Key takeaway: Real-time payments leave little room to catch fraud after the fact, so firms that wait to modernize their controls until after adopting real-time rails are choosing to run that gap live.
A new PYMNTS Intelligence report finds that just 24% of firms have adapted their fraud controls for real-time payments, even though 57% say fraud attempts have risen over the past year.
The report, “Payment Protection: Why Firms Still Aren’t Real-Time Ready,” was produced by PYMNTS Intelligence with Plaid and surveyed 150 senior executives across seven industries that handle substantial payment volume.
Fraud attempts are climbing for most respondents: 57% say they faced more fraud attempts than a year earlier, according to the report. Nearly every firm surveyed already has secure, permissioned access to customer bank account data, yet only 49% use that access to generate real-time fraud signals from account activity. Sixty-nine percent use the same bank connections just to retrieve account and routing numbers, a narrower use case that leaves the fraud-detection potential of that data mostly untapped.
The real-time payments gap is sharper still: only 24% of firms have adapted their fraud controls specifically for real-time rails, the report found.
The report also ties broader use of secure bank connectivity to measurable business gains. Ninety percent of firms using it report improved onboarding completion, 89% report lower payment operating costs, and 85% report fewer failed or returned payments. Despite those gains, only 17% of firms rated their overall payment experience as excellent.
Why it matters: For merchants weighing a move into real-time payment rails, faster settlement also means less time to catch a bad transaction before funds move. The report’s central finding, that most firms already hold underused bank-account data rather than lacking fraud tools altogether, points to a faster path toward real-time readiness than buying another point solution.
Source: PYMNTS