Comment by toomuchtodo
19 hours ago
Central bank instant payment system. The US has FedNow, and has had it for almost 3 years. It costs a few pennies to move up to $10M per XML message.
Brazil's Pix costs ~$10M/year to run: https://www.pymnts.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/PYMNTS-Int... [pdf] (September 2026 revision)
FedNow is a payments rail, which is a long shot away from being a full retail payments scheme. The latter needs a disputes story, customer knowledge, merchant acceptance…
Take SEPA Instant, for example. It’s great for many things, but effectively nobody pays using it in stores or even online.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49632470
That’s a list of news articles (notably none about SEPA Instant, the closest analogy to FedNow!), not a response to my point.
It actually supports my point: FedNow could be SEPA Instant (if it were to be widely supported and available to retail bank customers), but it’s definitely not UPI, Pix, Wero etc.
2 replies →
> Walmart is currently trialing it to save $3B-$7B a year in interchange fees. No crypto, just XML messages through a mainframe at the Federal Reserve with a 20 second SLA.
Please tell your user that this SLA is much too high for many purposes. A cafe or such would lose a ton of money if every transaction took 20 seconds longer to conduct.
It's the worst case before they get penalized. I've had worse times with Mastercard and Visa. It's really not a big deal if one in a thousand payments, you sit by the card reader for 30 seconds before it says "please try again".
Works fine based on the evidence. It’s a maximum SLA, not every transaction. The economics are too compelling to ignore. Fast enough.