Sionic, an Atlanta-based payments company, has made its Instant Bank Pay service and an accompanying Fraud Detection Service available through Microsoft Marketplace. The listing, announced on 11 August 2026, gives enterprise customers a route to deploy the product within the Microsoft Azure ecosystem alongside other cloud and AI tools.
The service routes payments across two real-time bank rails: the Federal Reserve‘s FedNow network and The Clearing House‘s RTP network. Funds move from a payer’s checking account to a payee’s account within seconds. Sionic claims an average cost saving of roughly 60% against card interchange, though it did not publish the methodology behind that figure or name the acquiring or issuing bank partners underpinning the rails.
Filling the gaps in A2A commerce
Sionic’s origin story is instructive. The company began a pay-by-bank proof of concept in late 2024 and concluded that both FedNow and RTP were missing components critical for point-of-sale commerce: no alias directory comparable to Zelle’s, no fraud detection specific to account-to-account transactions, and no dispute resolution framework. Sionic used Microsoft Foundry, Microsoft’s agentic AI development environment, to address each gap. On disputes, for instance, a refund request triggers an AI agent that negotiates directly with a merchant-side agent, bypassing the financial institution unless escalation is required. That architecture reduces the operational load on banks and removes them from routine chargebacks, which is commercially significant given that dispute handling is one of the costlier elements of card programme management.
Nick Stanescu, executive vice president and chief FedNow executive at the Federal Reserve, was quoted in the announcement welcoming the listing. “As the ecosystem continues to grow and evolve, we move toward our long-term goal of delivering reliable, efficient and widely accessible instant payments for all,” he said. Stanescu’s involvement is notable: explicit endorsement from the Fed’s FedNow leadership signals that Sionic’s infrastructure integration meets the rail’s operational standards, which carries more weight than a standard partnership announcement.
Market context and competitive positioning
Pay-by-bank is a well-established category in Europe, where open banking mandates under PSD2 created a competitive market for account-to-account initiation. The US equivalent is structurally different: no regulatory push equivalent to PSD2 exists, adoption of FedNow remains uneven across financial institutions, and card networks still dominate point-of-sale volume. Several fintechs, including Plaid, Trustly and Dwolla, already operate in the US A2A payments space, though most focus on online or bill-payment contexts rather than in-store commerce.
The Microsoft Marketplace listing is a distribution play rather than a product announcement. Enterprise software buyers already procuring Azure services can discover and subscribe to Sionic’s tools without a separate procurement process, which lowers the friction for financial institutions and merchants evaluating the product. Sionic said it will announce go-to-market financial institution partners in coming weeks; those names will be the clearest indicator of how far the distribution relationship extends into the banking channel.
Founder and chief executive Ronald Herman framed the moment as the culmination of sixteen years of work towards low-cost payments infrastructure in the US. The consumer-facing incentive layer, branded Perks, allows merchants to offer rewards at the point of payment through Apple Pay or Google Wallet integrations, adding a loyalty mechanic that card networks have long used to sustain consumer preference.
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