Form3 completes FedNow® RfP Certification as the industry works to scale adoption

FedNow launched RfP alongside the rest of its service in 2023, and now the Federal Reserve is taking its own step to close the gap, confirming a dedicated pilot aimed specifically at accelerating adoption on its network.

That's notable for a capability that both operators have flagged as central to what instant payments could become since it was made available. The Federal Reserve's own announcement of the service's early adopters explicitly named Request for Payment as one of the flagship use cases the platform was built to support, alongside account-to-account transfers and bill pay.

Years on, RfP is still the capability everyone agrees matters and neither rail has fully scaled, though RTP's longer runway means it has seen more real-world traction to build on.

A feature that only works if both sides show up

The reason is mostly structural. RfP isn't a one-sided capability like sending or receiving a payment. For a request to go anywhere, the payer's financial institution has to have built the ability to receive it, present it to their customer and let that customer approve, decline, or let it expire.

That's a materially bigger lift than basic send-and-receive support: new infrastructure for creating and tracking requests, presenting them to end users, and handling the approval logic behind them, not just moving money once someone says yes.

FedNow itself continues to build out its network, with roughly a fifth of the country's 8,500 or so banks and credit unions having joined as of this year.

RfP asks more of that network than basic send-and-receive does. A business can only request payment from customers whose bank has actually built RfP receiving capability. That makes the feature's addressable use case narrower than FedNow's overall footprint suggests, and it only grows as more institutions build out the receiving side.

That keeps volume thin early on, which is the same network-effect dynamic that tends to shape instant payments adoption generally, just compounded for a two-sided feature.

Why it's worth fixing

RfP is one of the more credible tools available for shifting recurring and semi-recurring payment volume off ACH and cards and onto instant rails. It offers irrevocability and round-the-clock availability, something those rails can't match.

A few use cases only become real once enablement is broad enough to reach most customers:

• Recurring and subscription-style billing, where a biller sends a request each cycle instead of pulling funds automatically, and the customer keeps the ability to approve or decline it.
• Consumer-controlled bills, where instead of giving a biller standing authorization to pull funds automatically, the customer gets a request each cycle and decides whether to approve it.
• Time-sensitive collections, including debt collection, where an instant, round-the-clock approve-or-decline flow beats a card hold or an ACH pull with a multi-day return window.

None of these are new ideas. What's new is the recognition, from the Fed downwards, that these real-world RfP use cases will not happen without deliberate, coordinated build-out across the ecosystem, which is exactly why a dedicated adoption pilot is now underway.

Building towards broader adoption

Form3 has just completed Request for Payment certification for the FedNow Service, adding RfP to its existing instant payments capability. No single provider's certification moves the industry-wide numbers on its own, but each one that comes online adds to the base that a request sent by another institution actually has a chance of reaching.

That's the nature of a two-sided feature like RfP. Its value compounds only when enough participants build in parallel rather than waiting to see who moves first, which is why the Fed's dedicated pilot matters as much as any individual certification does. It gives the ecosystem a coordinated reason to build now, rather than leaving adoption to accumulate certification by certification on its own timeline.

Providers, financial institutions of every size, and the Fed's own pilot are all part of the same effort. Real progress depends on that build-out happening in parallel, rather than any single participant going first and waiting for others to follow. The regulatory groundwork and much of the technical infrastructure is already in place. The remaining work is getting enough of the ecosystem building at the same time, which is a problem the industry needs to solve together. 

Interested in learning more about Form3’s Request for Payment capability? Get in touch with our team here.