Visa Teams With Alacriti as Instant Payment Use Grows

Payments firm Alacriti has launched an integration with Visa’s real-time money movement platform Visa Direct.

This new integration, announced last week, melds Visa Direct with Alacriti’s Orbipay Payments Hub to offer more complete coverage of faster payments.

“Visa Direct is an important piece of a modern real-time payments infrastructure because it gives financial institutions the ability to deliver faster payments in supported markets—even if they aren’t directly connected to an instant payment rail,” Mark Majeske, senior vice president for faster payments at Alacriti, said in a news release.

“By offering Visa Direct through our Orbipay Payments Hub, banks and credit unions can provide more choice, more speed, and maintain a single, unified view of every payment source across their ecosystem.”

The release adds that the integration will let North American financial institutions (FIs) provide card-based real-time payments for a wide range of uses, such as real-time account funding as well as real-time payouts and domestic transfers.

The integration lets FIs push funds directly to eligible Visa debit cards, bank accounts, or digital wallets in more 195 enabled countries and territories and 150-plus currencies. In addition, FIs can provide real-time payout capability for things like insurance claims, earned wage access, bill sharing and remittances.

This is happening at a time when instant payments have gone from a novelty to a “reflex,” as PYMNTS wrote Monday (Oct. 27).

“New data shows that what began as a convenience is becoming an expectation, with consumers not only embracing real-time disbursements but sticking with them long after their first experience,” that report said. “The real story is not just the speed of instant payments, but their permanence.”

Research from the PYMNTS Intelligence report “Beyond Speed: The Case for Instant Payout Adoption and Stickiness,” an Ingo Payments collaboration, shows that once consumers receive money instantly, they seldom look back.

This “stickiness ratio” for instant payouts (the number of consumers who make instant their most-used payout method) now stands at 57%, compared to 39% five years ago, meaning that close to 6 in 10 recipients who try instant payments once make them their default.

“That stickiness is not accidental. It’s being engineered by a convergence of technology and behavioral economics, like corporate senders offering virtual card accounts, digital wallets and incentives that reward recipients for keeping money in-network,” PYMNTS wrote. “Instant isn’t just speeding up payments; it’s creating new ecosystems of loyalty.”