ACI Worldwide — GLOBAL PAYMENT TRENDS — Charting the growth of 'immediate payments'

Economic Benefits of Real-Time Payments Remain Largely Untapped

Japan’s Zengin is the oldest real-time payments infrastructure in the world, having been launched in 1973.

Japan recorded 1.7 billion real-time transactions in 2021, which resulted in an estimated cost savings of $3.3 billion for businesses and consumers. This in turn – which helped to unlock $4.3 billion of economic output, representing 0.09% of the country’s GDP.

With real-time transactions set to rise to 1.8 billion in 2026, – net savings for businesses and consumers are forecasted to reach $3.2 billion in 2026, . That would helping to generate an additional $4.2 billion of economic output, equivalent to 0.08% of the country’s forecasted GDP.

That means for the 3rd third largest global economy, the economic benefits of real-time payments remain largely untapped. According to the Cebr, the theoretical impact of all payments being real-time could add 1.9% to formal GDP by 2026. However, these are theoretically modelled modeled benefits, ; they do this does not suggest that there is no longer place for non-instant electronic payments or paper-based payments in the future.

Japan is an interesting case, as despite being the oldest real-time payments scheme, it still has not overtaken other payment tools in total payments volume. In terms of payments volume, Japanese consumers still favourfavor paper-based payments, which held a 68.9% share of total payments volume in 2021. By 2026, paper-based payments will see its payments volume market share decrease to 59.8%, but this decrease will benefit electronic payments (excluding real-time payments) while real-time payments will remain the same as it was in 2021, at 3%. But in terms of total payments spend, real-time payments (which all bank transfers are in Japan) is the dominant payments tool at an 89.6% share of total payments spend; this is predicted to slightly increase to 90.8% by 2026. Only financial institutions are allowed to provide real-time payments, which prevents fintech companies from joining the system. As a result, the real-time payments system may lack in terms of innovative development, in turn holding back the potential of the system to grow and reach more consumers and fulfil more use cases.

Key Stats

Real-Time Payment Types

Single Instance

Initiation/Authorization Methods

Bank Account

Year of Real-Time
Payments Launch

1973

Availability

365

24/7

Message Standard

ISO
20022

ACI’s Take

One way to describe the progress of real-time payments modernization in Japan is “on hold.” At a national level, Japan has had real-time payments in place for more than 20 years, but only for high-value payments. Because the country’s strong cultural attachment to cash persists, banks and institutions see no business case for low-value payments, and the large existing domestic market for high-value transactions provides little incentive to modernize. So, while the legacy infrastructure that’s in place is not ISO 20022-compliant, the market has not seen any real need for such compliance — until, that is, SWIFT mandated its adoption by November 2022.

Japan will surely only be able to resist the trend for wider real-time payments availability for so long, however. Perhaps in recognition of this, the Payment Clearing Network, which operates the Zengin clearing system, has established a number of task forces on real-time settlement. As is happening in China, the initial catalyst will be growing corporate demand for enhanced cross-border interoperability that would bring costs down. Again, as in China, this will necessitate leveraging more advanced payment architectures based on cloud best practices, which could in theory also be applied to low-value payments, triggering new use cases and boosting volumes significantly. Indeed, to make these modernizations pay in the long run, these innovations may be essential.

Banks, acquirers, merchants and PSPs would therefore be rewarded for accelerating modernizations in pursuit of enhanced abilities to bring to market added-value real-time payment use cases. To do so, they will need technology partners with proven experience in real-time payments around the world, and with the cross-border experience to connect Japanese payments infrastructure to regional neighboring systems such as PayNet (Malaysia) and BI-Fast (Indonesia).

History

April 1973

The Zengin System was launched.

February 1979

Upgraded to second-generation Zengin System.

April 1982

Foreign banks operating in Japan were permitted to participate in the Zengin System.

November 1987

Third-generation system upgrade.

November 1995

Fourth-generation system upgrade.

November 2003

Fifth generation system upgrade.

October 2010

System operations were transferred to ZenginNet.

November 2011

Sixth-generation system upgrade.

October 2018

24/7 support was added to the system.

November 2019

Seventh-generation system upgrade.

January 2021

The Japanese Bankers Association announced Zengin will be available for fintech companies by the end of 2022.

October 2021

The interbank fund transfer fee between banks was reduced by more than half to JPY62 ($0.60) per transaction.

Mobile Wallet Trends

40.6%

% of adults who have a mobile wallet and have
used it in the past year (2021)

Acceptance

Banks

Merchants

Consumers

Total Participants

1,160

Population Banking Level

6.2

Number of debit, credit and
charge cards per adult

275

Index to global average

Fully Banked
Progressing
Underbanked

Real-Time Transactions

1.7B

2021

1.8B

2026f

1.2%

F5 Yr CAGR

Payments Fraud Rate

2.9%

Population who reported being a
victim of fraud in the last 4 years

Top 3 Payment Fraud Types

% of fraud victims	Trend
27.6% Card details stolen online
13.8% Confidence trick
13.8% My card was lost or stolen

Share of Volumes by Payments Instrument

Transactions

Paper-based payments
Electronic payments
Real-time payments

2021

2026

Spend (USD)

2021

2026

Real-Time Payments Volume and Its Share in Overall Non-Paper-Based Transactions, 2015-26f

% of total electronic payments transaction volume

Trends + Data

Cloud Management Platform

54.1%

73.0%

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

73.0%

83.8%

Hybrid Cloud

62.2%

56.8%

Managed Cloud Service

56.8%

54.1%

Current priority
Planned

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Private Cloud

Software as a Service (SaaS)

Cebr

Japan is a high-income country and the world’s third largest economy in 2021 (Cebr World Economic League Table, 2022).

Japan is one of the few advanced economies that remains predominantly cash-based (68.9% of all transactions), with just 3.0% of all transactions in 2021 made through real-time instruments. However, despite its low share of instant payments, Japan still stands to benefit greatly in economic terms from real-time technology.

In 2021, the total benefit to consumers and businesses was estimated to be $3.3 billion, the fourth largest share from Cebr’s 30-country economic impact assessment. This is primarily a result of the payments float mechanism: Japan’s payments mix has a high paper-based share combined with high-value, real-time transactions meaning that real-time payments unlock a total transaction value of $108.6 billion per day through the reduced float. The resulting working capital facilitates an estimated $3.1 billion of business output in the same year.

In 2021, Japan realized total macroeconomic benefits worth $4.3 billion or 0.09% of GDP, equivalent to the output of 56,538 workers.

The share of real-time payments is forecasted to remain at 3% to 2026. As a result, the economic impacts at the consumer and business level and the economy-wide level are predicted to remain broadly constant in real terms. In 2026, the benefit for consumers and businesses is forecast to be $3.2 billion, facilitating $4.2 billion of the total national output (0.08% of formal GDP); equivalent to the output of 52,195 workers.