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FedNow Is Live

federalreserve.gov

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Re: FedNow Is Live

#971

Post by Frummy »

pc86 wrote: post #967
Frummy wrote: post #961

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your gut reaction is disgust and I don't blame you. You could do without the insults, however. The "nation's banking infrastructure" is outdated and messy. There is no chance in the entire world to upgrade it or clean it up if we the workers are not equipped with the power to do so. A first step could be informational transparency, I would for example really like read access on other systems in the bank and not just…

It was the royal you, so was not an insult. I think anything that could be appropriately described as infrastructure could also be described as outdated and messy, so that's not necessarily a reason in and of itself to let people experiment on banking infrastructure. Are software engineers (again, the type who end up working for the federal government and banks and government contractors) any more qualified to experi…

Ah okay I get it now. My mistake.

Are they qualified? Sometimes a fresh perspective and courage is what is actually required rather than the home blindness that comes with following the careful bureacratic method for decennia. I would want there to be at least one mechanism in the universe that willpower from the bottom to actually improve the health of the core of these old institutions and companies. There is no mechanism at all currently for the person doing the actual work to take ownership, out of passion or duty, without first climbing the corporate ladder and becoming the grey suit decisionmaker not actually doing the tinkering any more.

I want to be able to own my own risk. If I identify a team need or personal need or business need I want to prototype it autonomously and have the control over my own computer and systems to do so while following all tests and procedures. I can pass it upward for a green light while following all test and development practices. Not only put someone elses decisions into practice while being bottlenecked by guardrails. These old institutions and old companies would pay anything to have something resembling startup agility, but they won't give up any power to self-selected intrapreneurs. I say let me own my own calculated risk . It can even be calculated risk, agreed ahead of time, this happens, that consequence. Off with my head, sure, tell me the cost that comes if I fail with some freedom and if it's losing my job then I'll accept it. If it's paying out of my pocket then I'll accept it. I'm not saying be reckless or not know what sort of risk one is taking. Open the door for calculated personal risk and let me remove the appropriate part of the guardrail. What's the point of being here if I can't use my own life force to change for the better that which crosses my path. Certainly not going to waste time, just fire me or fine me, I agreed to it to do more and better work because I care, hypothetically.

I'll admit the risks that comes with more access, if the risk is uncalculated and can't be owned in scale. Don't take risks, any at all, where the worst outcome is unethical or illegal, for everything that is production and customer data, or where the worst outcome is not even understood or out of scale. So some mindfulness, yes.

If someones personal tool becomes actually useful and the person leaves, then it becomes a weak link in an already unhealthy codebase. Or if they take decisions that don't come from above and somehow have enough access to also leak customer data or cause production issues, then compliance fines could happen. Or getting hacked, or breaking laws with unlicensed software or piracy or anything else, or disrupting other teams, or causing irreversible damage or data loss. Scary, I admit it! I see the paranoia from the top and I empathise!

Let's use bottom-up freedom for replacing the infrastructure with new technology, or lifecycle treatment or archiving, not for entrenching it with new development, or just not knowing what one is doing. But let's not get paralysed with fear. The scale is too heavily tipped in one direction. Shift it in the right direction.

Re: FedNow Is Live

#972

Post by runarberg »

TylerE wrote: post #805
hunter2_ wrote: post #794

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most people don't want to share their bank account numbers While far less common these days, people gave this information to arbitrary payees (via personal checks) for decades. The idea that it's not to be given to payers, despite it having been given to arbitrary payees, seems misguided. If someone tries to commit fraud with that number, they're probably going to get caught, making it sufficiently unlikely, no?

Seems to me a big part of why something like this should exist is so personal checks can just die, as they should have years ago. Crappy usability, no security, abysmal throughput and latency.

When I first came to USA as a tourist in 2011, one of the most amusing thing I witnessed was at a party at my Couch Surfer’s host when a friend of theirs payed back a debt by writing them a check. This cranked me up, as I had not seen a real world check in use since I was a kid in the early 1990s. I was equally surprised to learn how nobody else at the party thought anything of this. Coming from Iceland where you simply transfer them money via a bank app (or a website back then), this was my first American culture shock.

Now I live in the USA and I actually use checks all the time. I get paid via a check, I pay with checks at my local farmstand, I used to pay my rent with a check, my immigration fees were paid with a check etc.

Re: FedNow Is Live

#973

Post by PKop »

withinboredom wrote: post #848
kelnos wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So presumably they are interested in offering consumers the ability to pay for Netflix using FedNow instead of a credit card. I do wonder how stuff like this will shake out. I will use a credit card, always, with any vendor that doesn't pass along credit card fees to the customer in some way. (Why would I choose otherwise? The credit card gives me rewards, and better fraud protection.) But more and more, I see comp…

I moved to Europe in 2018. The banking system is decades more advanced than the US. At least where I am, no restaurant will “split a check” and one person is expected to pay. We settle the bill between each other in a matter of seconds. Most bills are paid using this exact system. Credit cards are very rarely used except in-person. Since you have to accept (or tell your bank to always accept certain vendors) debits u…

>Credit cards are very rarely used except in-person

Credit cards give you reward points/money so that's not really a positive.

Re: FedNow Is Live

#974

Post by xp84 »

mnahkies wrote: post #394
xp84 wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends. I have to use checks to pay my landscaper and housekeeper, because there isn't another unilateral payment document. By this I mean, in the US everyone could use CashApp, Venmo, PayPal, Zelle (glorified ACH, right?), etc. for p2p payment. If you have the same bank, many banks have a trivial "send money to another customer's account" feature. However, to do so requires essentially a 'handshake' where the tw…

Aren't you just describing cash? Cheque has the same issue as the online alternatives in that it could "bounce" - cash (or I guess crypto) can't

I can’t print cash in my house ;) and I don’t want to keep a board of it under my mattress!

Re: FedNow Is Live

#975

Post by xp84 »

Qworg wrote: post #399
xp84 wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends. I have to use checks to pay my landscaper and housekeeper, because there isn't another unilateral payment document. By this I mean, in the US everyone could use CashApp, Venmo, PayPal, Zelle (glorified ACH, right?), etc. for p2p payment. If you have the same bank, many banks have a trivial "send money to another customer's account" feature. However, to do so requires essentially a 'handshake' where the tw…

Zelle may still allow for you to send money to a non-Zelle account - as a dark pattern, they'll hold that cash for the recipient and give them an opportunity to sign up and receive it. This was a big pressure point for smaller banks and CUs to sign up.

Sure, so will all the real fintech payment companies that came before Zelle too, but you can’t count on someone to be interested in signing up. They might just say “no, screw that, I don’t like Zelle/PayPal/CashApp, I demand you pay me I with cash or check or I won’t work for you anymore.”

For all I know, they might even be banned from that app, and unable to sign up to retrieve my payment.

Re: FedNow Is Live

#976

Post by unmole »

playingalong wrote: post #968
unmole wrote: post #965

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 26 digits of the account number That seems rather excessive. Why on earth are Polish bank accounts so long?

The IBAN 26 digit system is multinational/global.

Only the Country Code and Check Digits are standardised by IBAN. The rest of it is country specific.

Re: FedNow Is Live

#977

Post by withinboredom »

PKop wrote: post #973
withinboredom wrote: post #848

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved to Europe in 2018. The banking system is decades more advanced than the US. At least where I am, no restaurant will “split a check” and one person is expected to pay. We settle the bill between each other in a matter of seconds. Most bills are paid using this exact system. Credit cards are very rarely used except in-person. Since you have to accept (or tell your bank to always accept certain vendors) debits u…

>Credit cards are very rarely used except in-person Credit cards give you reward points/money so that's not really a positive.

That depends on the country the card is issued in.

Re: FedNow Is Live

#978

Post by ratg13 »

wredue wrote: post #613
aeyes wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there anything special about the IBM MQ implementation which makes it worth naming them? It looks like you can connect to it using AMQP so I wonder why they wouldn't just say something generic like "MQ" or "AMQP protocol".

It’s a little especially strange as IBM hasn’t exactly made a great reputation for themselves over the last several years. Name dropping IBM makes me think that the reserve is generally not confident and is ready to blame IBM for what they expect to happen.

IBM MQ has been the standard for message queues for literal decades.

Hitching a horse to a different technology platform that has only been around for a few years to complete a project that should last for many more decades would be an architectural choice that would only lead to high costs and high risk of major changes in the future and puts the whole system at risk.

Re: FedNow Is Live

#979

Post by astrange »

astrange wrote: post #697
jonhohle wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What benefit would targeting low wealth individuals have to the IRS? I worked on a state tax system briefly at Accenture and they offered the product for a percentage of reclaimed taxes. They started with high debts with good credit scores. Since they had skin in the game (which it could be argued the IRS doesn’t), they wanted to maximize the unpaid taxes they collected.

Because it's easy to mess up claiming the EITC and only low income people can claim it. Also, there's a lot more (relatively) low income people than high income people. This also depends if by "audits" you include every kind of correction letter the IRS sends you.

I got a letter from the IRS today and thought it was some kind of ironic punishment for commenting this, but it turned out it was just warning me I'd used the website last week(??)

Re: FedNow Is Live

#980

Post by mavili »

mavili wrote: post #301
no_wizard wrote: post #96

Is 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…

> This would cut alot of middle companies out of the payments industry 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 examp…

A lot of people complain that 50k isn't much of a hurdle. Yes, I also agree that I as an individual can actually get that loan tomorrow if I want, but the point is "open" banking is meant to open up opportunities and should have as little hurdles as possible and the 50k is just one example.

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.

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