PYMNTS Intelligence has long spotlighted the value that real-time payments bring to consumer disbursements and emergency use cases. Beyond those use cases, faster funding is steadily becoming part of how businesses think about cash flow, settlement certainty and liquidity timing.
Recent PYMNTS reporting shows CFOs increasingly value real-time settlement not for speed alone, but for the predictability it brings to cash flow and funding decisions, particularly as volatility puts pressure on working capital visibility.
Speed Changes the Clock, Not the Chain of Control
Treasury software increasingly supports real-time payment processing by preparing payment instructions, validating data, monitoring eligibility and tracking settlement status. Final routing decisions are executed by the originating bank and governed by network rules set by the RTP® Network and the Federal Reserve’s FedNow® Service, as well as the receiving bank’s ability to accept the payment. Treasury platforms operate upstream of settlement, enabling faster decisions about when to send funds and how to structure the instruction, as the systems choose the optimal network for payments.
Modern treasury platforms evaluate variables such as urgency, transaction size, cutoff logic, counterparty information and known network availability. Based on those inputs, the software can recommend or request a payment type (such as ACH, RTP, FedNow or wire) and pass the instruction to the bank. PYMNTS Intelligence analysis shows that many banks now support multiple instant rails, reinforcing the reality that eligibility and routing is a dynamic strategy.
Treasury Teams Move From Scheduling to Readiness
This shift is changing how treasury teams operate. Instead of managing payment calendars built around batch windows, teams are increasingly focused on readiness, ensuring funds, data and approvals are available at any moment a payment needs to be made.
Treasury functions are being redesigned to support intraday liquidity visibility and continuous cash positioning, as real-time settlement compresses traditional decision windows.
Within that framework, intelligent routing uses transaction context — such as urgency, amount thresholds, cutoff times and known rail availability — to guide how payment instructions are submitted to banks, particularly as RTP and FedNow volumes grow. Executives interviewed by PYMNTS have emphasized that these tools improve speed, resiliency and liquidity visibility by reducing manual intervention and failed payment attempts, while final routing, eligibility and settlement decisions remain governed by the originating bank and the real-time payment networks themselves.
Platforms, AI and the Orchestration Layer
Treasury platforms are also incorporating advanced analytics and automation to improve payment preparation. Artificial intelligence (AI) can help flag exceptions, validate payment details and prioritize transactions based on business rules. As noted here, agentic and workflow-driven AI increasingly supports orchestration and delegation, not settlement authority, across payments and B2B finance. These infrastructure changes raise the bar for treasury operations, which must now manage liquidity outside legacy windows while still relying on banks to control settlement risk.
As payments accelerate, responsibility shifts. When treasury software enables near-instant initiation, errors propagate faster and reversibility becomes more limited.
While banks and networks enforce compliance at execution, treasury platforms must embed controls earlier in the workflow, including approvals, sanctions screening, audit trails and exception handling. The result is a shared governance model between the financial institutions and the treasury software that manages preparation, visibility and compliance support.
