I spent the last week doing something that sounds incredibly boring but might be the most consequential work I do this quarter: mapping payment rails. My Q1 partner bank newsletters are full of FedNow updates, Plaid A2A pilots, and new crypto on-ramps. The ground is shifting under every neobank builder, and if you're not paying attention to the plumbing, you're building on top of something you don't understand.
Choosing your payment rails isn't a feature decision. It's a foundation decision. Get it wrong and you're stuck with the wrong unit economics, the wrong settlement model, and the wrong partner dependencies for years. I started exploring this in What Visa Taught Me About Dental Banking. Dee Hock's genius was creating one standardized network. What we're moving toward now is a multi-rail world, less superhighway and more national park system with multiple routes to the same destination.
The two main roads: FedNow and RTP. For years, The Clearing House's RTP network was the only real-time option. Now the Fed's own service is live and growing fast.
| Feature | FedNow Service | RTP (The Clearing House) | |---|---|---| | Operator | Federal Reserve (Public) | The Clearing House (Private) | | Launch | July 2023 | 2017 | | Txn. Limit | $100k (up to $500k) | $1M | | Settlement | Direct in Fed master accounts | Pre-funded joint account at Fed |
Source: Cross River comparisons and industry analysis.
The builder-relevant difference is the settlement model. RTP requires member banks to pre-fund a joint account, which guarantees liquidity but creates a barrier for smaller institutions. FedNow settles directly in a bank's own Fed account, which is why over 1,400 institutions have adopted it in just over a year.
Then there's Account-to-Account (A2A) payments riding on top of both rails, often initiated through providers like Plaid. The US real-time payments market is projected at 39% CAGR through 2030, and the cost difference explains why. A FedNow transaction runs about 4-5 cents. A typical credit card transaction costs 2-3.5% of the total. For a dental practice processing hundreds of thousands a year, that gap is thousands of dollars straight to the bottom line.
The strategic question I keep circling: the two networks don't talk to each other. To send a payment from anyone to anyone, you probably need both. That adds complexity. But A2A is the UX play, letting a practice pay a supplier or a patient pay for a crown directly from their bank account with no card numbers and no interchange fees. That's a killer feature for a vertical neobank.
While Dentplicity helps practices understand their current cash flow, this plumbing work sets CLIN up to change how that cash actually moves. If you're building a bank, you have to be obsessed with how money moves. The plumbing is everything.
Data sources: Cross River Bank Q1 2025 Newsletters, FedNow.org, TheClearingHouse.org, Mordor Intelligence, CUInsight.