For the last few years, payments companies have been racing each other on one metric: speed. Instant rails, real-time settlement, same-day everything. MassPay CEO Ran Grushkowsky called this out back in April, arguing that Net-30 was effectively dead and that speed had become the new competitive weapon in payments.

That race is largely over. In a new Forbes Technology Council piece, Ran makes the case that speed has stopped being a differentiator and become table stakes, and that the real challenge sitting behind it is accuracy: not how fast a payout leaves, but whether it actually arrives.

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A sent payment and a landed payment are two different things

Here's the gap most platforms don't talk about. The sender experiences a payout the moment it leaves their system. The payee experiences it the moment it hits their account, or doesn't. Those two moments can be days or weeks apart, and most of the infrastructure built over the last decade optimized for the first one, not the second.

The reason payouts fail is rarely the rails. It's the data riding on them: a mismatched name, a malformed account number, an outdated field. Retail checkout solved this problem years ago, correcting a bad address before you finish paying. Payouts still tend to discover the problem after the money has already left.

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The cost lands on the person who can't do anything about it

A failed payout might show up as a small line-item fee on a finance team's dashboard. For the person waiting on that money, it looks nothing like that. It looks like an invoice that's been "sent" for weeks, no way to escalate, and eventually a refund that shows up minus fees, with a request to re-confirm account details as if the mistake were theirs.

That imbalance, plus the sheer scale of global payouts, is why the problem persists. The party with the power to fix it barely feels the cost of not fixing it.

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Regulators have already made the call

Europe and the UK have both decided that verifying who's on the other end of a payment isn't a nice-to-have. Under the EU's Instant Payments Regulation, payee verification became mandatory for euro-area providers in October 2025, and it has to be offered to the payer at no charge. The UK's Confirmation of Payee scheme now covers nearly all Faster Payments and CHAPS transactions.

The catch: those mandates cover domestic and regional transfers inside markets with mature account infrastructure. The corridors where verification is hardest, and where it matters most, are the ones outside any regulator's reach. A payout into a mobile money wallet in a market with no central account directory is nobody's problem but the platform sending it.

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What this means for how a payout platform is built

Ran lays out what accuracy actually requires of a platform, and none of it is complicated:

• Check before the money moves, not after. Validate accounts and names at onboarding, while the payee is still there to fix a typo, not at disbursement when they're asleep and the payment is already in transit.
• Make verification free, internally. The moment a check carries a per-transaction cost, someone rationally decides to sample instead of checking everything, and the failures concentrate in the low-value, high-volume payouts where the payee has the least power.
• Own the failure. A payout that doesn't land is a product defect, not a mistake by the person waiting on their money.

This is also why MassPay doesn't charge for payouts that fail. It reads like a pricing policy, but it's really a forcing function: it puts the cost of inaccuracy on the only party that can actually engineer it away.

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The bottom line

A payout that fails in four seconds isn't faster than one that takes three days and works. It's the same disappointment, delivered more efficiently. Speed gets money to the edge of someone's life. Accuracy is what gets it across.

Read Ran's full piece on Forbes: The Payment That Never Arrives

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