· by
Kent Brown, CIO
Real-time Payments
,
Banking Infrastructure
PortX Payment Manager runs wires, ACH, and FedNow for community banks and credit unions and brings every rail into one payment flow.
Executive summary: why real-time payments need one platform
Instant payments are growing fast across the U.S. The FedNow Service settled nearly 6.4 million payments worth $371 billion in the third quarter of 2026, up 27.6 percent in volume and 35 percent in value from the previous quarter. According to the Federal Reserve, close to 2,000 banks and credit unions are now live on FedNow, with a presence in every state and more than 50 certified service providers supporting payment processing. Even so, most community banks and credit unions have not joined in yet.
For many, the hesitation is not choosing the rail itself. It is the prospect of running a third payment operation, with its own configuration, screening, exceptions, and audit work, alongside wires and ACH. PortX Payment Manager supports wires, ACH, and FedNow for community banks and credit unions today, each with the controls its operational requirements call for. Our vision is to bring them under one unified payment management layer, with a single control tower, screening model, exception queue, and audit trail across rails.
The goal: to let you offer instant payments to customers and members without building a new back office for every rail.
What real-time payments mean for community banks and credit unions
Real-time payments move money between accounts in seconds, at any hour, on any day, with final settlement. In the U.S. they run on two networks: the Federal Reserve's FedNow Service, launched in July 2023, and The Clearing House's RTP network, launched in 2017.
Both networks now accept payments of up to $10 million. That takes instant payments well beyond person-to-person transfers, into payroll, supplier payments, loan disbursements, insurance claims, and real estate closings. On FedNow, the average payment in the third quarter of 2026 was about $58,000.
For a community bank or credit union, real-time payments change four things:
What customers and members can do. Get paid, pay bills, or move money anytime, with funds available in seconds.
What you can build. New products such as instant loan funding, on-demand business payouts, and faster access to wages.
How payments are managed. More payment choices mean different speeds, limits, and processing requirements to manage across rails.
How you run operations: automate before you go live. Instant payments run 24/7, so screening, fraud checks, exceptions, and Federal Reserve account liquidity must run alongside them automatically, with no manual-review window. Defining those rules and putting automated checks behind them also positions you to automate more of your wire and ACH operations, keeping a high compliance bar while lowering the manual effort it takes to meet it.
U.S. real-time payments are still in the early adopter phase. The Richmond Fed found the U.S. averaged 0.12 fast-payment transactions per person per month, compared with 27 in Brazil and 35 in Thailand in 2023. But early adopters decide which institutions, or which apps, they rely on to move money, and others follow their lead.
Why community banks and credit unions need to move on real-time payments now
Customers and members would prefer instant payments from you, not from a third-party app. In Federal Reserve Financial Services surveys, 79 percent of consumers say they want their current financial institution to offer faster or instant payments, and 74 percent of businesses said they want or prefer their primary financial institution to provide them.
Payment users already place value on speed. In an American Banker Market Intelligence survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers in May and June 2026, 35 percent said they pay instant-transfer fees always or often, and 30 percent said they want to access wages as they earn them and would pay for the privilege.
Early adopter institutions are already running more than one rail. The Richmond Fed found 70 percent of RTP participants are also FedNow members.
Industry standards are coalescing. The Federal Reserve moved the Fedwire Funds Service to ISO 20022 on July 14, 2025, retiring its legacy message format, so wires and FedNow now share one message standard.
Regulation is tightening for everyone: Nacha's new risk management and transaction monitoring rules took effect on March 20, 2026, and from June 2026 apply to every receiving institution regardless of volume.
The Federal Reserve is paying institutions to move now. Under the FedNow Service 2027 Discount Program, institutions can earn a one-time statement credit of up to $20,000 for enabling FedNow receive, or up to $80,000 for enabling FedNow send at volume, provided they meet the program’s participation requirements.
The problem: one payment operation per rail
Payment rails arrived one at a time, years apart, and you had to build for each one as it came. More rails, with more monitoring on each one, make duplicated screening and exceptions work expensive. The critical question for everyone now is whether the next rail adds a new operation, or plugs into a payments foundation designed to take on whatever comes next.
What Payment Manager does today: wires, ACH, and FedNow
PortX Payment Manager provides three rails currently:
Wires over FedLine Direct and ISO 20022
Wires are the platform’s most mature rail. It supports the full payment lifecycle: initiation through UI, API, or file; service messages and drawdowns; wire controls, screening, and exceptions; and full operations, reconciliation, reporting, and audit. It is built on a direct FedLine Direct connection using the ISO 20022 protocol (the global standard for structured, data-rich payment messaging).
ACH through FedACH
ACH handles FedACH (the Federal Reserve's ACH network) file integration, credit and debit processing, funds control and settlement management, returns, NOC (Notification of Change), and exceptions management. Screening and auditing are also available to ACH.
FedNow instant payments
FedNow, the newest of the three, is real-time by design: ISO 20022-based instant payment send and receive, internal and external decisioning, Request for Payment, and automated business controls including OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control) and risk screening. Because settlement has to happen in seconds rather than through a review queue, FedNow requires far less manual operator involvement than wires or ACH, but correspondingly more investment in automation and pre-built checks, since there’s no human-review window once a payment is in flight. That same investment in automation pays off across wires and ACH, where it can reduce manual review while keeping controls strong. FedNow’s around-the-clock availability also opens the door to new product design that simply isn’t possible on batch-oriented rails.
Why we’re focused on building one payments platform for every rail
Across all three rails, the Payment Manager day-to-day experience is intentionally low-touch. The platform is built to only pull a back-office expert into the interface when there’s actually a decision to make. If nothing needs review, a wire or payment proceeds straight through to the Fed without requiring operator action. But because each rail today runs as its own operational envelope (real-time, batch, or straight-through processing with exceptions), extending a capability across all three typically means building it three times. We are changing that starting now.
Our vision for the future is bringing all independent payment workflows under a unified management layer, with configurable controls and intelligent rail selection. Imagine a customer initiates a payment and the platform routes it to the appropriate rail based on institution-defined criteria such as speed, cost, payment characteristics, and destination reachability.
We’re building toward this vision on a common payment data model informed by ISO 20022, designed to provide a consistent foundation across payment rails while accommodating the unique data and processing requirements of each.
This approach is designed to make it easier to support additional rails without rebuilding the payment management experience for each new rail.
We’re organizing this vision around four pillars:
Rapid delivery and innovation: Shared capabilities such as fraud, AML, sanctions, and document management will be integrated through a common framework, reducing duplication and accelerating the introduction of new payment rails. Multi-rail shouldn’t have to mean multi-configuration.
Intelligent payment routing: Institutions will be able to define routing rules based on factors such as speed, cost, payment characteristics, and destination reachability, allowing Payment Manager to select the appropriate rail.
Unified payments view: A central control tower will provide visibility across payment activity, with the ability to search and trace a payment’s history and lifecycle regardless of the rail used to process it.
Data Manager integration: Payment data will be available through PortX Data Manager to support reporting, reconciliation, auditing, and operational investigation.
That same vision for consolidation extends to risk and operations: one screening model for every rail, inbound and outbound, feeding a single decision queue rather than separate sanctions workflows per rail; one stop for exceptions, regardless of which rail raised them; and an immutable audit trail, where the evidence behind every decision, including which policy version was in effect at the time, will be preserved as part of the payment’s permanent history.
We are architecting the future of Payment Manager to ensure that existing interfaces for wires, ACH, and FedNow remain in place as-is, with new unified views and controls introduced per rail as they come online, rather than requiring customers to adopt one large platform change all at once. Payment Manager allows you to move at a pace you choose and with rails you and your customers need.
The bottom line: real-time payments are here, and more rails are coming. Build one payment operation for all of them. We are reshaping the future. It is time to:
Think payments, not rails.
Curious what Payment Manager could do for your wires, ACH, and FedNow operations? Talk to us today.
FAQs about Payment Manager
What payment rails does Payment Manager support today?
Payment Manager supports wires, ACH, and FedNow today, with more rails on the roadmap.
Is Payment Manager real-time?
FedNow payments settle in real time; wires and ACH remain batch- and exception-based. Payment Manager’s control tower is being built to give one unified view across all three, regardless of settlement speed.
What is Payment Manager’s control tower?
The control tower is our vision for a single view of all payment activity and history across every rail, backed by one screening model, one exceptions workflow, and one immutable audit trail.
What’s on the Payment Manager roadmap?
FedNow Liquidity Management and additional payment rails are planned for 2027. We’re also working toward a unified control tower, screening model, and audit trail across rails.
What is the difference between FedNow and RTP?
FedNow and RTP are both U.S. instant payment networks that settle in seconds, 24 hours a day, every day, with a $10 million transaction limit. The Federal Reserve runs FedNow and The Clearing House runs RTP. Many institutions use both: 70 percent of RTP participants are also FedNow members.
Why should community banks and credit unions offer real-time payments now?
Customers and members want instant payments from their own institution. In Federal Reserve surveys, 79 percent of consumers and 74 percent of businesses said they want or prefer their financial institution to provide them. Institutions that do not offer them leave room for payment apps that charge for speed.
Does Payment Manager support ISO 20022?
Yes. Wires run on ISO 20022 over a FedLine Direct connection, FedNow is ISO 20022-based, and Payment Manager is modeling payments around ISO 20022 so one payment object can adapt to each rail.
Sources
Federal Reserve Financial Services, "FedNow Service Volume and Value Statistics," Q3 2026. frbservices.org
Federal Reserve Financial Services, “Standout Number of Sign-Ups, Volume Climbs on the FedNow Service in Q3,” FedNow Explorer, October 21, 2026. explore.fednow.org
Zhu Wang and Vinh Phan, "FedNow and the Development of U.S. Fast Payments," Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond Economic Brief No. 26-28, August 2026. richmondfed.org
FedPayments Improvement, "Surveys: Businesses and Consumers Adopting Faster/Instant Payments to Suit Their Preferences," Federal Reserve Financial Services surveys, May 6, 2024. fedpaymentsimprovement.org
American Banker Market Intelligence consumer payments survey, 1,000 U.S. consumers, May to June 2026. americanbanker.com
PYMNTS, "FRFS Completes Implementation of ISO 20022 for Fedwire Funds Service," July 2025. pymnts.com
Nacha, "New Nacha Risk Management Rules Now in Effect," 2026. nacha.org
Federal Reserve Financial Services, "FedNow Service 2027 Discount Program." frbservices.org
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