking software infrastructure with audit-ready posture have a structural head start, because their compliance work is mostly done.
If you’re a SaaS platform serving SMBs — say, a vertical billing product for healthcare clinics or law firms — this is the window to add RTP and FedNow as a payout option before your customers ask. By 2027, instant payout will be the assumed default the way ACH was by 2015. Building it now as part of a custom payment gateway integration buys you a year of competitive cover.
Prediction: by the end of 2027, RTP and FedNow support will be a standard line item in mid-market RFPs for treasury, AP automation, and vertical SaaS billing — not a differentiator, but a disqualifier when missing.
Why Users Score RTP Higher Than Nonusers Do
The report surfaced one of the most useful data points in the whole study: businesses that have actually used RTP or FedNow give them ROI scores up to 21 points higher than nonusers do. Among users, 79% said instant payments improve cash flow management, 78% said they strengthen supplier relationships, and 76% said they improve reconciliation.
That’s an experience gap. Nonusers are evaluating real-time rails against a hypothetical — what they think it would be like. Users are evaluating against their actual books. The gap implies the standard pre-sale ROI calculator dramatically undersells the value, which means demand will accelerate as referrals and case studies stack up.
For a treasury team on the fence, the practical move is a narrow pilot: route a single supplier category, say utilities or contract logistics, onto RTP for one quarter and measure days payable outstanding, exception rates, and supplier complaints. That’s the cheapest way to convert hypothetical ROI into measured ROI.
The editorial take: the adoption curve here won’t be linear. It’ll be lumpy, driven by ERP vendors shipping connectors, then by a handful of vocal supplier-side customers demanding instant pay, and then by a sudden mid-market rush in late 2026.
FAQ
Q: What is the RTP network and how is it different from FedNow? A: The RTP network is the real-time payments rail operated by The Clearing House, launched in 2017. FedNow is the Federal Reserve’s competing instant payments service. Both settle transactions in seconds, 24/7, but they are separate networks with different participating banks, which is part of why businesses care about supplier acceptance before committing.
Q: Why are large companies more focused on ERP integration than small ones? A: According to the PYMNTS Intelligence report, 29% of businesses with at least $25 million in annual revenue cited ERP, accounting or treasury integration as the top improvement area, versus 22% across all businesses. Larger firms run more complex GL structures, multi-entity consolidation, and treasury workstations, so the marginal value of automating reconciliation against real-time payments is much higher.
Q: Should a SaaS or fintech product add RTP support right now? A: If the customer base includes any B2B payouts, yes — especially given that nearly 30% of businesses in the report are targeting RTP adoption within six months. The smart play is overlay integration that doesn’t require customers to change their core systems, which lines up with how mid-market buyers actually procure.
Key Takeaways
- Lead sales conversations with reconciliation and cash visibility outcomes, not payment speed — the speed pitch lands flat against an AP team already hitting 94% on-time.
- Prioritize ERP, accounting, and treasury connectors over rail features; integration is where the 29% of larger firms in the PYMNTS report say the biggest gains live.
- Use the six-month adoption window cited by nearly 30% of businesses as a forcing function — ship overlay RTP and FedNow support before customers put it in an RFP.
- Run narrow supplier-category pilots to convert hypothetical ROI into measured ROI; the 21-point user-versus-nonuser perception gap suggests internal data will sell the rollout better than vendor decks.
- Expect RTP and FedNow support to shift from differentiator to disqualifier in mid-market procurement by late 2027 — platforms without it will lose deals they don’t even know they were in.