The BIS just blueprinted a tokenized unified ledger and JPMorgan put a deposit token on a public chain - in the same week. The hard part for banks was never the blockchain. It is retrofitting core banking to carry programmable money without a big-bang migration.
Talented technical leaders derail their teams without realizing it. The warning signs are quiet - the team stops bringing bad news, the best people stop pushing back, and the resumes get updated before anyone says a word.
Fiserv, Bottomline, and a core banking system each work fine alone. Wiring them into one payment chain is where projects go to die - and the difference between the ones that survive and the ones that become expensive lessons is a handful of boring resilience patterns.
RTP cleared $246 billion in 2024 and the headlines said instant payments had arrived. The average transaction sizes tell a quieter story - this is high-value institutional money on a faster rail, not the consumer revolution that was promised.
Fraud-prevention AI demos dazzle, then meet reality - the bank's wire, ACH, card, and instant-rail data live in separate systems. A model that cannot see the whole customer cannot catch a fraudster who moves across all of them.
An $8M deal chopped into 16 payments because one bank used FedNow. With TCH-RTP at a $10M limit and FedNow at $500K, transaction size is quietly deciding which rail a corporate treasurer can use.