Understanding instant payments – Artsiom Liashanau insights

Instant payments have been framed as the next logical step in the evolution of financial infrastructure. Faster settlements, improved cash flow, fewer delays – on paper, it all reads like an obvious upgrade. Yet, as fintech investor Artsiom Liashanau points out in newest column, the reality for businesses has been less straightforward. How so?

From a distance, instant payments look like a purely technical improvement. In practice, they quietly reshape how risk, liquidity and operational processes are managed. And this is where many companies, particularly on the merchant side, tend to underestimate the impact.

One of the most important things Artsiom Liashanau, a fintech expert with hands-on experience in payments, highlights is the shift in responsibility. Traditional payment flows allowed time and made a room for mistakes that can be fixed later. Maybe even with long waiting period. Time to verify, to flag suspicious activity, to intervene if something felt off. Instant payments compress that window to near zero. After the transaction is completed, it becomes significantly more complicated to reverse.

This changes how fraud needs to be approached. Banks and fintech services are no longer allowed to react after the fact. They’re obliged to make decisions upfront. For businesses used to layered verification processes, this requires a different mindset – and, in many use cases, a different infrastructure.

Another angle that tends to be overlooked is liquidity management. With instant settlements, funds move continuously rather than in “packages” form. That might sound efficient, but it also means the need to monitor cash positions in real time mode. The “classic” model, where balances are reconciled at the end of the banking day, is obsolete to this “new era”.

According to Artsiom Liashanau fintech has been quick to adapt to this shift. Banks and PSPs are gradually building tools to live tracking and decision-making. Merchants, however, often lag behind – partly because the change doesn’t always look urgent until it starts affecting operations.

There’s also the question of user expectations. Once customers get used to instant payments, waiting even a few hours can feel like friction. That pressure inevitably moves upstream, forcing businesses to align their internal processes with the payment layer pace.

But Artsiom Liashanau doesn’t frame instant payments as a problem. If anything, he treats them as an inevitable stage in the market’s development. But he does point out a gap between how the technology is marketed and how it actually behaves in a live environment.

For companies operating in or entering the EU market, this gap matters. Instant payments are increasingly embedded into broader regulatory and infrastructure changes, meaning they’re less of an optional feature and more of a baseline expectation.

In that sense, the key takeaway from Artsiom Liashanau is pragmatic: speed alone doesn’t define a better payment system. What really have a real KPI impact is whether the business is prepared to operate at that speed – across risk, liquidity and day-to-day decision-making.

And that’s where the real work begins.