Real-time payments have yet to become a true retail mainstay in the U.S., but trillions of dollars moved across the FedNow and RTP networks last year. Both networks recently increased their transaction limits to $10 million, dramatically expanding enterprise use cases.
The growing adoption of real-time payments will meaningfully reshape the B2B payments landscape. But it’s only one of several forces converging in what is shaping up to be a watershed year for commercial payments.
As Hugh Thomas, Lead Commercial and Enterprise Analyst at Javelin Strategy & Research, discussed in the 2026 Commercial & Enterprise Trends report, artificial intelligence-driven automation and the rise of more targeted, value-based pricing structures will also play defining roles in the next era of enterprise payments.
An Inflection Year for AI
Optimizing commercial payments flows—whether through automation or outsourcing—has long been a priority for finance leaders. Few technologies, however, offer the promise of AI.
Over the past few years, businesses across industries have invested heavily in AI capabilities. This year represents a critical litmus test: organizations are now expecting measurable returns on those investments.
Expectations have only intensified with the emergence of agentic AI, which has the potential to further accelerate automation.
“You’re looking at something now where so much of that work can be automated, where on initiation of a purchase you could begin to be provisioning an agent to go out and find goods or services that meet the criteria—find price points, look at all the tumblers that need to fall before you say, ‘I’m now ready to pull the trigger and make the payment here,’” Thomas said.
“The data has been around for a long time, the technology is just getting to the point where I think this year will be almost an inflection year in the payables space where you’ll begin to see some big case studies happening,” he said. “I’ve been interviewing people in the receivable space and they’re all talking about how well-suited AI is to managing customer interactions on their AR portals.”
In the past, accounts receivable processes required consistent human intervention—managing credit lines, reviewing invoices, reconciling payments, and handling exceptions. Generative and agentic AI now can substantially reduce time spent on these manual workflows.
That promise is compelling. However, implementing AI securely and responsibly requires strong governance, oversight, and iterative deployment. Progress will likely be incremental rather than instantaneous.
“I don’t know whether we’re going to see paradigm changes, but I think that this is going to be the year that there’s a more ubiquitous perceived need for AI in the payments mix,” Thomas said. “It’s still going to be a learning year, but there are going to be a lot of interesting case studies that happen. This is something where it moves from the theoretical to the practical and the applied.”
A New Real-Time Ballpark
Real-time payments are far more culturally entrenched in markets like India and Brazil than in the U.S., but domestic adoption is accelerating.
For years, RTP—operated by The Clearing House—was the only instant payments network in the U.S., which helped it grow from 60 billion real-time payments in Q2 2024 to around 481 billion in Q2 2025. FedNow, launched nearly three years ago by the Federal Reserve, has not displaced RTP; instead, both systems have expanded in parallel, with FedNow facilitating roughly 246 billion payments in Q2 2025.
“You’re in a different ballpark now, where you’ve got a higher average value and they’re seeing clear use cases where instant transfer of funds is required,” Thomas said. “The one that gets talked about a lot these days is housing down payments—moving from a wire or a cashier’s check to a real-time payment, where both parties can be sitting at their terminals and observe the money move from one account to the other.”
“It’s a great way to avoid a lot of steps versus handing a cashier’s check to a lawyer and having them affirm to the counterparty’s lawyer the funds are on their way,” he said.
Speed introduces new risk considerations, most notably fraud. In traditional payment systems, settlement delays provided time for fraud screening and dispute resolution. With real-time settlement, those buffers largely disappear.
While instant payments introduce unique risk management challenges, they also deliver powerful benefits.
“These observable instant funds movements are going to be where you’re going to see quick take-up,” Thomas said. “And they’ll drive the business case for investing in managing these new risk parameters. As real-time use cases become broadly known, the functionality will be expected of the smaller banks, and you’re seeing companies building out the functionality to offer this to the smaller providers at scale.”
Targeting Price-to-Value
As real-time rails gain momentum in B2B payments, card networks remain formidable competitors.
For years, leading credit card issuers have sought to replicate their consumer-market success in commercial payments. However, translating retail-based pricing models into the B2B environment has proven more complex than expected.
“There are a million different kinds of consumer, but not much differentiation in how they want to pay for things,” Thomas said. “People either want rewards or access to credit, or they want to be as cheap as possible—and they tend to know the best way to meet their own needs.”
“As a consumer, if you go to a grocery store today, try and pay for it with a check—it’s not The Big Lebowski days, you can either pay with card or cash,” he said. “However, if you’re a business you can pay with ACH, you can pay with real-time payments, you can pay with a check, you can do direct debit, or you can use a card. Rarely would you ever do cash, but some people do. You tend to have a lot more options than consumers, and many of them turn on whether you want to pay now or later, and what sort of discounts or later payment options are available.”
Commercial payments operate under different economics, workflows, and value expectations. As a result, issuers face well-established alternatives and deeply embedded processes within enterprise finance teams.
Still, cards offer significant advantages in B2B contexts. Organizations can authorize one amount and settle for another within defined parameters, and chargeback rights provide strong recourse protections. From both a control and risk-mitigation perspective, cards remain one of the safest payment methods available.
To gain broader traction in commercial payments, however, issuers will likely need to move beyond retail pricing frameworks and adopt models aligned specifically to B2B value creation.
“The pricing schedule for Visa and Mastercard used to be a six- or seven-page document for the United States and Canada,” Thomas said. “Now, it’s about a 30-page document, and most of the new pages are describing different types of B2B transactions—a page for different flavors of fleet payments, two pages for different flavors of virtual card payments, new tranches of card types and interchange schemes associated with them.”
“So, the networks are getting smarter about pricing, but the problem is they’re not seeing both sides of the transaction. They don’t know the full costs and benefits the counterparties are seeing by using the network, how much rebate the buyer may be getting, and how much it’s costing the supplier to accept cards,” he said. “These new pricing schemes are an attempt to balance the economics of the transaction without actually controlling the final costs; they’re designed to encourage maximum and sustained network use. Given the priority the card networks have been putting on B2B growth, one has to assume they’ll continue to tweak their pricing further to capture specific spend types where they can price to the value their solutions deliver.”
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