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Education

on the card within seconds, they may not be truly a
real time payment, as the funds will not always be
available for immediate withdrawal. This does not
diminish their value as an alternative, but they should
be differentiated from instantaneous funding.

Mastercard touts the use of its service for gig workers,
humanitarian aid, merchant settlement and insurance
claims. Visa provided the diagram accompanying
this article to illustrate the process, (see https://
vi.sa/3O4pVDp).

Like with The Clearing House's RTP, the sender bears
the cost for sending the funds. Because of the additional
players, it will be more expensive than RTP. Push to
debit has an interchange cost in addition to network
fees and processor fees. Because of the ubiquity of
debit cards, however, it will be very useful in paying
gig workers and can be used in the context where a
platform wishes to rapidly scale to new geographies.
Moreover, it remains much faster than ACH and has
greater coverage than RTP. Additionally, unlike with
Zelle and RTP, there is a mechanism for reversing
erroneous transactions.

RTP’s international capabilities will spur growth. Its
lower costs will further availability and drive adoption.
RTP is a great solution when the sender can dictate the
accounts to which it will fund in order to ensure the
recipient’s bank accepts RTP. Entities needing to pro-
vide immediate payments to a diverse group, however,
will default to a push to debit solution and absorb the
greater costs as a trade off for its ubiquity.

As founder of Humboldt Merchant Services, co-founder of Eureka
Payments, and a former executive for such payments innovators as
WePay, a division of JPMorgan Chase, Ken Musante has experience
in all aspects of successful ISO building. He has also served as an
expert witness on numerous complex civil and criminal cases in pay-
ments, a service he provides, along with consulting on merchant ser-
vices and platforms, as founder of Napa Payments and Consulting,
www.napapaymentsandconsulting.com. Contact him at kenm@
napapaymentsandconsulting.com, 707-601-7656 or www.linke-
din.com/in/ken-musante-us/ .

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