High-Volume Transactions: Essential Benchmark or Industry Hype?

Transactions per second (TPS) has become the payments industry's favourite vanity metric. Every year, headlines celebrate Visa's 65,000 TPS peaks or Alipay's half a million transactions in a single second. These numbers impress. But for 90% of banks, fintechs, and wallet providers, they are irrelevant - and chasing them is a costly distraction.

Where extreme volume is real

There are only a handful of platforms where ultra-high TPS is a daily reality:

• Visa - ~8,500 TPS sustained, 65,000+ at peak events.

• Mastercard - ~20,000 TPS during busy hours, with 400 million transactions a day.

• Alipay - 544,000 TPS on Singles' Day 2019.

• WeChat Pay - 409,000 TPS during Lunar New Year bursts.

• India's UPI - ~7,500 TPS sustained across 20+ billion monthly payments.

These are exceptional systems: global networks, national infrastructures, or super-apps serving populations in the hundreds of millions.

The reality for most fintechs

Now compare those figures with the platforms that dominate everyday usage:

• PayPal - averages ~475 TPS, peaking in the low thousands.

• Nubank - scaled to ~3,000 TPS for 88 million customers.

• Revolut, Chime, N26 and others - typically measure in the hundreds of TPS.

These businesses are not struggling. They grow, win customers, and raise valuations without chasing Visa-level throughput. Their advantage lies elsewhere: regulatory compliance, customer experience, and product innovation.

The hidden cost of high-volume hype

The pursuit of high-volume transaction capability comes with a price few institutions can justify. Systems built for this scale require not just powerful servers but also redundant data centres spread across regions, continuous monitoring teams working round the clock, and infrastructure permanently sized to handle the worst possible peak. On top of this, enterprise-grade compliance and annual auditing are mandatory to keep such systems secure and operational.

The financial burden is enormous. For many payment businesses, this means investing millions into capacity that will remain idle for years. Instead of fuelling growth, these resources are locked into maintaining an infrastructure that far exceeds actual needs. The result is predictable: higher operating costs, more complexity, and reduced flexibility to invest in areas that matter more for long-term competitiveness, such as product development, customer experience, and compliance maturity.

Smarter investments for growth

Instead of overbuilding, payment businesses should invest where it pays off immediately:

• Right-size capacity - scale infrastructure to actual demand.

• Elastic design - adopt modular, API-first architecture that can grow seamlessly with volumes.

• Resilience and compliance - PCI DSS and ISO 27001:2022 certification are more valuable than a headline TPS figure.

These are the foundations that allow institutions to expand without breaking when demand finally arrives.

The bottom line

TPS records make for good press releases. But unless you are Visa, Alipay, or UPI, chasing extreme throughput is hype - not strategy. The smart question for most payment providers is not "Can we do 20,000 TPS?" but "Are we architected to grow securely and efficiently when the time comes?"

That is what separates sustainable fintechs from those burning resources on numbers that don't matter.