Brazil’s Bradesco bank has completed the first pilot transaction on Bank of America’s new cross-border real-time payments (RTP) solution. International transfers remain one of the slowest and most cumbersome parts of the payments landscape, and the test is an early attempt to speed them up without changing how banks send them.
Bradesco, that become one of the pioneers to test the new RTP solution, is one of Brazil’s largest private-sector banks. Bank of America announced the first transaction on Sept. 29. The payment was initiated through Bradesco’s existing Swift connectivity. It was delivered in Hong Kong dollars to a local beneficiary through Hong Kong’s Faster Payment System (FPS). The firms did not specify the payment amount, but the initial concept of the solution targets high-volume, low-value payments.
Bank of America first introduced the solution on June 4, 2026, and said then that it would launch in the third quarter, so the pilot transaction arrived right on schedule. The service mainly aims at catering to international remittances, gig worker payouts and vendor payments for e-commerce marketplaces.
The bank described the new payment rails as a response to growing demand for speed and transparency in global payments. Their design is aligned with the G20’s cross-border payments objectives. BofA stressed out that policymakers and financial institutions share the goal of making cross-border payments faster, more transparent, more affordable and more accessible.
The June launch plan named SPEI in Mexico, the UK’s Faster Payments Service and India’s UPI among the networks the solution would connect to. Hong Kong’s FPS wasn’t named explicitly, so it might either have been part of the original plan or the list of supported markets has grown since initial announcement.
“Financial institutions want a practical way to accelerate international payments without disrupting the channels and processes they use today,” said Christian Stolcke, head of Global Financial Institutions, Nonbank Financial Institutions and Governments in Global Payments Solutions (GPS) at Bank of America. “This pilot shows how Bank of America can connect those existing channels to real-time payment capabilities in markets around the world.”
In practice, a bank sends the payment as it normally would, through Swift. Bank of America then hands it to the local instant payment system in the destination country. Because the bank already connects to these domestic systems, clients do not need to adopt new technology. Payments can be sent at any time, and funds typically arrive within seconds or minutes.
The sender can follow the payment’s status in real time and receives confirmation once the money is credited. Recipient account details are checked before sending, which is meant to reduce failed payments. The beneficiary receives the full amount sent.
Clients will later be able to initiate these payments through CashPro, Bank of America’s digital banking platform for corporate and institutional clients. Daniel Stanton, Payments Product Head in GPS, said the bank plans to extend the capability to more countries, currencies and client payment types. Bradesco and Bank of America are also piloting a separate U.S. payment route through Swift for consumer and small-business international payments.
The bank also reports growing corporate use of real-time payments at home. On the same day, Bank of America released data on the RTP network, the U.S. instant-payment system operated by The Clearing House. From January through July, corporate RTP transaction volume rose 48% compared with the same period in 2025. The number of corporate transactions above $1 million rose 351%.
The network raised its per-transaction limit from $1 million to $10 million in February 2025. This significantly expanded the list of potential corporate use cases. Clients are using it for liquidity management, intercompany transfers and cash concentration around month-end and quarter-end close.
“Corporate clients are increasingly looking to real-time payments for use cases that go beyond speed alone,” said AJ McCray, head of Global Payments Product in GPS at Bank of America. “We’re seeing a shift in how companies think about payments, with clients using RTP to make treasury operations more precise, efficient and resilient.”
