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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

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://whatispix.com/ https://whatispix.com/ This is much cheaper than the entire credit card ecosystem skimming ~3% off of the economy. Efficiency! FedNow Is Live - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36801491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36801491 - July 2023 (1022 comments) 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. > “It surprised me,” Henry said of adoption of Walmart’s first iteration of pay-by-bank, which is available online but hasn’t been marketed to customers. “It’s certainly surpassed our expectations of the amount of customers that have registered and actually use the payment type.” > Walmart’s upgraded pay-by-bank offering will be rolled out in 2025. The transactions will occur over bank technology provider Fiserv’s NOW Network, which integrates with The Clearing House’s Real Time Payments network and the Federal Reserve’s FedNow. Until now, large retailers hesitated to launch real time payment options because many banks were not connected to an instant settlement system, meaning their customers would not be able to use the product. NOW Network aims to connect to as many banks as possible to reach 100% of deposit accounts by combining its own network with RTP and FedNow. Walmart Plans Instant Bank Payments, Cutting Out Card Networks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41593450 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41593450 - September 2024 (3 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49433164 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49433164 (citations) (as of this comment, there are 100+ instant payment systems live across the world; we should assume that all countries will eventually have an instant payment system, or integrate with someone else's) https://www.pymnts.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/PYMNTS-Intelligence-Real-Time-Payments-World-Map-September-2026.pdf https://www.pymnts.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/PYMNTS-Int... [pdf] (September 2026 revision)

SpicyLemonZest 1mo ago
> 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.
- toomuchtodo 1mo ago
  Works fine based on the evidence. It’s a maximum SLA, not every transaction. The economics are too compelling to ignore. Fast enough.
- pocksuppet 1mo ago
  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".
lxgr 1mo 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.
- toomuchtodo 1mo ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49632470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49632470
  - lxgr 1mo ago
    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.
    - toomuchtodo 1mo ago
      > 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)

SpicyLemonZest 1mo ago

> 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.

toomuchtodo 1mo ago
Works fine based on the evidence. It’s a maximum SLA, not every transaction. The economics are too compelling to ignore. Fast enough.
pocksuppet 1mo ago
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".

lxgr 1mo 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.

toomuchtodo 1mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49632470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49632470
- lxgr 1mo ago
  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.
  - toomuchtodo 1mo ago
    > 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)