October 28, 2025—For more than a century, America’s payment systems have gradually shifted from paper checks and cash to digital rails that now move trillions of dollars each quarter. Record growth reported by the three major digital payment operators—Nacha, The Clearing House RTP® Network, and the Federal Reserve’s FedNow® Service—this quarter suggests that this transformation is far from over. In fact, it is accelerating.
The long road from checks to chips
According to the Federal Reserve history, the story of U.S. payment rails traces back to the early 1970s, when the banking industry, facing mountains of paper checks, created the Automated Clearing House (ACH) network. Managed by Nacha, it established a secure, electronic way to route broad categories of payments—from payroll to vendor invoices. Decades later, it remains the workhorse of American electronic payments, and it now offers same-day and near-real-time transfers.
This week, Nacha reported that in the third quarter of 2025, ACH Network overall volume was 8.8 billion payments valued at $23.2 trillion. These increases of 5.2% and 8.2% respectively from a year earlier were driven by growth in online commerce and healthcare payments. Overall B2B volume was nearly 2.1 billion payments, an increase of 10% from the third quarter of 2024.
The real-time race accelerates
If ACH modernized batch payments, The Clearing House’s Real-Time Payments (RTP) Network, launched in 2017, made instant processing and settlement possible for the first time in the U.S. Backed by the nation’s largest commercial banks, RTP brought real-time capability to a market that had lagged behind global peers. In the third quarter of 2025, the network’s payment activity reached 115 million transactions for a value of $405 billion in payments, a 7% volume growth. On October 3, 2025, The Clearing House announced a single-day record: 1.8 million RTP transactions, collectively valued at $5.2 billion.
“Reaching a single-day record of nearly two million transactions highlights both the scalability of the network and the growing confidence of the financial industry,” said Jim Colassano, Senior Vice President of RTP Business Product Management at The Clearing House.
FedNow® ushers in the latest layer in the era of instant payments
Seeking to democratize access to instant payments, the Federal Reserve (Fed) launched its FedNow® Service in July 2023, making it the first new public payments rail in the U.S. in more than 40 years. Unlike the Fedwire® and ACH networks it already operated, FedNow was built for continuous, 24/7 instant settlement, particularly serving banks and credit unions seeking an alternative to the funding requirements of the private-sector RTP Network.
As referenced in our September blog post, the Fed will raise the FedNow® Service network transaction limit from $1 million to $10 million effective November 2025. This marks the second increase in less than a year and reflects a growing demand in the U.S. for higher-value instant payments. The limit increase will unlock new use cases like real estate funding, corporate payroll and vendor payments, and corporate treasury management.
Just over two years in, FedNow has attracted over 1,500 financial institutions, signaling growing adoption even as many U.S. businesses remain cautious about retiring older channels.
In Q3 2025, the FedNow Service processed approximately 2.51 million settled payments, which represents a 17.6% increase in quarterly volume. The total value of settled payments was $307.3 billion, reflecting a 25.0% rise from the previous quarter. These figures highlight strong and sustained growth for the FedNow Service, with both transaction count and dollar value continuing to rise rapidly into the latter half of 2025.
Digital momentum continues
The parallel growth of Nacha, RTP, and FedNow underscores a pivotal moment: the U.S. payments ecosystem is finally catching up to nations like the U.K., Brazil, and India, where real-time systems dominate.
The data points to an accelerating digital shift—one that began half a century ago with ACH and is now racing ahead on real-time rails designed for an always-on economy.
We at Vertifi are applying our payments and money movement expertise to the continued development of our instant payments gateway and to EasCorp’s settlement service where we can settle transactions from all payment rails, including ACH, domestic and international wires, the FedNow® Instant Payments Service, and now, The Clearing House RTP® network. If you are interested in learning more, please contact us via this form.