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No that isn't surprising because those were new buildouts of brand new systems that didn't exist before. In a lot of cases, those countries skipped over a whole bunch of in between phases, like how China skipped over a bunch of telecom infrastructure buildout and so managed to avoid a lot of similar issues there.

The US digitalized it's financial industries the earliest and so it has the most pre-existing infrastructure to maintain and past decisions to deal with the consequences of. The finance industry was quite literally the first major industry to computerize in the US, most other countries got started decades later due to a lot of factors but mostly either poverty, being behind the iron curtain, or lack of access to reliable computers.

It's always more difficult when you have millions of active users and SLAs to abide by, and regulators and auditors that are aware of every possible thing that can go wrong and that they should be asking questions about.

This article doesn't really go into much detail, but this shouldn't be surprising. IT in financial services is the most insanely complicated, heavily regulated, mishmash of every technology under the sun going back about 60 years that it's a miracle it works as well as it does.

This is also why fintech/insuretech/etc startups tend to fail so spectacularly...because in almost every case they severely underestimate the difficulty and don't understand the enormous scale and expense of the past several decades of that were carried out by established and already very profitable companies.

It's incredibly hard to justify getting rid of something that already provably works (what every single person that thinks we should flip a switch and get instant payments is advocating). There is a tendency to portray financial IT services as being risk-averse...there is maybe some truth to that but I'd characterize it more like a situation where those on the outside are simply not aware of the enormous amount of risk already being taken just to make minor improvements to existing systems with 50+ years of business rules encoded into them.

For all of those reasons, FedNow looks to me like it's actually been a fantastic success so far. I'm not sure what the WSJ was expecting to see. They aren't (to my knowledge) hundreds of billions over budget and a half decade past due...that is about as good as one could have hoped for.