Federal Reserve To Insist On Realtime Payments

The Federal Reserve banks have prepared a multi-year plan that will a realtime payment system in the U.S., according to a report in The American Banker.

“Some observers think that the U.S. isn’t moving fast enough, or contemplating big enough changes to a creaky system in which as many as five days may pass before a payment gets completed,” the story said. “Countries on six continents have switched to nearly real-time payments, or are in the process of doing so.”

The piece quoted Gareth Lodge, a London-based analyst at Celent, saying that the Fed’s actions must be taken seriously. ” If the U.S. hasn’t got a real-time system in the next 10 years, I think the Fed will feel as if it’s failed. The conversations I’m having fall into two camps. Camp one says, ‘Yeah, we’ve got to do something, we know we’ve got to do something, it’s just [a question of] what.” The second camp says, ‘Yeah, we know we’ve got to do something. We just don’t know quite what, nor how to pay for it.” And so they want to put it off.”