Scholarlink

<p>Four of the world’s largest economies have deployed public or publicly mandated instant payment rails — India’s UPI, Brazil’s Pix, the United States’ FedNow, and the European Union’s SEPA Instant regime — yet available theory explains adoption (TAM/UTAUT), platform pricing (two-sided market theory), or access (financial inclusion frameworks), while none explains how public payment infrastructure itself generates welfare. This article closes that gap by shifting the unit of analysis from the wallet, a proprietary application competing for users, to the rail, a shared, interoperable, real-time public infrastructure, and by introducing Compression–Velocity–Legibility Theory (CVLT): a middle-range, mechanism-based institutional theory of welfare generation through public instant payment rails, situated within institutional welfare economics. The theory is derived axiomatically. Every payment system must perform exchange, settlement, and information generation; the welfare yielded by a payment regime depends on how efficiently and inclusively these functions are performed; and the public instant payment rail is the first configuration that optimizes all three jointly in the public interest. From these axioms follow three jointly necessary and — within the domain of public instant payment rails — collectively sufficient mechanisms: Compression, which collapses the cost of transacting and thereby shifts the adoption equilibrium; Velocity, which delivers liquidity in seconds and thereby relaxes consumption-smoothing constraints; and Legibility, which converts informal activity into verifiable data and thereby relaxes informational credit rationing. CVLT yields eight falsifiable propositions organized by mechanism, explicit negative-welfare mechanisms and trade-offs, boundary conditions, refutation criteria, and a measurement scheme. It explains why UPI and Pix succeeded where technologically similar systems stalled — institutional design, not technology — and offers regulators a staged design blueprint together with an identification-oriented research agenda using publicly available rail data.</p>

错误：搜索内容不能为空，请输入英文关键词
错误：关键词超出字数限制，请精简
高级检索

Rails, not wallets: a compression–velocity–legibility theory (CVLT) of welfare generation through public instant payment infrastructure

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年7月27日

查看全文
  • Elamurugan Balasundaram

摘要

Four of the world’s largest economies have deployed public or publicly mandated instant payment rails — India’s UPI, Brazil’s Pix, the United States’ FedNow, and the European Union’s SEPA Instant regime — yet available theory explains adoption (TAM/UTAUT), platform pricing (two-sided market theory), or access (financial inclusion frameworks), while none explains how public payment infrastructure itself generates welfare. This article closes that gap by shifting the unit of analysis from the wallet, a proprietary application competing for users, to the rail, a shared, interoperable, real-time public infrastructure, and by introducing Compression–Velocity–Legibility Theory (CVLT): a middle-range, mechanism-based institutional theory of welfare generation through public instant payment rails, situated within institutional welfare economics. The theory is derived axiomatically. Every payment system must perform exchange, settlement, and information generation; the welfare yielded by a payment regime depends on how efficiently and inclusively these functions are performed; and the public instant payment rail is the first configuration that optimizes all three jointly in the public interest. From these axioms follow three jointly necessary and — within the domain of public instant payment rails — collectively sufficient mechanisms: Compression, which collapses the cost of transacting and thereby shifts the adoption equilibrium; Velocity, which delivers liquidity in seconds and thereby relaxes consumption-smoothing constraints; and Legibility, which converts informal activity into verifiable data and thereby relaxes informational credit rationing. CVLT yields eight falsifiable propositions organized by mechanism, explicit negative-welfare mechanisms and trade-offs, boundary conditions, refutation criteria, and a measurement scheme. It explains why UPI and Pix succeeded where technologically similar systems stalled — institutional design, not technology — and offers regulators a staged design blueprint together with an identification-oriented research agenda using publicly available rail data.