Digital Wallets Win the Instant Payments Habit Battle

Payments history shows a familiar pattern.

Innovations begin as features, become expectations and eventually harden into infrastructure.

Credit cards, ACH and online banking all followed this trajectory. Those former innovations can now feel almost quaint.

Instant payouts are now crossing this threshold. The shift has implications for businesses, platforms and financial institutions. It suggests that payments strategy is no longer primarily about cost optimization or back-end efficiency. It is about shaping user behavior, loyalty and trust.

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Beyond Speed: The Case for Instant Payout Adoption and Stickiness,” a collaboration with Ingo Payments, found that once consumers experience instant payouts, they rarely want to go back.

According to the report, 57% of recipients who receive an instant payment go on to make it their most-used payout method, up from 39% in 2020. That is not a marginal shift; it is a behavioral inflection point. In just a few years, instant payments have crossed the threshold from novelty to norm. They are no longer something users simply try.

They are something users adopt, then demand.

The Role of Habit Formation Across Financial Behavior

Consumers are not sampling instant payments. They are internalizing them.

Payments are repetitive behaviors. People interact with them frequently, often subconsciously. Once a particular payout method becomes the default, it shapes how users engage with a platform. They log in more often, cash out more frequently, and feel more in control of their finances.

Nowhere is this transformation more visible than in what the report called “transactional payroll.” For millions of Americans, such as gig workers, freelancers, contractors, marketplace sellers and others, payouts have replaced traditional paychecks. Income arrives irregularly, from multiple sources, and often in response to completed tasks rather than time worked.

In this context, immediacy isn’t a convenience. It’s liquidity.

The report revealed that instant payouts are stickiest where disbursements matter most. Among recipients for whom payouts represent core cash flow, nearly 7 in 10 one-time instant users become regulars. These workers rely on speed not to optimize spending, but to manage rent, groceries, gas and childcare.

Read the report: Beyond Speed: The Case for Instant Payout Adoption and Stickiness

At the same time, not all instant payment rails are equal. The report showed that digital wallets are the most effective at converting occasional users into regulars. Compared with bank account deposits, digital wallets are more successful at building habits to the tune of 58%.

On paper, an instant payout to a bank account and an instant payout to a digital wallet may both settle in seconds. In practice, they feel different.

Digital wallets offer immediacy plus usability. Money is not just received quickly; it is immediately visible, actionable and integrated into a broader financial ecosystem. Users can spend, transfer or store value without friction.

Instant bank deposits, by contrast, often land in environments that were not designed for real-time interaction. The money may arrive quickly, but it can still feel inert, locked behind batch processing, legacy interfaces or delayed availability for certain transactions.

The superior conversion performance of digital wallets highlights that instant payments are not just about how fast money arrives, but about what users can do next.

The most important takeaway from the report is not that instant payments are growing. It is that they are becoming instinctive.

When more than half of users who try instant payouts make them their primary method, the market has crossed a psychological threshold. This is no longer about early adopters or edge cases. It is about how people expect money to behave.

As with all instincts, once formed, they are difficult to unlearn.

At PYMNTS Intelligence, we work with businesses to uncover insights that fuel intelligent, data-driven discussions on changing customer expectations, a more connected economy and the strategic shifts necessary to achieve outcomes. With rigorous research methodologies and unwavering commitment to objective quality, we offer trusted data to grow your business. As our partner, you’ll have access to our diverse team of PhDs, researchers, data analysts, number crunchers, subject matter veterans and editorial experts.