Staying real INSTANT PAYMENTS
Payment Spayce has been quietly building resilient real-time payments integrations for years. Now it’s ready to help businesses in Barbados ride the new RTP rail there Canadian banks have deep and historic roots in Barbados. RBC Royal Bank and Scotiabank have operated on the island for decades. Compliance culture, supervisory philosophy and operational frameworks connect the two markets more closely than many realise. And 2026 will be a significant year for both of them. That’s when the two jurisdictions enter a new era of real-time payments (RTP) almost in parallel, and with it comes a new era of risk management for financial services. Speed has always been the most seductive promise in payments, from the introduction of telegraphic transfers to transitioning from paper-based transactions to electronic Automated Clearing House (ACH) networks. But the arrival of RTP rails has been a seismic shift: governments are modernising their infrastructure and their rules, banks are rethinking oversight, and fintechs are positioning themselves at the centre of compliance. This year, Canada’s long-awaited Real-Time Rail (RTR), overseen by Payments Canada, will deliver 24/7 instant, data-rich account-to-account transfers, while Barbados’ BiMPay initiative, led by
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the Central Bank of Barbados, will transform domestic payments with instant clearing and settlement. For payment facilitators, this change of mindset and technology provides tangible opportunities. And that’s something Barbados-based Payment Spayce has had experience of before. It’s been building real-time capability in North America behind the scenes for years. And its approach has been consistently straightforward: when settlement shrinks to seconds, compliance cannot be an afterthought. The company’s origins were in traditional rails. “We were doing ACH with banks in the US, providing payment services, withdrawing and depositing funds into people’s accounts – commercial accounts as well,” says co-founder Ramon Caracas. But while ACH is reliable, predictable and well understood, it is not instant, and, working directly with sponsoring banks, Caracas says the company gained insight into product development conversations to take transactions to the next level. “We had multiple sponsoring banks
Ramon Caracas and Deborah LePage, Co-founders at Payment Spayce
where we had a peek behind the curtain in regards to certain products or services that they weren’t able to develop,” he explains. “As a technology company, we were able to take a look at what they were not pushing out. They gave us the opportunity to pilot different programmes.”
Evolving the infrastructure The United States is a useful reference point for real-time payments infrastructure. The Clearing House launched its RTP network in 2017, introducing instant, irrevocable settlement among participating banks. In 2023, the Federal Reserve followed with FedNow, expanding coverage further. Adoption has required deep changes in the financial industry – from liquidity management to fraud monitoring to treasury operations and redefined partnerships. “When we built out the RTP system for
Direction of travel: Barbados and Canada are both about to launch RTP rails
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