Cards vs. real‑time payments is the wrong question

Card payments are growing at a pace that would have seemed unlikely just a few years ago. Global card transactions are projected to reach 1.1 trillion annually by 2029.^¹ At the same time, the narrative that once dominated industry conversation (that real-time payments would displace cards) has not played out as expected. Instead, real-time has scaled alongside them. In 2024, The Clearing House’s RTP network processed 343 million transactions worth $246 billion in the United States alone.^² Globally, real-time transaction volumes reached 266.2 billion in 2023 and are forecast to more than double by 2028.^³

This is not one payment type replacing another. It is multiple payment types operating at scale, each with its own economics, protections, and operational requirements.

Every week I talk with banks and merchants managing that complexity. The challenge is rarely about any single payment method. It is about running all of them at once without duplicating risk operations, fragmenting the customer experience, or missing the cross-payment signals that drive fraud and unnecessary declines. Banks need card programs and real-time payments running through one set of controls. Merchants need acceptance platforms that can adapt to new payment methods and shifting interchange structures without a full rebuild every time the market moves.

Cards are not going away. They are evolving into smarter, more portable credentials that live across wallets, devices, and embedded commerce experiences. At the same time, real-time account-to-account payments are becoming core infrastructure, not experiments. The institutions that succeed will be the ones that stop treating these as competing systems and start running them as one connected operation.

That is an architectural decision, not a philosophical one. It requires centralized decisioning, shared controls across all payment types, and the ability to see and act across the full payment landscape in real time. Without that shift, institutions will continue to absorb avoidable fraud losses, duplicated operational cost, and customer friction that erodes trust.

I have spent more than 20 years in payments technology, and the pace of change right now is unlike anything I have seen. The path forward is clear. It starts with simplifying how payments are managed and building infrastructure that can support that simplicity at scale.

^¹ The Nilson Report: Transactions by Payment Cards to Top 1.1 Trillion Annually by 2029

^² The Clearing House, RTP Network 2024 Annual Data

^³ ACI Worldwide, Prime Time for Real-Time Global Payments Report