The payment-processing system in the banking industry consists of deposits, withdrawals, and transfers of monies through the use of cash, checks, magnetic tapes, and electronic transactions. Of these, nearly all of the check processing through the United States Federal Reserve System, most of the check processing in the private networks, and a part of the electronic transactions are realized through the utilization of the principles of batch-mode processing. This is a conservative and secure means of transaction processing wherein operations, initiated by users, are stored within the system for a certain length of time, typically a few hours to a day or a week, and completed during off-hours i.e.; when the bank is closed to users. Batch-mode processing suffers from many limitations, the principal ones being that: (i) users are denied real-time access to their money, and that (ii) a user's banking privileges cannot be extended — a facility that is increasingly being demanded by users. A centralized banking algorithm, similar to the Swiss Interbank Clearing System (SIC), is inadequate for the United States of America with nearly 12,700 financial institutions and which is extremely vulnerable to a natural calamity or an act of terrorism. This paper proposes a new, distributed architecture for payments processing within a network of major banks as an alternative to the Federal Reserve System. This approach distributes the processing operations to multiple, concurrent, cooperating geographically distributed computers i.e., at many sites, to achieve real-time transaction processing. In essence, a user's most recent account balance and the banking privileges of withdrawal, deposit and, transfer are available to a user, transparently, anywhere i.e., at any of the major banks constituting the network. The accuracy of every transaction is guaranteed and, as a result, (i) banks are not exposed to the risk of fraudulent or bad credits, and (ii) users are not denied complete access to their most recent balances.