The Future of Retail Payments in the United States
The U.S. Fed announced the core features of its new FedNow end-to-end 24/7 fast payments service, set to go live in 2023 or 2024. It is seen as “a catalyst for innovation in the market by providing a neutral platform on which the private sector can build to offer safe, efficient instant payment services to users across the country.” It will operate alongside the private-sector Clearing House RTP instant payment service. The Fed will take a phased approach to service implementation, with the first one to provide the following core clearing and settlement features.
- Banks will be able proactively to set parameters that limit transaction activity in FedNow Sbased on banks’ knowledge of their own customers. The Fed will also explore other anti-fraud tools, including centralized monitoring by FedNow.
- The Fed will develop a liquidity management tool that allows a participant with excess funds in its FRB account to transfer funds to another participant who needs the funds on weekends, holidays, and after hours. Moreover, we will make the liquidity management tool available for instant payments broadly, including to banks that choose not to participate in the FedNow Service. Participants in a private-sector instant payments service will be able to use the tool to transfer funds from their Federal Reserve accounts to the joint account at a Reserve Bank that backs settlement in that service.
- The FedNow Service will be interoperable with the RTP service to accomplish the goal of nationwide reach for instant payments. In part to facilitate interoperability, FedNow Service will use the widely accepted ISO 20022 message standard and other industry best practices.
After launch the Fed will explore the best ways to support alias-based payments, whereby a payment can be sent to a recipient using an alias, such as an email address or phone number, rather than requiring an account number.
CBInsight’s State of Fintech report reveals some opportunities for crypto companies
Fintech providers have experienced a massive uptick in demand as the coronavirus sparks unprecedented levels of growth in the eCommerce sector, according to CBInsights. It estimates that eCommerce could represent 27% of U.S. retail sales in 2020, two-thirds higher than in 2019. One success story mentioned in the report is that of Shopify, which generated revenue of $714.3m in the second quarter of 2020, 97% higher than the same period in 2019. Over this three-month period, the number of new stores on Shopify rose by 71% as brick-and-mortar retailers aimed to speedily build an online presence. Interestingly, Shopify is one of the few eCommerce platforms that allows merchants to receive crypto payments.
Singapore, Australia formalize digital economy pact
Singapore and Australia have formally signed off on a digital economy agreement following months of negotiation. It marks the second such pact, following a first with New Zealand and Chile, that the Singapore government has inked covering several areas of cooperation, including cross-border data flow, digital payments, and artificial intelligence (AI).
Avalanche consensus, like Nakamoto consensus, is a probabilistic protocol. Just as Nakamoto traded off a small chance in probability for performance, Avalanche embraces probability to make the chance of error just as microscopic (and better yet, like all parts of Avalanche, configurable by validators on custom subnets).
Posted from Diigo: https://www.diigo.com/user/kiffmeister/Fintech