I want to send money between accounts I own in real time. I want to deposit money in brokerage accounts in real time. I want to stop connecting my accounts to services like Wise to make money transfers. I want to pay off a credit card and have that payment clear instantly. FedNow could enable all of this.

Purchases are an afterthought. A system like Brazil's Pix could be rolled out on top of FedNow.

> For purchases, the US has debit cards and Zelle.

Both are a very poor alternative to something like UPI or even EU-style bank transfers as a mass retail payment system. Cards are orders of magnitudes more expensive; Zelle has no standardized interface and is explicitly geared only towards P2P Payments, lest it cannibalizes the banks' golden goose, i.e. payment cards.

> same-day ACH is widely used, and again the delay allows more efficient netting.

Importantly, customer-initiated/"push" ACH is largely not a thing in the US, unlike in many other countries. This is what people unfamiliar with the US landscape often have a hard time understanding.

> A very important point is that debit cards offer consumer protections (chargebacks for unsatisfactory goods). FedNow, Zelle, wires, ACH do not and people have lost money by scams this way.

That's the crux of it: The US seems to be culturally unwilling to accept the risks (fraud) and rewards (practically free P2P and B2C payments) that come with a customer-initiated/push payment system.

Instant for USA banks doesn’t mean instant for USA banking customers, and deposits can be held per fed and banking policies for variety of reasons especially larger deposits. Also, it’s increasingly common to have financial routing intermediaries playing by different rules and non-insured financial accounts that result in no coverage when the money is spent/lost elsewhere and not returned to end customers. Take a look at Zelle case in New York and the nearly $100M customer funds missing with the Synapse bankruptcy.

My point is that these properly designed national systems should also be considered in the USA as well, and not dismissed because something is kind of working right now with a long list of exceptions to a good and safe experience.

Most other countries low value real time systems are also net settled (as opposed to RTGS systems which as the name suggests, use gross settlement).

Is this correct - A very important point is that debit cards offer consumer protections (chargebacks for unsatisfactory goods) - I was under the impression that only credit cards offer chargeback protection?

The Clearing House owns both ACH (automated clearing house)and RTP (real-time payments).

https://www.theclearinghouse.org/payment-systems/rtp

Zelle is pseudo real time. The settlement (mostly/often?) happens by ACH.

https://www.cjsoi.com/articles/fednow-vs-rtp-vs-ach

Why do you argue with fanatics? Even your sensible and informative post gets downvoted.