Faster Payments moves money bank to bank in minutes, around the clock, and cannot be reversed. For paying money out and collecting from businesses, that is exactly what you want. The cost that hurts is not in the rail. It is in the payment that arrives with a reference that means something to the payer and nothing to you.
The rail is not the problem
Faster Payments does its job well. A loan drawdown, a landlord remittance, a broker commission or a B2B collection can leave or land the same day, in full, with no card in sight. The speed and the finality are features. The friction sits one layer up, in reconciliation.
Where the cost hides
An inbound payment arrives, but nothing on it tells your ledger which invoice, loan or customer it belongs to. So someone matches it by hand. At any volume, that is days of work a month, cash sitting unallocated while it waits to be identified, customer queries about payments that have arrived but not been applied, and month-ends that do not close cleanly. None of it shows up as a fee, which is why it goes unbudgeted.
Why it happens
A payer sends money with the reference that makes sense to them, their own name, an internal code, nothing at all. You have no control over what they type. So the structured reference you need for automatic matching is exactly the thing the inbound payment tends to lack.
The fix: attribute on arrival
Two things remove the cost. The first is a structured reference carried end to end, so a payment can be matched automatically. The second, where you cannot rely on the payer, is a virtual account per client or invoice, so money is attributed to the right entity the moment it lands rather than matched afterwards. Either way, the aim is the same: reconciliation on arrival, not reconstruction later.
The outbound side
Paying out has its own version of the risk. Because Faster Payments is irrevocable, a payment to the wrong account is a serious problem, not a reconciliation nuisance. A Confirmation of Payee check before the money leaves, and a structured reference so the other side can reconcile too, are what keep high-value payouts safe.
What orchestration does
Credit Canary gives every outbound payment a structured reference and a Confirmation of Payee check, and matches every inbound payment to the right loan, invoice or customer on arrival, posting it all to one ledger. Pending, completed and failed payments sit in one queue rather than a bank portal, so the day's payouts and collections reconcile themselves.