Credit Union Times reported on October 5 that credit unions need to offer instant payments to keep pace with Gen Z, citing new Filene Research Institute work on digital wallets, P2P, stablecoins, earned wage access and AI-initiated payments. The headline number: 78% of Gen Z consumers say instant payments are important. The research comes out of Filene’s All Things Payments Center of Excellence, which published report #680, The New Money Movement Landscape, on September 28. The report is free to download, and its public summary focuses on agentic payments: AI tools that pay on a member’s behalf within limits the member sets.
The demand number is real and well documented. The more useful story for a marketing team is on the supply side, where credit unions trail community banks on adoption and almost nobody can yet send an instant payment.
The 78% Figure Comes From the Fed’s Own Survey, With a Small Gen Z Sample
The 78% matches the Federal Reserve Financial Services 2024 Consumer Payments Study, which surveyed 1,854 U.S. household financial decision-makers online in the third quarter of 2024. The Gen Z subsample, ages 18 to 27, was 170 people. Among them, the share calling instant payments important rose from 64% in 2023 to 78%, a 14-point jump the Fed highlighted in September 2025.
Two caveats belong in any board deck that uses this number. Federal Reserve Financial Services operates FedNow, so the organization measuring demand also sells the rail. And 170 respondents is a thin base for a generational claim. Neither makes the finding wrong, and the direction matches everything else we see in younger members’ payment habits. A larger independent survey showing a different level would change how hard we’d lean on the specific figure. We were not able to review the full CU Times article, which is paywalled, so this piece builds on the underlying sources directly.
Importance Is Running Far Ahead of Use
In the same Fed study, only 10% of Gen Z respondents had actually used an instant payment, against 80% who use digital wallets. Paying friends and family was the top use case Gen Z named for instant payments, at 71%.
That gap tells you where Gen Z’s instant money movement happens today: inside Venmo, Cash App, PayPal and Apple Pay, not through their credit union. When a 22-year-old member says instant payments matter, she is describing an experience she already gets from an app that holds a balance outside your share drafts. The Fed found Gen Z respondents split almost evenly on where they’d get instant service, with 51% preferring their primary institution and 49% open to a different provider. For a credit union marketer, that is half of a cohort you spend heavily to acquire saying they’ll take this feature from whoever offers it first.
If you’ve been working the family angle we covered in The Fastest Way to Win Gen Z? Market to the Parents Already Banking With You, this is the product gap that can undo it. A parent can bring a teenager in the door. The account still loses the daily transactions if the money moves through a fintech.
Credit Unions Are the Slowest Adopters on FedNow
FedNow passed 1,800 participating banks and credit unions by its third anniversary in July. The Kansas City Fed’s July analysis breaks that down for smaller institutions: 588 small credit unions are on the service, an adoption rate of 13.6%. Small commercial banks sit at 28.6%.
Credit unions led year-over-year growth, up 46.3%, so the gap is closing. But a small credit union is still about half as likely as a small community bank to be connected at all.
Connected also doesn’t mean much to a member yet. Most institutions joined to receive. A 2025 survey by Q2 Holdings, a digital banking vendor, found only 4% of financial institutions had both send and receive enabled on FedNow. The Fed is now paying to change that: statement credits starting January 1, 2027, with larger credits for institutions that send.
The practical result is that the feature Gen Z said it wants most, sending money to a friend instantly from their own account, is the one almost no credit union can offer today. That’s a product roadmap problem before it’s a marketing problem, and marketing should know exactly where its institution sits before writing a word of copy.
Receive-Only Still Has Something to Market, If You Market It
Two credit unions show what receive-only looks like in practice. AdventHealth Credit Union, which serves healthcare workers and their families, signed its FedNow forms on November 19, 2025 and went live November 24. It took in $45,000 through the service in December and more than doubled that by March 2026, according to Veronica Gurmendi, its vice president of finance, who said instant payments “really outpaced our expectations.” Send capability, including for auto loan disbursements, is on its list.
U.S. Eagle Federal Credit Union in Albuquerque, with more than $1.4 billion in assets, went the other direction on communication. When it turned on FedNow and RTP receipt in January 2025, it announced the specific money members could now get instantly: pay from employers, payments from customers and vendors, money from family and friends, IRS refunds, and government and insurance payments.
That list is the model. A receive-only connection is invisible to members unless someone tells them it exists and tells the senders, too. A member doesn’t know their side-gig payment cleared through FedNow; they only know it showed up. Naming the use cases gives members a reason to route money to you and gives your gig-worker and small-business members something concrete to tell the people who pay them.
Instant Payments Raise the Stakes on What Your Copy Promises
Before “instant” goes into an ad, a product page or an app banner, run it past compliance. Check three things. First, does every claim match what you actually support: receive versus send, which rails, which account types, and whether any holds or limits apply. Advertising instant sending you can’t deliver is a UDAAP problem. Second, fraud disclosures: instant payments are final, and authorized push payment scams target exactly the young, app-native users this pitch is aimed at. Third, any earned wage access or payroll-advance messaging, which carries its own regulatory questions.
Filene’s report adds a longer-range item to that list. Its central questions about agentic payments, how an institution knows a member really delegated authority to an AI agent and who’s accountable when an agent’s purchase goes wrong, will eventually land on member disclosures and education. Filene’s own position is that this is not a product to launch now. We agree, and covered the deposit side in AI Agents Are Coming for Your Idle Deposits.
What to Do Before Your 2027 Budget Locks
This week, find out exactly what you have. Ask your payments or operations lead four questions: Are we on FedNow, RTP, both or neither? Receive-only or send? Which account types are enabled? What’s the send timeline? Put the answers in writing. You can’t plan a campaign around a capability nobody on the marketing team can describe.
If you’re receive-only, publish the use cases. Update your direct deposit page, your new-member welcome emails and your business-member onboarding with a short, specific list in the U.S. Eagle style. Give members a one-line explanation they can forward to an employer or client. Have your digital lead tag the page in GA4 so you can see whether anyone reads it.
Size the P2P leak with your own data. Have your analyst pull outbound ACH and debit card transactions to Venmo, Cash App, PayPal and Zelle-funded wallets, segmented by member age. The Fed survey tells you Gen Z cares about instant payments nationally. Your transaction file tells your board how much of your own members’ money moves through someone else’s app every month. That number is what justifies the send investment, and the Fed’s 2027 statement credits lower the cost side of the same conversation.
Hold the Gen Z “instant” message until you can send. If your institution can’t send instantly, don’t build a youth campaign around the word. Spend that budget on the parents-and-teens strategy and the receive use cases, then launch the instant-send campaign the month the capability goes live.
Track three numbers monthly. Instant-payment dollars received (AdventHealth tracked exactly this), outbound P2P app volume from members under 28, and the share of new members under 28. If the first rises and the second falls after send goes live, the product is pulling money back. If neither moves, you have a communication problem, not a rails problem.
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