By Elizabeth Dilts Marshall

NEW YORK (Reuters) -Global payments giant JPMorgan Chase & Co has launched a real-time payments option that it hopes will increase its edge in the financial industry’s battle to handle more of the surging volumes of global digital payments.

The new product, called request for pay, lets corporate clients send payment requests to the bank’s roughly 57 million retail clients who use its app or website, cutting the cost and time it takes for those companies to get paid, said Cyrus Bhathawalla, the bank’s global head of real-time payments.

The digital payments product is one of a handful JPMorgan has in the works, as the largest U.S. bank invests heavily in the sector which has grown sharply as more commerce occurs online, a trend further boosted during the coronavirus lockdowns.

“Our job is to give multiple different payment types so corporates and merchants can provide the right options to their customers,” Bhathawalla said.

The service went live last month and began a pilot phase with its first corporate client, a fintech company, last week. Executives declined to name the company.

JPMorgan envisions clients like a gas distributing company using the service to get paid faster for filling up a gas station’s supply tanks, Bhathawalla said.

Currently, that kind of company may have to wait a week to get paid. A digital payment could happen in less than 30 seconds, he said.

One of the first banks to participate in The Clearing House real-time payments network in 2017, JPMorgan processes about 12 million transactions a month. The business is part of the wholesale payments division, which contributes roughly 10% of JPMorgan’s revenue.

(Reporting by Elizabeth Dilts Marshall in New YorkEditing by Matthew Lewis)