Due to roll out in 2017, The Clearing House's real-time payments system (RTP) is designed to enable consumers and businesses across the US to send and receive payments instantaneously.

The IBM hardware will form the backbone for the VocaLink application which will handle millions of bank payments settled daily, in real-time, across the US.

The ubiquitous system is expected to help reduce and eliminate payment delays and give receivers of financial payments immediate access to funds and support complex business payment services including electronic invoicing, rich remittance data and confirmation of delivery.

“The real-time payments solution we’re building marks an important milestone for the US banking industry, a revolution in the payments market that brings a new level of service to businesses and consumers,” says Tom Statnick, chief information officer, The Clearing House. “To support our real-time initiative, it was crucial we had the right technology infrastructure in place.”

The implementation forms a new departure for VocaLink, which previously ran its Faster Payments service on x86-powered servers, a business which IBM exited two years ago. IBM's new Power servers target a similar market but are packed with new features intended to provide scale for distributed computing and cloud integration.

VocaLink says that in testing, the Power8-based infrastructure supported a sustained 2500 transactions per second - a record result for its real-time banking application.

George Evers, director of immediate payment solutions, VocaLink, says: “Our collaboration with IBM, and expansion of our solution onto the Power platform, will transform the amount and speed of data and result in the delivery of a payments solution currently unimagined in the US.”