Cards Remain Default Payment Rail
Bo Jiang, CEO of Lithic, on the power of the cards as a digital payment rail
The real bottleneck for FedNow is not speed, it is distribution. A payment rail only changes behavior when buyers, sellers, banks, software providers, and reconciliation systems can all rely on it everywhere. That is why cards remain the default for many workflows. They already handle instant authorization, variable final amounts, disputes, international acceptance, and programmable controls inside one system, while newer rails still have to earn that same everyday ubiquity.
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Lithic is built around cards, not around replacing them. The company positions ACH as an add on that helps customers tie together reconciliation, cash, and money movement, while keeping card issuing as the core product. That framing explains why slower FedNow adoption is strategically good for Lithic. It extends the life of cards as the most versatile programmable rail.
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The strongest near term use case for real time bank rails is payouts, not point of sale commerce. Across the payments stack, operators point to payroll, disbursements, and instant funding as the places where real time account to account movement creates obvious user value. That is very different from consumer checkout, where cards already work well and reward the buyer.
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This is also a workflow problem, not just a network problem. Businesses do not just need money to move fast. They need to know when a payment was authorized, when it posted, how to match it to the ledger, and what happens if something goes wrong. Cards have decades of rules and tooling around those edge cases, which is why new rails usually enter beside cards before they replace them.
The next phase is a mixed stack where real time bank rails grow fastest in wages, payouts, and back office transfers, while cards stay dominant anywhere software needs controls, acceptance, and reliable exception handling. For infrastructure companies, the winning position is to orchestrate multiple rails inside one product, while continuing to treat cards as the anchor workflow.