Simply expressed - an environment where transactions of all sorts are mostly digital, increasingly generated automatically and completed in real time both from the business angle and in IT-processing.  For enterprises, the public sector and citizens this means for example that orders, confirmations and invoices flow from system to system and payments from account to account without delays. This makes it possible to have automate accounting so that it is always up-to-date. The benefits for society at large are enormous - both for productivity, more meaningful work and for the environment as there is much less need for travelling, transporting and material. 

How can we get there fast?

There is no giant leap option. To get there we need to see the stairway and constantly keep moving up. In countries were payment references are in use many important automation features have already been completed. E-banking is an important element and needs to be improved further to cater for the next step - e-invoicing - in itself saving more than 200bn€ processing costs in EU - but even more importantly being the next step to a Real Time Economy.

Next steps 

When this ladder is completed, new opportunities for human, business and machine interaction becomes available in the form of real-time services.

As we move to the age of real-time, we see that real-time systems also enable new paradigms characterized by emerging non-real time processes. A good example of this is the shift from broadcast radio to on-demand podcasting, where we move from real-time to my-time. When you have the ability to consume/download media faster than real-time (actually watching it), business models and consumer behaviour will eventually change.

Digital networks link people together in new ways. Service providers can turn themselves into invinsible intermediaries by removing unnecessary services. This development is fueled with observations of the spirit of the age as put forward by 3Com founder and Ethernet inventor Robert Metcalfe, that the value of a communication system grows exponentially as it adds users (Metcalfe's Law).

Today, most important emerging internet businesses like Facebook and YouTube get out of the way of their users. Banks and other traditional institutions are following by turning themselves into embedded platforms for business transactions. The Internet has become a hybrid of my-time and real-time, revealing new dimensions for value generation.

Perhaps even more importantly, RTE is the continuation of the information age as described by Marshall McLuhan as an age of all-at-onceness. Space and time are overcome by television, jets, and computer networks. In such an all-at-once world, linear, cause-effect thinking processes give way to a discontinuous integral consciousness and non-linearity, so that points of view, specialist goals, linear schedules, turn-taking and broadcast models are replaced by an overall awareness of the mosaic world of a retribalized society. Processes will have the characteristics of a blink of an eye, rather than the speed of light. To put it differently, RTE is about escaping the age of speed (industrial era) by connecting context with time once again, providing time for reflection, peer production and collective decision making through digital technologies.

Ours is a brand-new world of all-at-onceness. "Time" has ceased, "space" has vanished. We now live in a global village . . . a simultaneous happening. . . . Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously."
– Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, 1967

It's about time... for a Real-Time Economy.