Mastercard and The Clearing House (TCH) have announced an extended multi-year partnership, bringing the companies together to collaborate on real-time payment (RTP) capabilities for consumers, businesses and governments on the RTP network.
The partnership continues Mastercard’s role as the exclusive instant payment software provider for TCH’s RTP network, enabling both companies to integrate new instant payment use cases across a range of payment flows.
“Technology is providing consumers and businesses greater choice in how they want to pay and be paid,” Linda Kirkpatrick, president of Americas at Mastercard, said in a release. “Our long-term partnership with The Clearing House supports choice in payments through the enablement of modern and ubiquitous real-time rails for bank-owned payments. We're pleased to extend and enhance our support of The Clearing House and its owner banks to deliver on our mutual goals to provide safety, reliability, and efficiency of real-time payments."
Instant payments became a reality in the U.S. in 2017 when The Clearing House launched the RTP network, the first new payment rail in 40 years designed and powered by Mastercard.
For consumers, RTP provides instant access and confidence that a payment is received. For businesses, RTP enhances value by simplifying payments for customers, enabling faster wage disbursements, improving liquidity management, and optimizing capital workflows, and for governments, it helps activate local economies through disbursement and settlement.
Today, RTPs offer speed of payment, extensive data exchange, real-time messaging, and 24/7/365 availability. Mastercard and The Clearing House continue to support, invest, and develop real-time account-to-account technologies that enable the transmission of rich payment and non-payment data both in the U.S. for the RTP network and around the world.
“The Clearing House and Mastercard designed and delivered the RTP network, the premier instant payment platform in the United States, and have a strong history of working together to deliver innovative, scalable, and secure products,” said Lee Alexander, chief information officer at TCH. “The expanded partnership will help both companies design the next generation of instant payment capabilities for financial institutions and their customers.”
TCH’s RTP network’s faster payment capabilities are available to financial institutions that hold close to 90 percent of U.S. demand deposit accounts. Financial institutions can integrate into the RTP network directly, through third-party service providers, banks and corporate credit unions.