Secrets of FedNow Success
How a Small Team Navigated FedNow!
Sometimes it's the seemingly insignificant things that matter most!
We were just three...
...Three busy people, a network engineer, a programmer and a developer with the goal of enabling our bank partners to implement the FedNow Instant Payments Service in a cost-effective and secure manner. Of course, we still had our day-jobs to perform so met early and late and on weekends to get the FedNow Service up and running! Our first hurdle was gaining acceptance into the Early Adopter FedNow Service Program. We were an experienced Federal Reserve Bank processor. We had been processing ACH payments for financial institutions for more than thirty (30) years, but we were rebuffed by our regional Federal Reserve Bank. Fortunately, a FedNow Service National Account Representative gave us a chance and that changed everything!
Getting Started
The amount of FedNow Service information to digest appeared overwhelming. We divided it among the three of us and found it wasn't that daunting, however. Fortunately, the FedNow Service Onboarding staff were extremely helpful.
We separated our current network from our new FedNow Service network. Being from Seattle, we chose Azure as our host environment and named our Instant Payments service idebit®! We definitely benefited from our Network Engineer's twenty years of experience in the IT industry, but there was still a lot to learn about FedNow Service networking, especially the certificates and key exchanges in the security realm.
Major Hurdles and Decisions
Learning about Messages
We did not have any experience using Messages for payments.
IBM MQ was new to us
Much of IBM's information was dated and hard to find on the internet.
Naive technology choices
We initially tried to use Ruby and C# for our application. We later switched to Java even though we hadn't used it for 20 years!
Experienced Java Programmer
We brought in an experienced Java programmer to help us with the application. It would take too long be become Java language proficient.
Swift became our best friend.
You simply can't create Messages without it and AI!
The FedNow Service Support Center provided technical support on demand
We wished we had used it more to pass the required Tests for certification.
BOTTOM LINE
The FedNow Service provides abundant information on the 'requirements' to implement the FedNow Service. but the IBM MQ application development is entirely up to the 'Participant'. And, that's where we think we can be of service. If we had known then what we know now, we could have cut our implementation time in half.