Instant payments supplied 94% of India's cashless growth since 2019
Where instant systems scaled, they carry the new payment habits. In card economies, cards still do.
Increase in instant payments, 2019 to 2024, as a share of the increase in all cashless transactions. BIS CPMI cashless statistics; UK and US instant counts from BIS payment systems statistics. Economies whose cashless total grew by less than 10% are excluded.
Evidence grade: A
Between 2019 and 2024 India added 176 billion cashless transactions a year, and instant payments supplied 165 billion of them, or 94%. The share was 70% in Argentina and 61% in Brazil. Mexico, where the SPEI system carries both large and small transfers, reached 46%.
In the card-rich economies most of the same five years of growth came from cards. Instant payments supplied 18% of the rise in the United Kingdom, 21% in Australia, 3% in Germany and under 1% in the United States, where cashless transactions grew by 51 billion and RTP and FedNow together carried 0.3 billion in 2024.
Singapore is left out of the chart. Its cashless total grew by only 2% over the period while FAST added 407 million transactions, so a share of growth would overstate what happened.
Systems Over Signals