The Federal Reserve announced the 57 “early adopter” organizations that have been certified to use the FedNow real-time payment system ahead of its launch in late July.
These 57 organizations, including both financial institutions and service providers, completed formal testing and certification necessary to use the FedNow service upon launch or shortly after, with other financial institutions ready to send and receive transactions and service providers ready to support transaction activity.
This group of early adopters is performing final trial runs on the service to confirm their readiness to support live transactions over the new instant-payments infrastructure. The early adopters include 41 financial institutions participating as senders, receivers and/or correspondents supporting settlement, 15 service providers processing on behalf of participants, and the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
“We are on track for the FedNow Service launch, with a strong cohort of financial institutions and service providers of all sizes in the process of completing the final round of readiness testing,” Ken Montgomery, first vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and FedNow program executive, said. “With go-live nearing, financial institutions and their industry partners should be confident in moving forward with plans to join the network of organizations participating in the FedNow Service.”
Over time, the Fed expects financial institutions to adopt and build on the FedNow Service with the goal of offering new instant payments services to their customers. Montgomery noted that as a platform for innovation, the FedNow Service is intended to support multiple use cases, such as account-to-account transfer, request for payment, bill pay, and many others.
In addition to working with early adopters, the Federal Reserve continues to work with and onboard financial institutions planning to join later in 2023 and beyond, as the initial step to growing a robust network aiming to reach all 10,000 U.S. financial institutions.
This initial group of 57 participants include large national banks, including Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, and U.S. Bank, as well as numerous regional and community banks and credit unions.