What happened
Sionic announced the availability of its Instant Bank Pay service and Fraud Detection Service on Microsoft Marketplace. The service enables real-time, bank-to-bank payments at the point of sale using the FedNow® Service and RTP® network through banking partners, moving cash digitally within seconds from payers' checking accounts to payees' accounts.
Why it matters
The service delivers an average 60% savings over credit and debit cards for transactions, and Sionic used Microsoft Foundry to solve three critical gaps in bank-to-bank commerce: building an alias directory (like Zelle), adding fraud detection for point-of-sale transactions, and enabling payment dispute support. For merchants and businesses, this means lower payment processing costs; for financial institutions, it expands real-time payment infrastructure.
What to watch
Sionic began a pay-by-bank proof of concept in late 2024 and is now distributing through Microsoft Marketplace, where customers can discover and deploy the service with integration into Microsoft Azure and other Microsoft products. Payers receive instant Perks when paying with their checking accounts at participating merchants.
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Sionic's announcement reflects a broader push to modernize U.S. payment infrastructure around instant, bank-to-bank settlement. The company's late-2024 proof of concept exposed a real problem: the FedNow Service and RTP network, while technically capable of moving money in seconds, lacked the commercial layer—alias management, fraud controls, dispute handling—that merchants and consumers expect from payment systems. By partnering with Microsoft and using Foundry (Microsoft's data and AI platform), Sionic was able to add these missing pieces without building them in isolation.
The availability through Microsoft Marketplace is a distribution play. It gives Sionic access to Microsoft's existing customer base—Azure users, enterprises buying cloud solutions—while providing those customers a pre-integrated payment option. The 60% cost savings over card networks is the headline benefit, but the real shift is structural: money moves directly between bank accounts in real time, with AI handling disputes and an alias system enabling frictionless lookups. This is materially different from card networks, which route payments through intermediaries and clear over hours or days.
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