“We have not launched a new payment rail since RTP, and the Fed hasn’t launched a new payment solution for a handful of decades. So this is a major shift.”
Eric Foust, vice president of banking partnerships North America at Trustly, told PYMNTS that once July’s launch of FedNow becomes official, there’s a roadmap ahead that will see a logical progression of adherents and use cases.
Asked by PYMNTS what the initial rollout may look like in the first weeks and months after the initial debut of instant transfers, Foust said that there will be a “large concentration of smaller regional banks, community banks, and credit unions.” These banks, he said, have had prior experience with The Clearing House’s RTP network, and will use some of that experience to scale into FedNow’s functionalities.
At present, there are two types of payment transactions enabled by the Federal Reserve’s FedNow: credit transfers and requests for payment.
“I’m willing to bet the farm that within the first 12 months of FedNow being live, we’re going to see the mass majority of transaction volume occurring through the credit transfer solution,” he said. And specifically within credit transfers, B2B transactions will find firm footing. It follows that account-to-account transfers will grow across FedNow — just as had been seen with RTP.
However, with FedNow, there is no debit functionality, which means that consumers will need to originate a request for payment to move money into their wallet account. According to Foust, “The consumer would go to the wallet provider. They originate that request to themselves, and then they have to go through and approve or push money from their bank into their wallet in order for that to take traction and really be part of the FedNow ecosystem.”
While FedNow is expected to revolutionize the way we manage our finances, it’s important to note that slower payment methods like ACH and wire transfers may still have a place in certain use cases or transactions. Foust contended that no one payment solution will be completely displaced by implementation of FedNow, although instant payments will cannibalize some of the current activities.
“I don’t think any one payment solution is going to be completely displaced by rolling out FedNow, but I do think it’s going to cannibalize some of the current activities,” he said. He noted that, generally speaking, if the payment is less than $500,000, and the payment is being sent domestically between banks that can leverage FedNow, the instant payments rail will be the cheaper option. Using FedNow for these high-value (usually commercial) transactions will grow once the Fed boosts the transaction limits from $500,000 to $1 million and more.
FedNow also may herald a watershed moment in the funding of digital wallets, said Foust. Historically, there have been two sides to managing those wallets, he illustrated: On one side, there’s the payout, where the consumer has money in their wallet, and may desire to “pay out” from that wallet, pushing funds to their main/primary checking accounts. That feature functionality will ride over the credit transfer rails.
The other side to managing a wallet is the “pay-in portion,” where consumers move money into their wallet account. With FedNow, he said, “there’s no concept of debit,” which means that users have to originate a request for payments (RFP). The consumer thus has to originate the request with their wallet provider and approve or push money from their bank into their wallet in order for that transaction to go through. Given the friction inherent in the process — where there’s the need to validate consumers are who they say they are (and the transactions are irrevocable) — there may not be much traction here, he said.
Trustly, he said, is on the RFP “working committee” with the Fed, in a bid to address the user experience concerns and to help make it easier to choose RFP over other payment options.
“If we can address these things,” he said, RFP will be a valid use case to really get traction and volume and funding of the digital wallets … we’re a couple of years away from that reality.”
Looking ahead, Foust predicted that in the future, there will be a fully funded and interoperable range of choices with intelligent routing in the mix. He believes that interoperability between financial institutions enrolled with different payment networks is an aspirational direction for the industry. Additionally, he said that payment limits on both FedNow and RTP will continue to increase as the networks mature and evolve.
Articul8 has launched a family of GenAI models built to optimize supply chain, manufacturing and industrial process operations.
The new A8-SupplyChain models are domain-specific and have the deep contextual understanding needed to autonomously translate complex technical documentation into structured, actionable sequences, the company said in a Friday (April 4) press release.
“We built A8-SupplyChain specifically to tackle the problems that general-purpose GenAI can’t: delivering accurate, transparent and fully traceable reasoning through complex technical documentation and real-world workflows,” Articul8 Founder and CEO Arun Subramaniyan said in the release. “This is not just another model — it’s a fully autonomous system built specifically for mission-critical environments.”
The A8-SupplyChain models support complex enterprise production environments and platforms, including customers and partners, according to the release.
They can use unstructured data, including PDFs, engineering diagrams, maintenance logs, quality systems and structured tables, the release said.
Because they are trained on high-fidelity technical documentation, the models deliver AI-driven recommendations without extensive manual customization, per the release.
“With A8-SupplyChain, we’re giving aerospace and defense leaders something new: a fully orchestrated system that doesn’t just generate answers — it understands, adapts and drives outcomes,” Subramaniyan said in the release. “This is the next leap forward in enterprise AI — intelligent systems that operate at scale, with context, precision and trust built in.”
Enterprises are turning to AI to automate not just repetitive tasks but also more complex processes like compliance monitoring, fraud detection and supply chain optimization, PYMNTS reported in January.
Articul8 was established in January 2024 by Intel and DigitalBridge Group, which joined forces to create it as an independent company that provides enterprise customers with a secure and vertically optimized GenAI software platform.
The company’s platform enables business to harness the power of AI while keeping their data secure; offers a turnkey GenAI software platform that delivers speed, security and cost-efficiency to large enterprise customers; and supports a range of hybrid infrastructure alternatives, allowing customers to choose cloud, on-premises or hybrid deployment options.
Today, in addition to the new A8-SupplyChain, Articul8 offers domain-specific models for various industries, including energy and semiconductor, according to the Friday press release.
