Lending has always lived in the space between risk and speed. You price the risk, you verify the borrower, and then—too often—you wait. Funds crawl through bank cutoffs, weekends, and holidays while your customer refreshes their inbox and competitors whisper easier promises. Real-time payments (RTP) changes that equation, not as a buzzword but as a concrete operational advantage: money arrives in the borrower’s account in seconds, 24/7/365, with no cutoff windows and immediate confirmation of success.
This is the story of how RTP is transforming lending in practice—consumer lending, small business lending, and merchant cash advance (MCA). And it’s why Liftoff has become the preferred platform for lenders who want instant funding without rebuilding their entire payments stack.
What “instant” actually means (and why it matters)
RTP is not “same-day ACH” or “faster batch processing.” It’s a separate rail designed for immediate, irrevocable credits. When your underwriting engine says “approved,” your funding flow can push money right then—nights, weekends, and federal holidays included. No more planning around 5 p.m. Eastern or “we’ll release funds Monday.”
For borrowers, speed is product quality. For lenders, speed converts more approved applications, reduces abandoned offers, and turns marketing spend into booked principal. In MCA and SMB lending, instant funding can be the difference between winning a customer at 10:37 p.m. on Saturday—or losing them until the next quarter.
Operational benefits beyond the headline
1) Higher conversion, lower drop-off.
Every hour between approval and funding is a leak. Instant disbursement keeps momentum: the borrower signs, you send, they see funds. That continuity improves funded-offer rate and shrinks your sales cycle.
2) Clear finality and fewer support tickets.
RTP confirmations are immediate. Your customer success team stops answering variants of “Did it go through?” and “When will the bank post this?” Your workflow moves from “pending” to “done.”
3) Weekend and holiday edge.
Most lenders still operate like banks: cutoffs, closures, and “resumes Monday.” RTP makes you the lender who doesn’t stop. That becomes a positioning statement in your ads and landing pages, not just an ops detail.
4) Better cash-flow modeling.
When funds hit instantly, downstream triggers (e.g., onboarding emails, card issuance, purchase flows) can also fire instantly. Your revenue events begin sooner—and more predictably.
Where ACH still shines—and how to combine it with RTP
ACH remains the cost-efficient backbone for repayments and scheduled draws. It’s inexpensive, scales beautifully, and supports robust retries and return management. The best lending setup pairs ACH for collections and RTP for funding:
· Fund on RTP (speed where it matters),
· Collect on ACH (low cost at scale),
· Reconcile both in one ledger so finance isn’t managing two tools.
That’s the design pattern Liftoff ships out of the box.
Real use cases
Consumer lending: Approvals at 11 p.m.? Fund instantly. Tie marketing to real availability: “Get approved and funded, even on holidays.”
SMB lending & MCA: Replace “wire by 3 p.m.” with 24/7/365 push funding. Issue multiple tranches the same day as documents clear. Win weekend deals your competitors defer.
Insurance & specialty finance: Claims and advances paid right away reduce inbound tickets and improve CSAT, which feeds back into cheaper acquisition.
Risk and compliance without the drama
Instant rails don’t mean cut corners. You still need:
· KYC/KYB on borrowers/merchants,
· OFAC screening,
· Consistent device, identity, and bank-account verification (especially for accounts used for repayment),
· Clear loan/MCA agreements and audit trails.
Liftoff layers these controls into your flow. You can require bank verification on the account receiving funds, lock in tokens (not raw numbers), and keep a full event timeline—who initiated the push, when it landed, and the confirmation data from the network.
What the integration looks like with Liftoff
You shouldn’t have to rebuild payments to get RTP. With Liftoff:
· One API / one dashboard for both RTP and ACH.
· No cutoff times—fund at 2 a.m. Sunday the same as 2 p.m. Wednesday.
· Unified reconciliation—your finance team sees a single source of truth.
· Role-based controls—ops can fund, finance can export, risk can review.
· Webhooks & events—trigger onboarding, card issuance, or “funds received” moments the instant RTP confirms.
Prefer to start without engineering time? Your team can fund right from the dashboard, then automate later.
Economics: where speed pays for itself
RTP will cost more per transaction than ACH—but you don’t need RTP everywhere. Use it where it drives revenue or cuts material cost:
· Higher funded-offer rate → more principal booked from the same marketing spend.
· Lower support burden → fewer “where are my funds?” tickets.
· Faster activation → more interchange or fee-based activity starts sooner.
· Competitive separation → weekend and holiday funding wins deals you used to lose.
When you quantify those deltas, RTP often comes out net-positive even before you count the brand halo.
Implementation playbook (what top lenders do)
1. Segment by urgency. Default to RTP for approved offers and time-sensitive disbursements, reserve ACH credits for non-urgent payouts.
2. Lock in bank verification. Tie the receiving account to your KYC/KYB and tokenize it.
3. Automate the handoff. Decision engine → “approved” → RTP push → webhook confirms → onboarding triggers.
4. Measure lift. Track funded-offer rate, TAT (time-to-fund), weekend funding volume, support ticket reduction, and first-payment success.
5. Pair with ACH collections. Use smart retries and return handling; keep cash costs down where speed isn’t the product.
Why lenders choose Liftoff for RTP + ACH
· True 24/7/365 availability with no bank cutoff schedule.
· ACH + RTP together—fund instantly, collect economically.
· Bank-grade controls (KYC/KYB, OFAC, audit trails, tokenization).
· Operator-friendly dashboard and reports your finance team will actually use.
· Developer-friendly API that drops into existing underwriting and servicing stacks.
When money moves instantly, your product stops making promises and starts delivering. That’s the lift in Liftoff—a single platform that gives you instant funding when speed wins, and low-cost ACH when scale matters.