U.S. banks can now connect to the FedNow Service in record time to provide innovative instant payment services to customers, ensuring recipients have full access to funds immediately, allowing for greater financial flexibility when making time-sensitive payments.

The FedNow Service is the new instant payment infrastructure developed by the Federal Reserve that allows U.S. financial institutions to provide safe and efficient instant payment services. With more than 50 financial institutions already participating, businesses and individuals can send and receive instant payments in real-time, around the clock, every day of the year.

“U.S. banks have an ongoing challenge to balance their IT priorities,” comments Donal Fleming, CTO at Icon Solutions. “On the one hand they have near-term requirements like FedNow compliance and ISO20022. On the other they have long-term strategies around driving innovation, improving CX and reducing costs. Often, the pressures of the former delay the latter as banks have realised that the home-built or vendor sourced applications they’ve used for decades are unsustainable and lack agility.”

U.S. banks can work with Icon Solutions to perform a FedNow readiness assessment to understand the requirements, build the business case and define a strategy for integration in line with their objectives. Complete with its latest scheme pack for FedNow, the IPF is enabling successful payments transformation for banks worldwide.

IPF, a low-code, cloud-native, open-source framework, allows banks to develop their own payment processing solutions. Scheme packs enable IPF customers to quickly integrate with various payment schemes without any development work, significantly reducing time to market and integration costs.

Importantly for U.S. banks, Icon’s low-code software development kit (SDK) enables them to continue working with existing solution integrators to develop, implement and customise their solutions. This unique approach, different from traditional vendors, enables banks to leverage Icon’s payments strategy and architecture pedigree while maintaining control, flexibility and agility to independently address their specific business requirements over time, while minimising vendor technology lock-in.

“Banks are often too dependent on solution vendors and can’t offer the latest functionality to customers quickly,” adds Donal. “With growing competition from other banks and fintechs, U.S. banks need partners that give them more control over payment solutions, not less. These are complex challenges and we are here to help banks meet them head on. And with IPF banks can take on scheme compliance at pace, allowing them to move on other priorities that cut costs and grow revenues.”

Icon has provided expert services and technology to leading banks and payments companies for over 15 years. Born out of frustration with legacy infrastructure, IPF combines this extensive payments, technical and integration expertise and experience, and is increasingly the solution of choice to simplify banking transformation.