One of the paradoxes in the growth of real-time payments around the world is that the greatest adoption has not occurred in the most prosperous countries. Rather, it has happened in the countries with high levels of unbanked and underbanked consumers.
That trend is expected continue over the next decade. According to a new report from ACI, Real-Time Payments: Economic Impact and Financial Inclusion, the economy with the most potential to benefit from adopting real-time payments over the next few years belongs to Pakistan, whose Raast real-time payment method went live in 2021.
Pakistan is expected to offer banks a profit potential of $173 billion by 2028. That estimate is based on the estimated value of financial inclusion—new accountholders resulting from the growth of real-time rails.
That’s not a huge surprise, as the Asia Pacific region has become the world’s largest real-time payments market. Nearly a quarter of all transactions in the region are made in real time. Thanks to its United Payment Interface (UPI) offering, India remains the world’s largest real-time player, having handled 129 billion transactions in 2023.
The region also has four of the global top five real-time payment markets by volume. Following India in first place, Thailand, South Korea, and China are third, fourth, and fifth among nations with the most real-time payments (Brazil ranks second). Overall, Asia Pacific processed 185.8 billion real-time payments in 2023.
New Connections
Further fueling the growth in the region, India’s UPI is set to connect with four other Asian central banks to establish an instant cross-border retail payments platform by 2026. Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, and the Philippines will be the other founding members of the platform.
Indonesia will serve as a special observer with expectations of joining later. The ACI report says that real-time payments are expected to contribute $3.6 billion of additional GDP to the Indonesian economy by 2028. A cross-border payment system launched in October 2023 facilitated payments for goods and services among residents of Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
Pakistan has not been a part of these alliances as yet, but that may change as its payments system grows. According to the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP), Raast has handled 892 million transactions totaling 20 trillion rupees in its existence, and that figure is accelerating. SBP noted that Raast handled a trillion rupees over the course of 336 days two years ago, but the most recent trillion in rupees was processed in just 16 days.
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