Dave Glaser is NMI‘s COO. He has over 20 years of experience driving industry innovations and successful payment operations strategies.
The payments industry has landed on one pitch: speed. Real-time rails are everywhere now, and sales conversations increasingly focus on which provider can move and settle money fastest. But that pitch skips over what a business needs once a payment doesn’t land as planned.
Access to faster rails was once a meaningful competitive advantage, and speed still matters when money needs to move instantly. What has changed is that many providers can now offer it. As fast payment capabilities become more widely available, speed alone becomes less effective as a differentiator. The 2025 Federal Reserve Payments Study found U.S. noncash payments numbered 236.6 billion in 2024, up 31.9 billion from 2021, the largest three-year jump since the Fed started tracking volume in 2000. Total payment value grew just 2.6% annually over that period, down from 10.4% between 2018 and 2021. Finance teams are processing more payments for the same dollar value, and every one of those payments needs to be matched, reconciled and explained if it fails.
What Actually Breaks
A payout that doesn’t go through on a Friday afternoon before a real estate closing is a visibility problem. The team can’t see where the money sits or tell the client when it will land. They also can’t tell whether the same problem will resurface next week. In this case, a faster rail can flag a failed payment quickly and allow an immediate retry, but it doesn’t explain why the failure happened or prevent it from repeating.
Transactions can break for a variety of reasons. Account information gets entered wrong at setup, and it goes unnoticed until the payout bounces; fraud slips through when a bad actor gets to the funds before a business does; a network timeout can leave a payment stuck mid-transfer; or returns pile up when a receiving bank flags an account as closed or invalid. Each example illustrates a stalled payment sitting in a queue and requires teams to find out what went wrong in order to correct it and try again. This determines what a business does next.
Nacha requires originators to keep unauthorized ACH returns under 0.5% and total returns under 15%. Those thresholds exist because return handling carries a cost that impacts staff hours, client trust and a company’s standing with Nacha, which can determine whether Nacha allows them to continue operating on ACH rails at all. The Fed’s “2026 Risk Officer Report” found fraud continued to climb across the board last year, with 63% of financial institutions reporting check fraud attempts, account takeover for wire fraud increasing 14% and business email compromise rising 20%. The cost of resolving each case scales alongside the growing volume of incidents.
The Cost A Fee Schedule Doesn’t Show
That expense rarely shows up in a vendor’s pricing page, but it’s the number that ends up on a CFO’s desk. LexisNexis Risk Solutions puts the total recovery cost for U.S. financial services firms at $5.75 for every dollar lost to fraud in 2025, up from $4.00 in 2021, once investigation and operational expenses are counted.
There’s an opportunity cost as well. A finance team can’t deploy or report on money sitting in a holding account while its landing status is unconfirmed. If payouts get marked complete before they settle, the resulting cash position carries that error into every forecast that follows. Speed gets a payment moving, and knowing what happens when something goes wrong mid-transaction is just as important.
Building Payment Operations That Scale
Businesses that handle payment growth well share a set of practices, starting with standardizing how payments are initiated and reconciled across every business unit. A claims payout in one division and a vendor disbursement in another get handled through an identical process, using the same exception rules and matching logic instead of each team building its own workaround over time. That consistency keeps a finance function from having to relearn its own payment stack every time a new business unit launches.
That standardization only pays off if the reporting behind it holds up. A CFO reviewing cash position needs numbers that reflect what has cleared, not just what a system marked as sent. Reporting built for that purpose turns a payment failure into a line item a finance team can act on rather than a surprise that surfaces during a close.
The volume math changes the calculation, too. A company processing a few dozen payouts a month can absorb a manual reconciliation process. The same process at 10 to 100 times that volume becomes a full-time job for one employee, eventually turning into a team. Planning for this early means building standardized handling before volume forces the issue.
A business also needs a support team that can quickly and accurately answer a client’s question about a stuck payment. When a vendor asks where a payout went, the answer should come from the same information the finance team sees internally rather than a promise to check and call back. Over time, that disconnect wears down a client’s trust.
Speed still counts in each of these instances, and businesses expect it from any rail they use. The real test now comes after a payment stops behaving as planned. Providers will be judged by this standard as transaction volume continues to increase.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?