New Federal Reserve data reveals a gap between how fast payments are growing and how much value they’re actually moving, and that gap is quietly driving up operational costs for finance teams.
A finance team can process payments faster than ever and still feel like they’re falling behind. That’s the uncomfortable reality buried in the Federal Reserve’s 2025 Payments Study, published July 1.
The study found that noncash payments in the U.S. reached 236.6 billion in 2024, up nearly 32 billion since 2021. That’s the largest three-year increase the Fed has recorded since it began tracking noncash payment volume in 2000. On the surface, that looks like proof that digital payments have won. Businesses have moved past paper. The modernization story is finished.
But the value moving through those payments tells a different story. Total noncash payment value reached $140.01 trillion, with annual growth slowing to 2.6%, down sharply from the 10.4% annual pace recorded between 2018 and 2021. Payment volume is climbing. Payment value is not climbing nearly as fast.
Put plainly, finance teams are processing more payments to move roughly the same amount of money.
That gap is the cost-per-event problem. Every payment, regardless of size, still requires reconciliation, exception handling, remittance matching and fraud screening. When the number of payments grows faster than their total value, the operational cost of the payments function grows too, even when nothing about the dollar volume suggests it should.
Why the instinct to switch rails misses the point
When finance leaders feel this kind of strain, the usual response is to look at the rail. Maybe ACH is too slow for certain payments. Maybe cards cost too much in fees. Maybe it’s time to add a faster payments option and see if that eases the load.
That instinct is understandable, and it’s also aimed at the wrong layer of the problem. The Fed’s data shows real specialization across payment types. Cards accounted for 79% of noncash payments by number in 2024 but only 8% of total value. ACH represented 74% of noncash value. Each rail is doing a distinct job, and neither is broken.
What’s breaking is what happens after the payment clears. A card transaction that authorizes instantly still generates a settlement record that has to be matched to an invoice. An ACH payment that lands on time still shows up with incomplete or inconsistent remittance data that someone has to chase down. The rail did its job. The reconciliation didn’t happen on its own.
This is the part of the cost-per-event problem that rail selection can’t fix. More noncash payments means more of these matching, chasing and correcting tasks, regardless of which rail carried the transaction. A finance team can be running entirely on modern, electronic rails and still be buried, because the bottleneck was never the transfer of funds. It’s the work required to turn that transfer into clean, usable financial data.
“CFOs have spent the last several years being told that faster payments solve their problems. The Fed’s data confirms what we’re hearing directly from finance leaders: the payment clearing quickly was never the hard part. The hard part is everything that has to happen afterward to turn that payment into accurate, usable financial data. That’s where finance teams need a partner, not just a processor.“
Brad Bialas
Chief Commercial Officer, Fortis
What CFOs should actually be measuring
The easiest gains in payments modernization have already been captured. What’s left is harder, and it isn’t about picking better rails. It’s about reducing the manual work required to reconcile, match and normalize what each payment generates after it clears.
That reframes what CFOs should look for in a payments partner. The right question isn’t which rail is fastest or cheapest. It’s whether a payments partner automatically normalizes remittance data, reduces the manual matching burden and gives finance teams clean records without requiring a person to reconcile the gap by hand.
The Fed’s data confirms a trend finance leaders already feel every day. Payments have gotten faster. They haven’t gotten simpler. Closing that gap, not just moving money quickly, is the real measure of a modern payments operation.
If your finance team is feeling the weight of more payments activity without more resources to manage it, that’s not a sign you’re behind. It’s a sign the old measures of payments performance no longer capture what’s actually happening. Fortis helps businesses build payments operations that scale with volume instead of against it.
Ready to see what your payments operation could look like with less manual overhead?
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