In India, there’s something similar to FedNow called UPI — “Unified Payments Interface” that really disrupted the market completely about 7 years ago — it is interoperable, works instantly and has no charges. It was phenomenal how that grew and got adopted, keen to see how FedNow changes the American payments systems.
FedNow Is Live
631–640 of 1001 posts
Re: FedNow Is Live
#632Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I lived in Japan twenty years ago, everybody just wired money electronically and checks were long obsolete. In the US, I write checks every week or so. They also had a system where you would put your checkbook into the teller machine and it would print your credits and debits into the book for you. It was very convenient. On the downside, the ATMs were turned off (!) during national holidays, so you had to get c…
Surprised you're writing checks every week: I haven't written a check in years. ACH transfers, sure, but not physical checks. I do still receive them occasionally, almost always as printed checks from companies.
I find I still have to write a few a year, annoyingly.
Of all things my life insurance company is still not set up for credit card payments. In 2023.
Boggles the mind.
Re: FedNow Is Live
#633Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Pick anybody from anywhere and they'll tell you they've been able to do everything they ever wanted to do (with regards to payments) using the already-existing systems of their country. This is like comparing candles and lightbulbs. Sure you can light up your home using both methods just fine, but you end up realizing how inconvenient candles were once you've made the jump to the newer technology.
Yes, but in many cases the people using candles fight like hell to insist that electric bulbs aren't better, can't be better, and even if they were better, there's no way to have electricity in the US.
I don't think anyone is arguing that an automagical system of electronic payments that everyone uses wouldn't be desirable [so long as cash wasn't also an option] but writing/depositing a check now and then is so far down my list of weekly annoyances it doesn't even register especially given my bank actually "writes" most of them based on online payment instructions. I'd be much more annoyed if I had to use cash on a regular basis as is the case in some countries.
Re: FedNow Is Live
#634For those curious, it is really using IBM MQ[1] under the hood and uses a bespoke flavor of the ISO 20022 specification. The FedNow Service itself is the tip of the iceberg in terms of what actually happens from an end-to-end perspective. We've been working to become a Certified Service Provider so feel free to ask me anything. I'm happy to share anything that is not under NDA. [1] https://www.ibm.com/products/mq
What is innovative and/or well engineered there? Could any bank or financial institution connect seamlessly with the system? How does it handle security keys, transparency, and transaction log duration?
As I see it, the innovative part is that the service is push-only. With ACH and most other systems in the US, payees can pull from accounts, while FedNow has no support for forceful debits. That's a significant shift in the way we think about payments (for the better, IMHO). This has been done before by other service providers, but not by someone with this kind of influence and clout in the US.
Re: FedNow Is Live
#635Is there going to be a universal SDK / API we can use with this? This would cut alot of middle companies out of the payments industry (or at least put pressure on lowering fees). That would be a huge win. 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 pa…
> 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.
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.
Re: FedNow Is Live
#636The announcement is very unclear. What I as layperson will get from it? Is it an app FedPayPal/Fedmo that I will be able to use for sending funds? Is it something that will be used by other apps to have cheaper funds transfer? Because if it is latter then I'm afraid that entrenched players will just keep doing what they're doing, keeping the profits but offloading processing to that system if it will be cheaper. The…
This is not a consumer-facing, social payment platform (e.g. Venmo), it is another payment rail (e.g. ACH, wires).
Laypeople are not the target audience for this, payment rail users are (i.e. entities who regularly utilize ACH/wire transfers or build services on top of them).
Re: FedNow Is Live
#637Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't understand why ~FedNow and CBDC~ BIG BROTHER are such a big issue in the US. Fixed this for you. I don't really want a gigantic federal agency having insight into every financial transaction I make. Hard, fucking, pass.
Ignoring the fact that FedNow doesn't change much in this regard... I'm torn on this. Visa, MasterCard, Venmo (aka PayPal), etc. all know about large subsets of my transactions, and they go and sell my personal data to other companies in sleazy ways to cover their costs. Is that better or worse than the government knowing all this stuff? Sure, the government can also legally use force against me and deprive me of my…
Can’t the government just buy this data from them, anyway?
Re: FedNow Is Live
#638This is a bit off topic for the post, but relevant for some of the comments here. For those who are commenting about payment systems in India and comparing this to UPI (Unified Payments Interface), this is not like UPI in a few ways. Firstly, this is more closer to a faster version of RTGS (Real Time Gross Settlement) in India, which is operated by the RBI (Reserve Bank of India). Speaking from experience, RTGS in In…
To clarify, the Federal Reserve is owned by the 12 Federal Reserve Regional Banks which are in turn “owned” (as in stock that pays a dividend but can’t be traded) by the commercial banks in that region.
it's not a clarification.
the ownership and stocks are entirely legacy symbolic gargoyles on a standard central bank. independent government agency. it's a loosely coupled top-down public institution, the monetary policy is set by a public committee,
Re: FedNow Is Live
#639For those curious, it is really using IBM MQ[1] under the hood and uses a bespoke flavor of the ISO 20022 specification. The FedNow Service itself is the tip of the iceberg in terms of what actually happens from an end-to-end perspective. We've been working to become a Certified Service Provider so feel free to ask me anything. I'm happy to share anything that is not under NDA. [1] https://www.ibm.com/products/mq
Is there a record of 'what' was bought or transacted for?
No this is an Interbank transfer system not a merchant service
Re: FedNow Is Live
#640Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think KiwiFarms is a cesspool and I think Null in particular is an extremely crappy human, but despite that I disagreed with the credit card processors pulling them, because they really did have a near-monopoly for online payments, meaning that this could be considered stifling of free speech. However, I think I'll have less of an issue for it if there's the government-backed means in which to send them money; at t…
This is a dramatic whitewashing of KiwiFarms. KiwiFarms was not deplatformed for wrongthink or because people disagreed with their ideas. They were deplatformed for coordinating harassment campaigns that resulted in at least three confirmed suicides. That is not protected speech.
This is misinformation.
KiwiFarms was not deplatformed for harassment campaigns* or suicides**; they were deplatformed due to coordinated harassment campaigns against the companies on which the site relied.
*There were no such things. Users were aggressively reprimanded and banned for suggesting and engaging in "poop-touching," respectively.
**See the other child comment to your post.*