Why it's taking so long for Americans to get payments instantly
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Re: Why it's taking so long for Americans to get payments instantly
#2Re: Why it's taking so long for Americans to get payments instantly
#3Interesting that not long time ago USA was at the forefront of world technology. But nowadays not so much. Even more worrying it's China that in many areas leads the world - best highway, railroad, 5G networks, digital payments everywhere, huge production of electric cars, buses and batteries.
Looks like so far OpenAI, Google/DeepMind and Anthropic are ahead of Chinese companies in term of AI, but for how long?
If not for Elon Musk, China today would completely dominate EV and space launch industries.
Re: Why it's taking so long for Americans to get payments instantly
#4This article doesn't really go into much detail, but this shouldn't be surprising. IT in financial services is the most insanely complicated, heavily regulated, mishmash of every technology under the sun going back about 60 years that it's a miracle it works as well as it does.
This is also why fintech/insuretech/etc startups tend to fail so spectacularly...because in almost every case they severely underestimate the difficulty and don't understand the enormous scale and expense of the past several decades of that were carried out by established and already very profitable companies.
It's incredibly hard to justify getting rid of something that already provably works (what every single person that thinks we should flip a switch and get instant payments is advocating). There is a tendency to portray financial IT services as being risk-averse...there is maybe some truth to that but I'd characterize it more like a situation where those on the outside are simply not aware of the enormous amount of risk already being taken just to make minor improvements to existing systems with 50+ years of business rules encoded into them.
For all of those reasons, FedNow looks to me like it's actually been a fantastic success so far. I'm not sure what the WSJ was expecting to see. They aren't (to my knowledge) hundreds of billions over budget and a half decade past due...that is about as good as one could have hoped for.
Re: Why it's taking so long for Americans to get payments instantly
#5This article doesn't really go into much detail, but this shouldn't be surprising. IT in financial services is the most insanely complicated, heavily regulated, mishmash of every technology under the sun going back about 60 years that it's a miracle it works as well as it does. This is also why fintech/insuretech/etc startups tend to fail so spectacularly...because in almost every case they severely underestimate the…
> but this shouldn't be surprising
Then is it surprising that other nations have had near instant payments for a good while?
Re: Why it's taking so long for Americans to get payments instantly
#6This article doesn't really go into much detail, but this shouldn't be surprising. IT in financial services is the most insanely complicated, heavily regulated, mishmash of every technology under the sun going back about 60 years that it's a miracle it works as well as it does. This is also why fintech/insuretech/etc startups tend to fail so spectacularly...because in almost every case they severely underestimate the…
> IT in financial services is the most insanely complicated, heavily regulated, mishmash of every technology under the sun going back about 60 years that it's a miracle it works as well as it does.
Australia in the late 90s had instant intra bank ACH transfers. Even inter bank was within 15 minutes. And not exactly a regulation free market.
Re: Why it's taking so long for Americans to get payments instantly
#7This article doesn't really go into much detail, but this shouldn't be surprising. IT in financial services is the most insanely complicated, heavily regulated, mishmash of every technology under the sun going back about 60 years that it's a miracle it works as well as it does. This is also why fintech/insuretech/etc startups tend to fail so spectacularly...because in almost every case they severely underestimate the…
> but this shouldn't be surprising Then is it surprising that other nations have had near instant payments for a good while?
No that isn't surprising because those were new buildouts of brand new systems that didn't exist before. In a lot of cases, those countries skipped over a whole bunch of in between phases, like how China skipped over a bunch of telecom infrastructure buildout and so managed to avoid a lot of similar issues there.
The US digitalized it's financial industries the earliest and so it has the most pre-existing infrastructure to maintain and past decisions to deal with the consequences of. The finance industry was quite literally the first major industry to computerize in the US, most other countries got started decades later due to a lot of factors but mostly either poverty, being behind the iron curtain, or lack of access to reliable computers.
It's always more difficult when you have millions of active users and SLAs to abide by, and regulators and auditors that are aware of every possible thing that can go wrong and that they should be asking questions about.
Re: Why it's taking so long for Americans to get payments instantly
#8Interesting that not long time ago USA was at the forefront of world technology. But nowadays not so much. Even more worrying it's China that in many areas leads the world - best highway, railroad, 5G networks, digital payments everywhere, huge production of electric cars, buses and batteries. Looks like so far OpenAI, Google/DeepMind and Anthropic are ahead of Chinese companies in term of AI, but for how long? If no…
> Interesting that not long time ago USA was at the forefront of world technology. But nowadays not so much.
The entrenched players figured out that they could instead of develop, research, and make new stuff, they could cripple existing stuff, and turn everything into a rental. And the players who showed up figured the exact same.
What do we get? A stagnating country. And nobody is willing to budge.
Every time I try to look, I just get depressed. There is no voting our way out of this. We're solidly on our way to 3rd world nation status... in fact much of the internal parts of our country are exactly that.
> Even more worrying it's China that in many areas leads the world - best highway, railroad, 5G networks, digital payments everywhere, huge production of electric cars, buses and batteries.
https://twitter.com/alvinfoo/status/1448461361181184005
China rail 2008 vs 2020.
Chinese Taxi 1 minute EV battery swap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anXQfRuAkZw
Chinese massive reduction in pollution https://epic.uchicago.edu/insights/china-has-quickly-and-sha...
Chinese mega highways: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80IFicuNrQg
Whereas the USA can't get get its thumbs out of its collective asses to build even a moderately decent train network. The USA is a failing state. Can't wait till they start lashing out with all their hyper-futuristic weaponry our money goes to.
Re: Why it's taking so long for Americans to get payments instantly
#9Interesting that not long time ago USA was at the forefront of world technology. But nowadays not so much. Even more worrying it's China that in many areas leads the world - best highway, railroad, 5G networks, digital payments everywhere, huge production of electric cars, buses and batteries. Looks like so far OpenAI, Google/DeepMind and Anthropic are ahead of Chinese companies in term of AI, but for how long? If no…
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Re: Why it's taking so long for Americans to get payments instantly
#10Interesting that not long time ago USA was at the forefront of world technology. But nowadays not so much. Even more worrying it's China that in many areas leads the world - best highway, railroad, 5G networks, digital payments everywhere, huge production of electric cars, buses and batteries. Looks like so far OpenAI, Google/DeepMind and Anthropic are ahead of Chinese companies in term of AI, but for how long? If no…
> Interesting that not long time ago USA was at the forefront of world technology. But nowadays not so much. The entrenched players figured out that they could instead of develop, research, and make new stuff, they could cripple existing stuff, and turn everything into a rental. And the players who showed up figured the exact same. What do we get? A stagnating country. And nobody is willing to budge. Every time I try…
And yet Chinese nationals are clamoring to buy real estate in the US in order to secure their assets.
Would you rather be given $10M in a US bank account, or $10M worth of Yuan in a Chinese bank account?