Real-Time Payments Are Now the Baseline - Is Your Gateway Ready?

Real-Time Payments Are Now the Baseline – Is Your Gateway Ready?

Fintechwerx Blog | Payment Services & Infrastructure | February 2026

Real-time payments have stopped being a differentiator and started being an expectation. In 2026, more than 80 countries operate instant payment schemes, and the global real-time payments market – valued at roughly $47 billion this year – is on track to exceed $156 billion by 2030. In the US alone, both FedNow and the RTP network have added participants rapidly, with well over half of US institutions now live on at least one instant rail. A recent PYMNTS Intelligence report found that 73 percent of microbusinesses say real-time payments directly improve their cash flow.

Most gateways weren’t built for this. Sequential transaction processing, single-acquirer routing, and limited failover capability become serious liabilities when volumes surge or a payment rail experiences downtime. The Fintechwerx Gateway-over-Gateway capability solves this by intelligently routing transactions across multiple gateways in real time – based on transaction type, geography, currency, and live performance data. If a primary gateway degrades, a secondary picks up automatically, providing near-zero downtime for merchants at scale.

The real-time trend is inseparable from mobile commerce. The Fintechwerx payment services are built mobile-first, supporting credit, debit, ACH and EFT, Interac e-transfer and cryptocurrency transactions across all devices, with OneTouch Payments that reduce repeat purchases to a single tap. PCI-compliant processing, branded checkout, one-click billing, and real-time analytics all sit within the same unified infrastructure.

One emerging development worth watching: Request for Payment (RFP), supported by both FedNow and RTP, allows merchants to send digital invoices directly to a customer’s bank for instant settlement. The Fintechwerx API-first architecture is positioned to integrate these evolving rails without requiring merchants to replace their payment stack.

Real-Time Payments Are Now the Baseline - Is Your Gateway Ready?