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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36801491

https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/about....

While true FedNow instant payments went live a few months ago, there is an adoption curve and a lot of banks and credit unions have to update their back office and risk systems to support instant payments. It will eventually obsolete checks. You can move up to $100k at a time today (and $500k in the future) for about five cents (bank/financial institution charge, most won’t charge you, some might).

If your bank doesn’t support FedNow, call them and tell them you want it.

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What's stopping banks from increasing this charge to $10 or $50 or a percentage, on top of the Fed charge? Because if they can, I'm sure they will.

Competition. Any bank can plug into FedNow for $25/month. It is unlikely banks raise rates, Zelle is free for example at every bank that supports it. I’d also expect Congress and the Fed to stamp that shit out quick considering this will eventually replace paper checks and ACH. FedNow is intended to operate on a cost recovery model.

Does fednow cover all the day to day uses of checks? Can I hand someone a token of some sort that they later redeem?

It does not replace gift cards or where you want the person to have to redeem the funds transfer at a later time, although one could build such an escrow service I suppose. SLA for delivery is no more than 20 seconds from when a transfer is initiated.

When we give gifts via stationary cards, I print a QR code sticker to place in the card that fires a notification when scanned, which lets us know to Zelle the gift because the card has been read. Could be productized for sure.

> When we give gifts via stationary cards, I print a QR code sticker to place in the card that fires a notification when scanned, which lets us know to Zelle the gift

Why not just put cash in with the card? It seems much easier and more convenient.

Too much risk of being stolen or lost in transit. Literally everyone in my network has Zelle or Wise for sending them fiat. We might have different ideas of easy and assurances.

> Too much risk of being stolen or lost in transit.

In my experience, that risk is very, very low (at least in the US). But yes, if we're talking large amounts of money, I wouldn't put it in a card. That said, I included $500 in cash in a package last month, so my risk tolerance is likely unusually high for this sort of thing.

> Literally everyone in my network has Zelle or Wise for sending them fiat.

Ah, that's a bit different (do those services charge a fee, though?). In my social circle, there are only two people (that I know of) who already uses such apps. Everyone else would be pretty annoyed, and probably wouldn't bother to scan the QR code.

It's interesting how much social norms can vary from group to group.

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