On Septem­ber 10^th 2013, the Fed­eral Reserve Banks star­ted a con­sulta­tion exer­cise in pur­suit of a bet­ter pay­ment sys­tem for the USA.

In the con­sulta­tion paper launch­ing the pro­cess, the Fed­eral Reserve Banks lis­ted five desired outcomes:

1. Key improve­ments for the future state of the pay­ment sys­tem have been col­lect­ively iden­ti­fied and embraced by pay­ment par­ti­cipants, and mater­ial pro­gress has been made in imple­ment­ing them.
2. A ubi­quit­ous elec­tronic solution(s) for mak­ing retail pay­ments exists that does not require the sender to know the bank account num­ber of the recip­i­ent. Con­firm­a­tion of good funds noti­fic­a­tion that the pay­ment has been made. Funds will be deb­ited from the payer and made avail­able in near real time to the payee.
3. Over the long run, greater elec­tron­i­fic­a­tion and pro­cess improve­ments have reduced the aver­age end-to-end (soci­etal) costs of pay­ment trans­ac­tions and res­ul­ted in innov­at­ive pay­ment ser­vices that deliver improved value to con­sumers, busi­nesses, and governments.
4. Con­sumers and busi­nesses have bet­ter choice in mak­ing con­veni­ent, cost- effect­ive, and timely cross-border pay­ments from and to the United States.
5. The Fed­eral Reserve Banks have col­lab­or­ated, as appro­pri­ate, with the industry to pro­mote the secur­ity of the pay­ment sys­tem from end-to-end amid a rap­idly evolving tech­no­logy and threat envir­on­ment. In addi­tion, pub­lic con­fid­ence in the secur­ity of Fed­eral Reserve fin­an­cial ser­vices has remained high.

In our response (https://fedpaymentsimprovement.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Alun_Thomas-Kalypton_Limited-121313.pdf ), Kalypton noted that the tech­nical require­ments implied by these desired out­comes could be delivered in much less than the anti­cip­ated 10 year times­cale but that there might be lim­ited incent­ive for some industry incum­bents to do so.