was looking into some EU payments legislature and rediscovered the following delightful (that doesn’t sound sincere but istg it is) congressional research service whitepaper from 2019, U.S. Payment System Policy Issues: Faster Payments and Innovation.

this quote initially caught my eye: “In August 2019, the Fed announced plans to create an interbank real-time payments (RTP) system by 2023 or 2024.”

now that it’s 2021, i’m really interested to see how that plan evolves (and more broadly, how instant payments shape up) in the U.S. over the next few years. i’m curious what the ramifications of an RTP will be for TPPs like PayPal, and how the fed entering the game will shape related payments legislature (especially around high-risk payment processing). i’m also trying to be optimistic that, from an engineering standpoint, we’ll end up with less kafkaesque interface solutions than (for example) the xml apis i was dealing with from experian as recently as 2018. lol. tbd!