For a global company managing some of the world’s largest and most complex capital projects, payment efficiency can have a direct impact on project execution. Worley, a global engineering, project and asset management company, saw an opportunity to transform traditionally manual payment processes by combining smart contracts, blockchain technology, and instant payments for a key U.S. project on the RTP® network, the nation’s largest instant payments system that processes 97% of bank-to-bank instant payments volume.

The challenge was significant. Worley’s major projects can involve hundreds of millions—or billions—of dollars in procurement, with hundreds or thousands of invoices moving through the company’s payments systems each month. Traditional vendor payments can require numerous manual touchpoints across project teams, accounts payable, finance, and banking partners. That can make payments difficult to scale and reduce the agility and predictability required to keep complex projects on schedule.

Worley wanted a better approach without forcing its employees and suppliers to completely change how they worked. Partnering with HSBC, Worley connected its blockchain-based smart contracts platform to HSBC’s DLT Settlement Utility (HDSU), an orchestration layer which enables the smart routing capability, giving clients a unified payment experience across different payment types. HSBC created a bridge between Worley’s blockchain environment and traditional payment rails, allowing payments to move through the RTP network or, when necessary, through wires.

One important efficiency came from smart payment routing. Worley did not want its teams determining which suppliers’ banks could receive RTP payments or selecting the appropriate payment rail transaction by transaction. Instead, HDSU’s orchestration layer handled that complexity. Instant payments over the RTP network were prioritized, while payments could automatically switch over to wires or ACH when the beneficiary bank was not available for instant payments.

“We wanted to keep it as frictionless and as invisible as possible for the AP team, for the project teams, everybody who was involved,” to not disturb established business processes and procedures, said Pushkar Rao, Vice President of Digital Transformation at Worley. By working with HSBC, his team was “able to keep it all the same,” while gaining efficiencies and instant payment capabilities.

Pushkar Rao, Vice President of Digital Transformation at Worley, says how working with HSBC to integrate instant payments on the RTP® network helped Worley accelerate vendor payments, automate manual processes, improve payment visibility and predictability, and increase efficiency across complex capital projects.

That philosophy of removing friction in payments processes extended deeper into the project. During the pilot, the company automated invoice validation processes, including its three-way match to verify an invoice against the purchase order and other required information. Once an invoice was approved, Worley could make urgent payments within hours. With HSBC providing the connections and instant payments capabilities on the RTP network, a smart contract could initiate a payment instruction through HDSU’s orchestration layer and the RTP network would provide confirmation almost immediately.

The connectivity and automation that HSBC’s HDSU provided to Worley was extremely beneficial for streamlining the payments process. The integration provided by HSBC “allows the automation to go beyond the boundaries of our enterprises into the banking ecosystem so we can go really fast” with our payments to partners and vendors, Rao said.

Worley also improved visibility and auditability for contracts and payments during the pilot. Previously, project teams might need to call another department or create a ticket to determine a payment status, such as pending, awaiting approval, or processed. The new platform included what Rao described as an “Amazon-like tracker,” showing invoice milestones with real-time dates and timestamps. Teams could see when an invoice arrived, where it was in the process and where action might be required—reducing the “black box” around payment status, increasing efficiency for the project teams, and reducing back and forth communications that delay other payments.

The pilot provided meaningful scale to test the approach. Over six months, Worley worked with approximately a dozen vendors and processed about 300 invoices, representing roughly $20 million in payments. The pilot also found smaller processes that could then be built into automated logic, such as accounting for vendor credits before executing payments. Worley and HSBC developed these capabilities with what Rao described as a joint execution team.

During the pilot, HSBC helped to make this payments modernization move easier by absorbing the complexity behind different payment rails. “We are focused on removing the friction from our client experience,” said Preeti Chaturvedi, U.S. Head of Domestic Payments and Emerging Payments at HSBC. This “enables them to operate globally as if there were no borders when payment and commerce systems are concerned.”

That meant Worley could focus on the business outcome rather than the mechanics of choosing a payment rail. HSBC standardized the experience across payment methods and handled differences in how other banks received payments from Worley. “We built the smart routing capability to help our clients achieve their objectives while we absorb the complexity and the differences that are in the back end with the payment rails,” Chaturvedi said.

Following the successful pilot, Worley is moving the capability into business-as-usual operations for future major projects. It is also exploring opportunities such as early payment arrangements with suppliers, where faster payment could potentially support discounts, improve working capital outcomes, and strengthen vendor relationships. Rao noted that even a one to two percent discount could become significant when applied to hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in procurement. The discount is meaningful to the partner, obviously, but it also speeds incoming payments to Worley and provides certainty as to when the payment will arrive.

By combining workflow automation with instant payments on the RTP network and HDSU’s orchestration capabilities, Worley is demonstrating how payment modernization can deliver more than speed. It can give project teams greater predictability and visibility, reduce manual intervention, strengthen supplier relationships, and ultimately help complex projects operate more efficiently. As Worley looks to scale the approach across future projects, the pilot offers a model for how other enterprises can turn payments innovation into measurable business value.