The Federal Reserve’s long-anticipated real-time payments system, FedNow, is scheduled to go live next year.
Yet businesses and consumers will probably have to wait years before they can rely on ubiquitous U.S. instant payments, according to industry professionals who have been involved in the project.
The new bank-to-bank payment rail aims to modernize the U.S. payments system and increase its efficiency by allowing payments to be sent and received in seconds instead of days. That eliminates credit risk tied to time lags and allows businesses and consumers to spend and invest their money sooner.
The U.S. trails a host of countries in implementing a real-time system. Such transactions accounted for less than 1% of payments volume in the U.S. last year compared with a 5.7% share in China, according to an April study by payments processor ACI Worldwide in collaboration with the Centre for Economics and Business Research.
That means the U.S. captured just $1.35 billion in macroeconomic benefits from real-time benefits while China netted $18.65 billion in benefits. China and emerging countries such as India and Brazil are racking up the advantages from real-time payments while Western nations, particularly the U.S., are missing out, according to ACI.
“The U.S. market, relatively speaking, is quite far behind other markets,” said Andrew Gomez, a managing consultant at Lipis Advisors in Berlin.
