Instant payments scale, back offices unready for 24/7 risk

Instant payment systems have grown quickly in the Middle East and South Asia. The UAE’s Aani reached 12.5 million users and connected 74 institutions with transfers that settle in about three seconds. Pakistan’s Raast has expanded its instant payment rail and supports high person-to-person volumes.

Instant account-to-account transfers complete immediately and do not include the reversal tools common on card networks. That removes the time and undo options that overnight batch systems once provided for operations teams to catch duplicates, investigate suspicious activity or reverse mistaken transfers.

The immediate and always-on nature of these rails shortens the window for intervention to milliseconds. Card networks offer chargebacks as a recovery tool; most instant account transfers do not. Where chargebacks exist for cards, authorised push-payment fraud on instant rails transfers losses into the customer or into whichever party bears final settlement.

Regulators and industry groups in several markets have been developing measures to address authorised push-payment fraud and the operational demands of real-time rails. Those measures include requirements for faster reporting, clearer dispute processes and enhanced merchant protections in some jurisdictions.

Banks and fintechs that connect to instant rails face operational changes. Reconciliation must run continuously instead of as a nightly batch task. Ledgers need to match the rail’s positions at any moment, and teams must be able to reconstruct the lifecycle of each transaction in real time. Settlement cycles can differ by transaction type; Raast delivers an instant customer experience for some transfers while person-to-merchant settlement can occur on a T+1 basis. Misreading those timings can produce overstated liquidity or hold merchant funds unexpectedly.

Fraud controls designed into products include risk-based onboarding, tiered transaction limits, real-time scoring with millisecond decisioning and targeted verification steps when transactions appear risky. Firms also need a defined dispute process for customers who have been defrauded. These controls require tooling and staff that operate round the clock because transactions and fraud attempts occur outside standard business hours.

Merchant uptake of instant rails has lagged person-to-person volumes in some markets. Pakistan introduced subsidies to encourage merchants to accept instant transfers. Merchants cite trust, habit, concerns over tax visibility and perceived friction as reasons to delay switching from cash or card acceptance.

Several institutions continue to rely on business-hours operating models while instant rails run continuously. Market participants and regulators in countries where instant payments have scaled are updating operational standards to address continuous reconciliation, 24/7 incident response and dispute handling.