Instant payments are reshaping the way money moves. As cash usage declines, consumers and businesses increasingly expect payments to be settled immediately, available 24/7, and delivered at little or no cost.
Earlier industry research highlighted the scale of this shift. Recent forecasts indicate that instant payments in Europe will grow from approximately 17 billion transactions in 2023 to nearly 39 billion by 2028, more than doubling over five years and reaching around 13 % of all electronic payments by volume, according to ACI Worldwide and the McKinsey Global Payments Report 2025.
This growth has been driven by ease of use, continuous availability, and rising consumer and merchant adoption, and reinforced by regulatory intervention, most notably the EU Instant Payments Regulation, which requires banks across the EU, as well as institutions in countries such as Switzerland participating in euro payment flows, to support both sending and receiving instant payments by October 2025.
As a result, instant payments are no longer an emerging capability. They are embedded in day-to-day banking operations and widely adopted across markets. While customers have embraced speed and convenience, banks face a far more complex reality.
No Time for Traditional Checks
The defining characteristic of instant payments is immediacy. Transactions are settled within seconds and are irrevocable once executed. This fundamentally changes the fraud risk profile.
Unlike traditional credit transfers, where delays between initiation and settlement allow time for checks and investigations, instant payments leave virtually no room for post-transaction controls. This has been consistently highlighted by regulators, who have warned that fraud rates by both value and volume are materially higher for instant payments than for traditional transfers.
Fraudsters exploit this speed to move funds quickly and irreversibly, making instant payments an attractive channel for abuse.
Scams at the Core of Instant Payment Fraud
Scams sit at the heart of most instant payment fraud cases. These attacks rely on deception rather than technical compromise, persuading customers to authorize transactions themselves. Authorized push payment fraud remains one of the most challenging threats for banks to detect in real time.
Scam scenarios continue to evolve and include impersonation of banks, executives, suppliers, or authorities. In more advanced cases, scams are combined with account takeover techniques, where malware lies dormant until a customer is manipulated into logging in. At that moment, control of the session can be hijacked and instant payments initiated that appear legitimate but are not.
For banks, this creates a difficult balance. Customers expect instant payments to be fast and frictionless. Regulators expect banks to prevent fraud and reimburse customers when controls fail. Traditional rule-based or batch-oriented approaches are no longer sufficient.
Real-Time Fraud Detection Is No Longer Optional
Customer education plays an important role in scam prevention, and many banks have invested heavily in awareness campaigns. However, education alone cannot address the structural risk created by real-time settlement.
Banks need the ability to assess risk as transactions occur, using behavioral context, transaction patterns, and adaptive models that operate within strict execution time constraints.
This is where real-time payment fraud prevention becomes critical.
How Real-Time Fraud Prevention Works in Practice
Vyntra’s Real-Time Payments Fraud solution enables banks to assess and respond to fraud risk in real time without compromising transaction speed or customer experience.
The solution allows banks to define dynamic risk thresholds based on their risk appetite, customer tolerance for friction, and current fraud exposure. Real-time dashboards provide visibility into fraud trends, hit rates, rejected payments, and transaction volumes, allowing teams to adjust controls as conditions change.
When fraud levels increase, controls can be tightened immediately. When friction becomes too high and fraud pressure is low, thresholds can be recalibrated. This flexibility is especially important during periods of heightened risk, such as geopolitical tension or large-scale scam campaigns.
Instant payments are monitored separately from other payment types, giving banks full visibility and control over performance and fraud metrics specific to real-time transactions. Dedicated models are applied to instant payments, while still benefiting from shared intelligence across the wider payment ecosystem.
Stronger Models Through Broader Transaction Intelligence
One of the challenges many banks face is limited instant payment volume, particularly in the early stages of adoption. By leveraging transaction data across all payment types, banks can build richer customer and risk profiles that strengthen fraud detection for instant payments as well.
Shared intelligence allows models to identify abnormal behavior more accurately, including signals associated with account takeover and coordinated scam activity. This reduces false positives while improving detection rates, helping banks protect customers without introducing unnecessary friction.
Participation in collaborative intelligence programs further enhances this approach by enabling secure and compliant data sharing across institutions, strengthening collective defenses against emerging fraud patterns.
Securing the Future of Real-Time Payments
Instant payments are now a core part of modern banking. Regulatory mandates are in place, customer adoption continues to grow, and fraud risks remain elevated.
To operate safely at scale, banks need fraud prevention capabilities designed specifically for real-time environments. Solutions must deliver decisions within milliseconds, adapt continuously to new threats, and provide clear visibility into risk and performance.
With the right real-time fraud controls in place, banks can support instant payments with confidence, reduce losses, maintain customer trust, and meet regulatory expectations without sacrificing speed or experience. Learn more about the capabilities required to support real-time payments fraud prevention.
