Comment by lxgr
12 hours ago
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.
> Take SEPA Instant, for example. It’s great for many things, but effectively nobody pays using it in stores or even online.
My link mentions how Wero, replacement for US credit card rails in Europe, is being built on top of SEPA Instant. An adoption tracker is included, to show uptake progress. ~35% of tracked banks in scope in Europe for Wero have adopted it, as of this comment. They are actively building to get off of US credit card rail infrastructure.
In the US, similarly, it will take time to move off credit card rails, but we’ll get there. As mentioned, Walmart is already running live trials for pay by bank. I agree it is not fully operationalized yet, but it will be eventually. The most important primitive already exists (FedNow rails). Everything else is app experience and consumer training (for payment requests and transfers).
I see the pattern between the EU and US credit card -> instant payment transformation journeys, but maybe you don’t. Pix and UPI have shown how easy it is.
(Almost every deposit institution in the US currently has access to FedNow, per the Federal Reserve’s latest participant report, and through those deposit institutions and service providers, their customers)
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