Study Finds Half of Consumers Want Instant Payments but Can’t Get Them

A few short years ago, instant payments were impossible to receive in the United States. Then, in 2017, The Clearing House launched its Real-Time Payment network — but before that, waiting for payments to clear could take days.

Fast forward to 2022, and instant disbursements are now table stakes. Roughly 170 million U.S. consumers received at least one instant disbursement in the last year, and 47% of our respondents said they would have opted for an instant payment if they could.

The “Disbursements Satisfaction Report 2022,” a PYMNTS and Ingo Money collaboration, delves into how instant disbursements went from being a competitive differentiator to a necessary part of business. We surveyed a census-balanced sample of 3,633 U.S. consumers about how many disbursements they received in the past year and how they received them.  We explored how many received or wanted to receive them instantly to gauge the rising consumer demand for instant disbursements and understand just how critical they are to being competitive in the disbursements space.

Key findings from our research include the following:

• Instant disbursement adoption has increased for five straight years but is quite low relative to interest. Twenty-two percent of consumers received at least one instant disbursement in 2022, and consumers received 17% of all disbursements via instant payment rails.

• Consumers now have fewer options for how to receive disbursements. Consumers were 3.5% less likely to be given a choice in how to receive disbursements in 2022 than they were in 2021.

• Consumers increasingly see instant disbursement options as table stakes and are less willing to pay for them. We found that 19% fewer consumers are willing to pay an added fee for instant disbursements in 2022 — just 27% in total — than they were just one year ago.

These findings are only the beginning of a much broader story about how instant disbursements are becoming more crucial to meeting consumer demand. The “Disbursements Satisfaction Report 2022” details why providing instant disbursement options is more critical than ever.

To learn more about why instant disbursements are becoming an integral part of the disbursement ecosystem in the United States, download the report.