By: Paul Roberts, AFPP, CTO & Co-Founder, SparrowPay Inc.

In a previous piece for Community IQ, I introduced instant payments and the role Request for Payment, or RfP, plays inside that ecosystem. The short version: instant payment rails are push-only by design, and RfP is the mechanism that lets a biller, merchant, or service provider ask to be paid without ever pulling funds. The payer stays in control, the payee gets immediate good funds, and everyone gets ISO 20022-rich data attached to the transaction. That is the theory. The more interesting question for the channel right now is what is actually happening on the ground. Who is sending RfPs? Who is receiving them? And what does the early adopter experience tell us about where this is going?

How an RfP Actually Moves

Before the numbers, a quick refresher on the mechanics. An RfP is a structured ISO 20022 message, specifically a pain.013, that the payee’s financial institution sends through the rail to the payer’s financial institution. The message carries the amount due, the due date, an invoice or reference identifier, and optional remittance details. The payer sees the request inside their banking app, reviews it, and either approves, declines, or schedules it. Approval triggers a pain.014 response message and then a standard credit transfer back across the rail. Nothing gets pulled. The payee asks, the payer pushes, and the rail carries the structured data that ties the request to the resulting payment. That tight coupling is what makes automated reconciliation possible on the payee side, and it is one of the most underrated benefits of the model.

RfP on RTP: The Early Movers

The Clearing House launched RTP in 2017 and added RfP as a network capability in 2021. As of the second quarter of 2025, the RTP network has more than 950 financial institution participants moving 107 million transactions per quarter at a total value of $481 billion, and reaches roughly 71 percent of U.S. demand deposit accounts. RfP availability inside that footprint, however, is narrower than the basic send-and-receive footprint. When The Clearing House announced expanded RfP availability, the named participants offering it included Bank of America, BNY Mellon, Citi, Fifth Third, JPMorgan, PNC Bank, U.S. Bank, and Wells Fargo, alongside community institutions like Bridge Community Bank and North American Banking Co. The headline news for 2025 came in April, when Truist announced it had completed the initial testing phase of an alias-based RfP solution on the RTP network, becoming the first financial institution to send and receive RfPs tied to an alias rather than a raw bank account number. That is a meaningful step. Aliases lower the friction of bill pay enrollment and remove one of the most stubborn objections to account-to-account payments, which is the awkwardness of handing over routing and account numbers in the first place.

RfP on FedNow: Newer Rail, Faster Growth Curve

FedNow launched in July 2023 with RfP as a day-one feature. The Federal Reserve convened a cross-industry working group of more than 90 organizations before launch to publish market practices for how RfPs should be enrolled, populated, and presented to end customers, with the explicit goal of avoiding inconsistent user experiences across institutions. Adoption has moved quickly. FedNow had roughly 35 participants at launch, climbed to about 900 by its first anniversary, and reached more than 1,400 participants by mid-2025. The Fed has signaled that RfP momentum is building, with instant bill pay services emerging as a leading use case. On the economics, FedNow charges $0.045 per credit transfer to the sender and a separate $0.01 per RfP message paid by the requestor, which keeps the cost of asking for a payment essentially negligible for a high-volume biller. The Fed also raised the FedNow transaction limit to $10 million in September 2025, bringing it into line with RTP and opening the door to higher-value B2B use cases that previously had to route through wires.

Multi-Rail Is the Quiet Default

One of the more interesting findings in a recent PYMNTS and The Clearing House study is that 58 percent of U.S. financial institutions enabling instant payments now do so through both RTP and FedNow rather than picking one. Earlier in the cycle there was a real debate about whether banks would have to choose. That debate has largely settled. Multi-rail is the operational norm because the two networks have different strengths, different participants, and, until interoperability matures, different reach. For an ISV or VAR thinking about RfP integration, the practical implication is that any serious product needs to assume both rails exist on the receiving side and route accordingly, much the way payment orchestration platforms already route card transactions across acquirers.

What Early Adopters Are Saying, and Where the Friction Is

The use cases that are actually live tell a consistent story. Apex Clearing, working with U.S. Bank, uses RfP to fund brokerage accounts so retail investors can move money from a checking account into a trading account instantly, eliminating the ACH return risk that has historically slowed digital account opening. Utility and subscription billers are using RfP for what the industry calls just-in-time bill pay, where the customer can wait until the moment of the due date and still pay with certainty of funds. Marketplaces and gig platforms are experimenting with collect-before-deliver flows that reduce settlement risk. And digital wallet funding has emerged as a natural fit, particularly for use cases like online sports betting where seconds matter. Across these implementations, the consistent feedback from billers is that the certainty of irrevocable good funds plus the embedded remittance data dramatically simplifies the back-office side of receivables. That said, the friction is also real. According to recent industry analysis, fewer than half of U.S. banks have implemented RfP functionality even where they support basic instant payment send and receive, and many that have adopted instant payments remain in a receive-only posture. The constraints are not glamorous: technical integration work on the bank side, billing system updates on the corporate side, and a healthy concern about fraud warranties that the Federal Reserve specifically addressed by updating the FedNow Operating Procedures to clarify the scope of RfP warranty obligations.

Where This Leaves the Channel

RfP is in roughly the same phase same-day ACH was in around 2017. The plumbing works, the largest billers and their banks are live, the standards are stable, and the use cases are proven. What is still missing is the broad mid-market and community bank rollout that turns a capable feature into a default consumer experience. For ISVs and VARs building in retail, hospitality, healthcare, property management, and field services, the window to design RfP into a product before it becomes table stakes is open right now. The early movers will not just be faster to market. They will help define what good looks like in the categories they serve. RfP rewards the integrators who understand both the technical pattern, request goes one direction and money goes the other, and the operational pattern, the payer is always in control. Get both right, and the rest is just shipping product.