What is Missing From Instant Bank Payments With Arpit Goel, CEO of Root

Arpit Goel built his first company, Gamma, on a simple pitch: legacy data-loss-prevention tools took nine months to show value, and Gamma got customers there in two weeks. Palo Alto Networks acquired Gamma in 2021. Now Goel is running the same play in a completely different industry. Root is a payments orchestration layer that lets enterprises move money bank-to-bank in about five seconds, with no intermediary ever holding the cash. In this conversation, Arpit explains why he thinks the US is finally close to a tipping point on instant payments, why Root never takes custody of the money it moves, and how the company handles banks that can't yet receive instant payments.What We CoveredGrowing up in India, and the ADHD diagnosis that pushed him toward IIT DelhiWhy he calls himself an "ignorant" founder rather than an experienced oneThe nine-months-to-two-weeks wedge that built Gamma, and why Root uses the same oneDiscovering the payments inefficiency by reading through ADP's 10-KWhy 40% of US SMBs don't accept cards, and it isn't about the feesThe dual pressure of RTP and FedNow that made 2024 the right moment to start RootThe heart, arteries, and capillaries analogy for how Root fits into the banking systemWhat actually happens to money in the five seconds between sender and receiverWhy reliability, not transaction scale, is the hard engineering problem in paymentsHow Root handles banks that can't receive RTP or FedNowWhere stablecoins fit into a bank-rail-agnostic platformWhy Root wants to be the pipes underneath the industry, not the brandKey TakeawaysSMBs refuse cards mostly because of settlement delay, not fees — restaurants earning their week's cash on a Saturday night don't see it until Tuesday, right when they need it most to restock.Root never takes custody of funds. Money moves directly between the sender's and recipient's own bank accounts, and Root charges a fee on top rather than earning float.Reliability, not transaction volume, is the hard engineering problem — Root has built retry and fault-tolerance systems, using the workflow engine Temporal, so a bank outage doesn't have to mean a failed payment.Arpit sees instant payments as a market that hasn't tipped yet but is close — RTP and FedNow now operating together create sustained pressure that neither rail created alone.About Arpit GoelArpit Goel is the founder and CEO of Root. He holds a computer science degree from IIT Delhi and a PhD from Stanford, and previously founded Gamma, a data-security company acquired by Palo Alto Networks in 2021, where he went on to lead product for the data-security business.Connect with Fintech One-on-One:Tweet me @PeterRentonConnect with me on LinkedInFind previous Fintech One-on-One episodes