[antihero]

> Can't innovate your way out of a central bank replacing your product.

What about the fact that Visa and Mastercard are accepted internationally pretty much universally for transactions, whereas what you're talking about would be more likely analogous to the UK Faster Payments Service (though state backed). It's fantastic, however for buying a coffee tapping a contactless card that's also accepted in most other countries is much nicer. Perhaps with mobile wallets and being able to scan a QR to pay for stuff or using NFC could be equivalent in ease-of-use.

[toomuchtodo]

I don't hand wave away this use case, but it is a much smaller amount of volume compared to domestic payments. As instant payment services sponsored by central banks roll out, the hurdles become lower for cross currency/international transactions. TransferWise already does a swank job interfacing with antiquated financial infra for cross border transfers and payments, I imagine that you'll see more competitors and possibly even native integration with central bank apps for cross border payments as improvements continue. It's all messages (ISO 20022) on a bus or in queues after all.

[HeadsUpHigh]

My country is heavily pushing for this kind of payment system. Given how bad android security and patching is I wouldn't trust anything involving my phone.

[antihero]

So will this mean we go from having a fairly standard international payment system with two main players (Visa/Mastercard) where anyone from any country can pay for things in pretty much any other country, the same, way, to a situation where every country has it's own (perhaps cheaper) system. How does that work for tourism?

[toomuchtodo]

I assume the traditional cross border payments will stick around until better systems using new instant payment primitives are built. I would not anticipate these user experiences to get worse, only better.

[phonon]

Interac in Canada is doing pretty well...it's not an either/or situation. National low-cost payment networks are pretty easy, and have been helped back artificially in the US.

https://newsroom.interac.ca/interac-by-the-numbers/

[phonon]

*held back

[cosmie]

You don't have to have a global network to have global acceptance - RuPay[1] is a domestic-only network in India, but RuPay cards are accepted internationally via the Discover network. And the Fed seems to be heavily emphasizing interoperability with existing/external financial systems for FedNow, so there's no reason to think that wouldn't extend to interoperability/integration with international partners to extend acceptance internationally.

And even if they don't, siphoning off a huge chunk of domestic-only US transactions will still be a massive blow to Visa and Mastercard's revenue stream. And the ubiquitous nature of FedNow domestically could easily disrupt market dynamics, if/when it reaches a point of saturation where businesses can actively choose to not accept Visa/Mastercard payments. Squeezing their 40-50+% profit margins on top of reducing their revenue, as they're forced to actually be competitive against FedNow.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RuPay

[jccooper]

Casual international use isn't much of a concern for most people in the US.