Industry focus: FedNow’s first birthday reflects strong faster payments progress

The launch of FedNow has undoubtedly been a success. While there hasn’t been an overwhelming wave of early adopters, the numbers have been encouraging and in line with targets. There are currently more than 1200 participating financial institutions that have onboarded in this first year.

While payment volumes across FedNow in the first year have been modest, the healthy levels of adoption of both FedNow and RTP will drive more use cases for faster payments, meaning payment volumes will likely rise significantly in the coming years.

We’ve been seeing a shift towards real-time, on-demand payments driven by consumer expectations for several years now. Driven by services such as PayPal, Venmo and Zelle in the peer-to-peer payment space, and the functionality of other digital services such as Amazon Prime, consumers are demanding real-time services from their banks.

But with legacy infrastructure that many banks are still using, achieving the scale and volume that real-time payment systems require simply isn’t possible. Banks are fast realizing that they need to adopt new technologies to stay relevant.

The process of technology modernization is necessary for banks and financial institutions that want to hold on to their customers. Cloud-based platforms that are flexible, scalable and resilient aren’t just optional, nice-to-have technologies; they’re table stakes. Similarly, using APIs to create systems and services that can be securely and effectively integrated with each other is the only realistic solution for banks overhauling their infrastructure.

While the volume of faster payments that most banks are needing to process at the moment are relatively modest, they’re set to ramp up dramatically as adoption of FedNow and RTP grows. This means that upgrading technology is critical for long-term success. My advice is that strategic planning and budgeting programs should start immediately in financial institutions that haven’t yet transitioned to the cloud.

Using the cloud to process payments is the bare minimum. While cloud providers offer high service levels, they don’t guarantee 100% uptime. If a cloud provider suffers an issue in one of its data centers, this could impact banks that use that cloud to process payments.

With a multi-cloud setup, payment flows can be re-routed if one cloud suffers an outage. As well as increased resilience, using more than one cloud also offers benefits in terms of latency and the bank’s ability to handle large volumes of payments.

Without a strong payment strategy, banks could be in big trouble. While joining faster payment rails right now isn’t going to have an immediate impact on their bottom line, failure to do so will be costly in the longer term. Forward-looking organizations will join RTP and FedNow sooner rather than later.

Ideally, banks and credit unions that haven’t yet connected to faster payment services should consider joining both RTP and FedNow at the same time to reduce costs and provide a foundation for many new use cases that will help them to retain and attract customers. Seeking guidance from the FPC should be a first step for those that haven’t yet planned for the faster payments future.