The Federal Reserve's Survey of Household Economics and Decsionmaking
(SHED) offers a wealth of data about you, me, and our neighbors here in the United States. Whatever your interests, you can mine gems from this data.
The depth and variety of the data give insights to those of us who are trying to imagine what behaviors might change as instant payments become more widely available and more heavily marketed.
One clue to the appeal of instant payments is in crypto. As with other surveys, SHED found that just a tiny share of adults used crypto currencies for financial transactions in 2022: 3 percent. Of that 3 percent, 2 percent used crypto to buy something or make a payment and 2 percent to send money to friends or family.
But here's what I find interesting: about one-fifth of the crypto users (granted, less than 1 percent overall) said they used crypto to send the money faster. That is, they used a new, uncommon, unfamiliar, somewhat cumbersome payment instrument in the pursuit of speed.
Another clue from SHED: the use of nonbank money orders and check cashing services fell among all households, from 15 percent of households with a bank account in 2019 to 13 percent in 2022. For households without a bank account, the decline was steeper: from 47 percent of households in 2019 to 31 percent in 2022. That is, even households without bank accounts moved away from paper ways to presumably faster digital methods.
Given how hard it is to predict what consumers will do when instant payments become ubiquitously promoted and marketed, these clues are important. It's easy to respond to hypothetical questions with "Yes, I would" or "No, I wouldn't"—to, for example, "Would you eat green eggs and ham?" or "Would you use instant payments?" But revealed preferences through behaviors are solid evidence. When you ask me, "Did you eat green eggs and ham?" and I answer, "Yes in a box, yes with a fox, yes in a house, yes with a mouse," you have a clear idea of what I think about Theodore Seuss Geisel's famous dish.
Behaviors that indicate we consumers are ready for a taste of faster pay can be found in the other data. Same-day ACH payments in the third quarter of 2023 were up 20 percent by number and 27 percent by value over third-quarter 2022. And The Clearing House reports that every month, three million consumers are sending account-to-account transfers and Zelle payments that clear and settle over the RTP network.
For a payments geek, an instant payment means a push payment that settles bank-to-bank 24/7 within seconds, not as part of a batch process. For a consumer, "faster" is a good step toward "instant." Faster could be a nonbank app like PayPal or Square Cash, same-day ACH, push to card, a digital wallet app, or Zelle. An online survey 
of 2,000 US consumers aged 18 and older in late 2022 found that three-quarters of consumers already had used one of these faster ways to pay.
Given the buffet of payment options available to consumers, the next few years will be important for use-based understanding of consumer behavior. Keep an eye on Fed surveys to gauge the appetite for the payments equivalent of green eggs and ham as well as other dishes yet to be invented.
By Claire Greene, payments risk expert in the Retail Payments Risk Forum at the Atlanta Fed