The Innovation of FedNow: Advancing the US Payment Landscape

The innovation of FedNow: Advancing the US payment landscape

As the momentum for real-time payment accelerates in the US marketplace, the Federal Reserve has been preparing to roll out the FedNow services since 2017. FedNow will enable all the banks, regardless of size, to offer instantly available funds and real-time payments to their respective customers within 20 seconds.

Unlike consumer-facing apps like Venmo, PayPal, or Zelle, which are being in use for instant peer-to-peer payments, FedNow won’t be an application per se. It’s a payment infrastructure enabling FI’s to move money instantly.

Contents of this blog:

Beneficiaries

Who can leverage FedNow Services?

FedNow Workflow

What is the workflow of FedNow?

We are certified

Tie with ECS Fin for FedNow launch

Who can leverage FedNow Services?

At its core, FedNow is an interbank instant payment infrastructure developed by Federal Reserve Bank in the interest of enabling banks, credit unions, FI and service providers across the U.S. to provide safe and efficient instant payment services.

What’s the workflow of FedNow?

FedNow’s payment flow is akin to other payment rails in the US, starting with the involved parties: a payer, the payer’s financial institution, the FedNow network, a payee, and the payee’s financial institution to complete the settlement cycle.

Step 1: Initiation: The Payer initiates a payment by sending a message to its FI through an end-user interface outside the FedNow Service.
Step 2: Payer's FI validates the payment as per its internal requirements and messages and will submit an ISO message (pacs.008) to the FedNow Service.
Step 3: The FedNow service validates the payment messages and sends the payment message contents to the payee's FI for confirmation.
Step 4: Payee's FI sends a " accept/decline " request to the FedNow Service.
Step 5: FedNow Service settles the payment, debiting and crediting the master accounts of the Payee’s FI and Payer’s FI.
Step 6: The FedNow Service sends an acknowledgment to the Payer's FI and advice to the Payee's FI - notifying that the Federal Reserve Banks settled the payment message.
Step 7: Payee's FI will send the notification to the payee for the fund's availability immediately after Step 6.
Step 8: The Payee's FI has the option to send a message through the FedNow Service to the Payer's FI indicating that the payment has been posted.
Step 9: The Payer’s FI will notify the Payee’s FI that the funds have been credited.

Simplify your FedNow journey with ECS!

Tie with ECS for FedNow launch

Participants considering FedNow will need to make decisions about significant changes to their internal technology infrastructure, services and software ahead of implementation. Being one of the first service providers to complete FedNow Certification, ECS will lead the way in advancing modern payments. We understand that there is pressure to provide more robust and accessible payment services to businesses of various sizes and customers. The larger and smaller banks must bear different constraints with the new product development-internal resource availability, technology, core updates, and varied customer demands.

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