In March 2025 Stripe published its 2024 update reporting $1.4 trillion in total payment volume for 2024, up 38 per cent year on year, equivalent to roughly 1.3 per cent of global GDP. A few weeks earlier, Nacha had reported that the US ACH Network processed 33.6 billion payments worth $86.2 trillion in 2024, in a January 2025 announcement. Read together, the numbers describe a US payments stack that handles the spending of more than 300 million people on top of an industrial settlement system, with private fintech firms increasingly riding the same rails as commercial banks. The line between bank and non-bank is blurrier in 2025 than at any earlier point, partly by design and partly because the regulatory perimeter has expanded to cover firms it once ignored.
The Rails That Carry the Volume
Five rails carry essentially all US payment volume. The ACH Network moved 33.6 billion payments worth $86.2 trillion in 2024, with Same Day ACH alone topping 1.2 billion payments worth $3.2 trillion. Wire transfers settle the largest commercial flows, mainly through Fedwire and CHIPS. The Federal Reserve completed the Fedwire migration to ISO 20022 on July 14, 2025 after pushing the original March 2025 date, opening the way to richer structured data on every dollar wire. Card networks dominated by Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover handle the high-frequency consumer business. The instant-payment rails, FedNow and the Clearing House’s RTP, are still small compared to ACH or cards but are growing fastest in percentage terms. Cash and paper checks account for what remains.
FedNow itself moved from a 35-institution launch in July 2023 to roughly 1,500 connected financial institutions by mid-2025, according to the Federal Reserve’s Q3 2025 participant list. The growth is meaningful because once an institution is connected, FedNow becomes an option for every payments product it offers downstream. Banks that connected in 2023 and 2024 spent 2025 working out how to put the rail in front of customers, not whether to use it. Several US payroll, claims-payout, and gig-economy companies have publicly disclosed FedNow integrations through 2025, treating instant settlement as a default rather than a premium feature.
Where the Margin Is Moving
The margin story in 2024 and 2025 was not in any one rail but in the routing layer that connects them. Stripe’s $1.4 trillion of payment volume sits on top of card networks, ACH, real-time rails, and increasingly stablecoins. Adyen, Block, Toast, Galileo, Marqeta, and similar firms each operate their own slice of the same architecture. The routing layer earns per-transaction economics rather than percentage interchange, and the volumes have scaled enough that the per-transaction model now produces large absolute revenue numbers. The orchestration market is also more crowded than it was in 2022, with payment operations as a distinct software category attracting venture capital in late 2024 and 2025, with Modern Treasury, Increase, Orum, and similar firms competing alongside the scaled platforms.
Tokenisation and Fraud
Tokenisation is the largest single change in card-acceptance security in 2024 and 2025. Visa announced that it had issued 13.7 billion network tokens cumulatively, with roughly 50 per cent of its global e-commerce transactions tokenised, in a June 2025 Payments Dive report. Mastercard reported that 30 per cent of all its transactions were tokenised in 2024, in a January 2025 statement. The architecture replaces the customer’s actual card number with a merchant- or device-specific token, which has limited resale value if stolen and unlocks card-not-present fraud savings on both sides of the transaction.
The fraud baseline against which to measure those gains comes from the Nilson Report. Worldwide card fraud losses for 2024 reached $33.41 billion, a small year-on-year decline, per a January 2026 Nilson press release. The US accounted for approximately 41.87 per cent of those losses while representing roughly 26 per cent of global card volume, which is the long-running structural pattern in US card fraud and one of the reasons tokenisation matters more in the US than elsewhere. Card-not-present transactions account for a disproportionate share of US card fraud, which is exactly where tokenisation helps most.
Regulation, Rules, and the 2024–2025 Reset
Three regulatory developments reshaped the US payments policy environment in late 2024 and through 2025. First, on October 22, 2024, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finalised its Section 1033 “Personal Financial Data Rights” rule, the long-anticipated US open banking rule. The rule was challenged in federal court the same day; the CFPB stayed the rule in July 2025 and initiated new rulemaking, with the first compliance band still scheduled for April 1, 2026 for the largest institutions if the underlying rule survives. Second, on June 25, 2024, a federal judge formally rejected the proposed $30 billion Visa-Mastercard merchant antitrust settlement, summarised in CNN’s contemporaneous coverage. The rejection sent the parties back to the table and re-opened the surcharge and interchange conversation for US retailers.
Third, on July 18, 2025, the GENIUS Act became law, the first federal US statute establishing a regulatory framework for payment stablecoins. The implementation timeline runs through 2026 and 2027, with primary federal regulators (OCC, FDIC, Federal Reserve) issuing the rules that put the framework into operation. Latham & Watkins published a useful summary of the GENIUS Act provisions and timeline on the day the bill was signed. Together these three developments give US payments fintechs a clearer regulatory perimeter than they had in 2023.
| Rail or operator | 2024 metric | Primary source |
|---|---|---|
| ACH Network | $86.2 trillion settled across 33.6 billion payments in 2024 | Nacha, January 30, 2025 |
| Stripe (private) | $1.4 trillion total payment volume in 2024, up 38 per cent year on year | Stripe, February 27, 2025 |
| Zelle (P2P / small business) | $1 trillion across 3.6 billion transactions in 2024 | Early Warning Services, February 12, 2025 |
| Global card fraud (Nilson) | $33.41 billion in 2024, US share ~41.87 per cent of losses on ~26 per cent of volume | Nilson Report, January 2026 |
Sources linked in the right column. Each figure is taken from the linked release or report.
What to Watch Through 2027
Three threads will shape the next 18 months. First, the Section 1033 rulemaking that follows the July 2025 stay will decide what open-banking implementation looks like in practice. The first compliance dates fall in 2026, and the technology investments US banks are making now are the operational basis for whatever comes out the other side. Second, the GENIUS Act implementing regulations will determine whether US-issued stablecoins become a meaningful payments rail by 2027 or remain a niche product. The post-2024 generation of crypto firms approaches the question very differently from the prior cycle. Several large US banks have publicly signalled that they intend to issue stablecoins under the GENIUS Act framework once the implementing rules are final. The implementing regulations will set the bar for reserve disclosure, redemption rights, and the role of state versus federal regulators. Circle’s June 2025 IPO at a $6.8 billion valuation, reported on the day of CNBC’s NYSE coverage, is the visible sign that public markets believe stablecoin issuance can become a regulated US business at scale. The post-GENIUS Act US stablecoin market is the single biggest open question for US payments engineering through 2027.
Third, FedNow’s adoption curve will accelerate now that the institution base has crossed the threshold where most consumer and B2B account-to-account products can reach most counterparties. The combination of FedNow, RTP, ACH-based same-day, and card rails gives US payments fintechs a richer menu of execution choices than the previous decade offered. The firms that route flow across all of them, and the firms that build the orchestration to do so cleanly, are likely to capture the next round of growth. The pattern is familiar from earlier waves: every infrastructure transition produces a small number of platform winners and a longer tail of niche players.
The interesting US payments question in 2026 is not which rail wins. It is which routing layer earns the right to sit between every rail and every regulated counterparty. The data above is what that question is being asked on top of. The answer will determine where US payments revenue sits for the next decade.
