There is probably a neobank opportunity in providing this. FedNow is, reasonably, administered by banks. (The Fed doesn't want to provide end-user customer service nor incur liability for fraud.)
Far too much lobbying for any REAL competition to shake up the industry.
This will be exclusive to the federal government and state governments I imagine.
So when a completely dissimilar example of 'digital money' comes up, they equate it to crypto, even though it lacks many of the intrinsic aspects of crypto.
So, unfortunately, for these “crypto” maximalists, the crypto aspect of their digital currency is just some fun trivia and not something they even bother to leverage.
I don’t know whether the fed’s investigation into CBDCs will result in it adopting one. But FedNow has been designed in such a way that it could easily be modified to support one. You’d just have to implement a version of it where the allowed participants were everybody who’s allowed to have a bank account, rather than only banks.
Curious how this would work, it would be a pretty big inversion of asset control to make it work.
Saying "just have to" is a very big "just", considering it was aimed at only a few thousand institutions with very tight reporting requirements being the target audience instead of hundreds of millions of nontechnical users that would need something that just werks.
they are centralized in which funds can be seized, censored, and they all have money services licenses just like their corresponding banks do.
right, not like bitcoin, like bitcoin exchanges, just like the person said and you somehow ignored.
far more similarities than differences for this comment and the other comments at your level to be focusing on the differences and confused about the existence of similarities.
Now is a matter of banks to pay the providers[2] to integrate with their systems and ledgers.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=le8Me8AfK8k
[2] https://www.frbservices.org/news/press-releases/072023-fedno...
I've never in my life received a wage in cash, as in, hard dollars.
Maybe a long time ago, but I get my pay which is supposed to be on the 1st and 15th on like the 13th and 29th or something. Getting paid "two days early" is a pretty common feature with Direct Deposit these days. It is always credited to my account before my actual paycheck technically gets posed.
> maybe charging a transaction fee
I imagine someone would be paying for the transaction of physically handling all the cash, no? Its not like having all the logistics of handling cash to potentially thousands of employees is a zero dollar cost. I imagine its massively cheaper for everyone to pay whatever marginal cost my employer is paying for ACH/DirectDeposit through their payroll app than paying a ton of people to handle and keep track of the cash.
My bank seems to trust my paycheck deposits, though, and they "clear" (update my balance and become spendable) under 24hrs after they show up as "pending."
So when my bank is crediting my account with my paycheck early, its because my work told them I'm getting paid that amount. Otherwise they wouldn't necessarily know of the amount. Sure, its like some kind of loan in a way, but its essentially paperovering the slowness of the ACH to actually clear in a decent timeframe.
You would think there would _at least_ be a ceiling price. Makes me wonder why they can't show _any_ pricing.
"Spend the time and energy to build us into your product first and then we can talk price" is not the most reassuring of pitches.
I think the pricing is weird because you can start (and run!) for free, while the end to end solution requires negotiating with multiple parties.
Those middle companies have lobbyist representation and the govt has no intention of cutting any companies out of the payments industry.
For e-commerce, isn’t that SRC?
https://www.emvco.com/emv-technologies/secure-remote-commerc...
however, the payment itself is almost besides the point. the tricky part is the scheme / governance surrounding payments. who is liable for what, preventing fraud, etc. these large payment actors + the middlemen are more about fostering trust networks than moving the actual dollars and cents.
fraud in P2P payment networks (e.g. Zelle) is already a huge issue because a lack of a governing actor like a card network.[0] a different question is would the government ever provide this mediating role / lay out guidelines? would we want it to?
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/06/business/payments-fraud-z...
https://incometaxindia.gov.in/communications/circular/circul...
Besides this, stakeholders/partners of the NPCI are mandated to offer UPI services. I'm not sure if signing up was optional, but it would honestly be suicidal for a bank not to, given that there are so many competitors offering the same.
I keep appreciating the regulations in India, it is overall supportive of the common man. From say SEBI regulations on derivative markets to digital payments. For eg. credit cards are becoming less frequent, people here won't take out their cards for every other expense. People have become aware of the fact that money at the end is in bank and spending from the bank account hits much more real than a 30 day stream of cash 3-4 times your salary handed to you whenever you need. And so, low income and middle income groups spend wisely and don't get caught in spend cycles above their capacity.
Such an angle goes unappreciated, but hopefully this continues and money still be real and in our pocket.
A bank does not want to interact with you in the same channel as it interacts with another bank.
What there will be are services provided by banks which utilize this for instant transfers.
The middle companies between transfers you want. Most of the actual work is fraud prevention and dispute resolution... unless you want the only means of settling a dispute is through the courts.
Not really. All it will do is let the same companies change the way they handle average citizens' payments.
It's the same as Open Banking in Europe. It is supposed allow small businesses to leverage this to enable innovation and all that stuff, but when you want to use these APIs you find there are limitations on who can actually use it. For example, you can only put your service to production by being on a "directory" of approved providers, and to be on that directory you need something 25k or 50k in an account. So, not really that useful for a small startup wanting to make a product out of it.
Banking systems are the backbone of world power dominance, big players won't let small people share it.
That's modest angel investor money in a small city.
I do think this is a bit of a weak justification, though.
I mean, 50k puts it out of “a couple people starting something in their garage”, but it doesn’t really lock out much beyond that. That’s pretty close to the franchise fee for opening a McDonald’s.
Yes, it could be more equitable, but if that’s the only barrier to access, it’s… pretty open for even quite small businesses.
If you can’t scrounge together $50k to start a banking business, you probably should not be starting a banking business.
Bruh, I could get $50k right now if I go through a line of credit for small businesses as a regular person.
Look into going into the business and you will realise other hurdles like having some insurance that will cost you tens of thousands, and more costs. When you compare that to, say, creating an app and putting it up on an app store, we can agree that there is a huge difference.
Of course I understand that banking means playing with people's money and therefore measures need to be put in place. But instead of requiring financial assets maybe the 'measure' should all be around technology and your service will need to have gone through extensive testing to ensure it won't be exploited. Otherwise 50k is peanuts like someone said when it comes to covering any financial loss incurred if your service is messed up. So that 50k is just to filter out a huge majority of individuals wanting to create something for themselves.
The network of banks supporting FedNow is still small, so we may not see meaningful payment volume for a while compared to ACH, Wires, Checks, etc.
It's never the merchant that gets hosed. It's the people not using credit cards.
Because, of course, the merchant just takes his banking expenses and forwards them right back to all customers by increasing prices across the board.
And it's not only the people not using credit cards that get hosed. Even the people with credit cards lose out - because the cash back is practically always smaller than the fee the merchant payed and forwarded to the customer.
As always, the real winner is only the bank. There's a reason for the market cap of MasterCard and Visa...
If FedNow can fit in with ApplePay, then it can displace credit cards in the first place! The corollary I’m drawing, is from India where “UPI” payments (something similar to FedNow) was launched about 7 years ago and today is the more dominant payment mode than credit cards.
FedNow can replace credit cards for cases where chargeback or actual credit isn't necessary. So for many ordinary cashless payments.
Arguably even for many cases (small to medium amounts of money) where the possibility of chargeback seems useful FedNow could be better in expectation, because the fees are lower. The credit card companies are making money after all. Using them for chargeback is like buying insurance for things you can replace out of pocket: On average, you make a loss.
I have no idea about fednow but you can directly transfer an unlimited amount of USDC to someone in about a second for $0.0025 right now on Solana.
Wish we could do the same for the credit card companies. Would be great if the Federal Government could intervene in some way to have Visa / Mastercard / American Express / Discover use the same API interface for payments. Would dramatically increase competition for providers.