Three years after its launch, Hong Kong’s Faster Payment System (FPS) has reached nearly 750,000 daily transactions with a total volume of 5.2 billion Hong Kong dollars ($667.9 million), according to a report from the South China Morning Post.
During a discussion at the 2021 Hong Kong FinTech Week conference, Financial Secretary Paul Chan Mo-po said the FPS for real-time fund transfers and retail payments grew more than two-fold from its $2.4 billion total transaction volume in the beginning of 2020.
Hong Kong is one of many countries making headway with FPS, which enable funds to be delivered instantly 24 hours a day, seven days a week, according to PYMNTS.
In 2019, the Russian Federation embarked on its FPS launch. The country’s FPS is geared to enabling users to make immediate person-to-person (P2P) transfers between two parties who have accounts at different banks. Transactions are made using personally identifiable information such as mobile phone numbers. The effort was piloted with a collaborative approach from a dozen Russian banks and payment service providers.
Read more: Russia Joins The Faster Payments Revolution
Prior to Russia and Hong Kong embarking on a FPS, the U.K., the U.S., India and Australia had already undertaken the effort, according to PYMNTS.
The U.K. became among the first to offer a nationwide faster payment system, with the debut of its Faster Payments Service in 2008.
According to a 2018 PYMNTS report, the service enables 24/7 payments, is available to 52 million checking account holders in the U.K. and has participation from 17 banks and credit unions. Within the first 10 years of its launch, the FPS was used to send more than 6 billion transactions, including almost all U.K. internet and phone-based banking payments.
In the U.S., payment speeds have been stepped up drastically stemming from the same-day automated clearing house (ACH) launch in September 2016. Same-day ACH debits debuted in September 2017. In the last phase, which began in March 2018, same-day ACH funds were available to payees on the same day that payments were sent.
See also: Deep Dive: The Rapid Rise Of Global Faster Payment Systems
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