FedNow and RTP are live, giving most institutions the ability to move money in seconds through real-time payments. But in Patricia Montesi’s view, what’s still missing is a commercial product that gives corporates a reason to pay a premium on top of the rail.
Qolo’s Co-Founder and GM made that case at Money Live, on a panel with The Clearing House, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and Truist. Her vantage point is different from most panelists: she builds the infrastructure underneath bank and B2B payment products rather than selling in front of them. Here are 5 ideas from her remarks worth carrying into any conversation about where real-time payments go from here.
1. Being Fast Stops Being a Selling Point Once Everyone Is Fast
Connectivity can’t be a differentiator for long. Once every institution is reachable on FedNow and RTP, reachability is worth nothing, and pricing tends to follow ubiquity down. Montesi’s argument is that most banks have already walked into this trap: they positioned instant payments as a cheaper, quicker ACH, which set the ceiling on what they could charge for it before the product even launched.
Why it matters: Institutions have already spent significant money connecting to these systems. If we make the connection itself the main selling point, they’re left with a large cost but no clear new revenue or benefit. From the client’s perspective, they may not even notice that anything has changed.
2. Corporates Already Pay a Premium for Certainty. Instant Payments Just Haven’t Asked For It.
Businesses have paid extra for wires for decades, and speed was rarely the point. What they were buying was proof the money was gone and couldn’t be clawed back, a confirmation they could forward to a counterparty, and a deadline resolved at a known moment. Instant rails offer all of that, plus far richer data than a wire ever carried. Most banks have sold them as a discount rail instead.
Montesi pointed to four things worth productizing that have nothing to do with velocity: real-time confirmation as a standalone offering, remittance data that travels with the payment instead of arriving through a separate channel, a receiving experience that treats the payee as a customer rather than an afterthought, and the ability to spend a balance the moment it lands instead of after an overnight funding cycle.
Why it matters: A bank can’t charge for a benefit the client never experiences. Money that’s spendable a minute after it arrives is a product. Money that arrives and is available the next business day is just a rail.
3. Float Didn’t Disappear. It Became a Decision Somebody Has to Own.
In a batch world, float was an accident of settlement timing that certain parties benefited from without anyone explicitly managing it. Real-time settlement removes that ambiguity, and what’s left is a deliberate choice about when money releases. Treasury can no longer benefit passively from delay. It needs a policy.
The operating model shifts too. A cash position built off a morning report doesn’t hold up when money can move at two in the morning on a Sunday, and most treasury staffing still assumes banking hours. There’s a financial angle as well: many corporates hold a larger cash buffer than they need, and that buffer is often the price of not knowing their real position. A trustworthy live view lets a company run leaner, which is a number a CFO can put directly into a business case.
Why it matters: Nobody buys a liquidity dashboard for its own sake. Companies buy freed-up working capital, and that only shows up once the underlying position is one they can actually trust in real time.
4. A Live Dashboard on a Batch Ledger Is Just Yesterday, Delivered Faster
Every liquidity capability corporates want depends on one thing the industry keeps underbuilding: an account layer that reflects movement as it happens. A dashboard sitting on top of a ledger that posts overnight isn’t a real-time liquidity product. It’s a rendering of yesterday with a faster refresh button.
Most institutions have attached real-time rails to batch core accounting, so the rails move in seconds while the books move once a day, and the client stands in the gap between those two speeds. You can’t forecast against a position that’s already stale, set a threshold-based sweep against a balance that isn’t current, or auto-fund from a number that changes at midnight.
Why it matters: This is where a lot of “real-time liquidity management” pitches fall apart on contact with an actual treasurer, usually within about a week of go-live.
5. Banks Won’t Talk Corporates Into Replatforming, So Stop Trying
A bank modernizing its own commercial product layer has to come before it can credibly advise clients on anything, and that’s also the only part of this a bank fully controls. The instinct to push corporates toward real-time ERP migration is a losing strategy: that kind of overhaul is a multi-year, board-level project with its own business case, and it will never be sequenced around a bank’s roadmap.
The more useful role is absorbing the mismatch instead of asking the client to close it. That means delivering at both speeds from a single source of truth, so real-time API access and the legacy batch file both come from the same underlying record. It means doing reconciliation upstream, before the data reaches the client, so a slow ERP stops being the expensive part. It means preserving remittance data end to end rather than stripping it out somewhere in the chain. And it means pre-built connectors into major ERP and treasury platforms, so adoption doesn’t turn into a client-funded integration project.
Why it matters: A rate is repriceable in a fifteen-minute call. An account wired into a client’s ERP, delivering reconciled data their finance team depends on every morning, doesn’t move that easily, because moving it means running a finance transformation project nobody wants to own. That’s retention built on operational dependency rather than price, and it holds up even when a competitor shows up with a better rate.
The Common Thread
Across all four panelists, the rails themselves weren’t really in question. FedNow and RTP work. What’s still unresolved is everything downstream of the wire transfer moment: how it’s priced, who owns the timing decision, whether the ledger underneath can keep up, and whether banks are asking clients to do work that was never realistic to ask for. Montesi’s framing ties those together into a single sequencing problem, one the whole industry, including the infrastructure providers building these systems, got slightly wrong on the way in. The rails were the easy part. The commercial layer on top of them is where the real work starts now.
