A retail trade association as well as Target Corp. have endorsed the Federal Reserve’s planned FedNow real-time gross settlement service.
In a letter posted last week on the official FedNow comment site, the Washington, D.C.-based Retail Industry Leaders Association said “over the past decades RILA has seen competition and innovation in the payments ecosystem stifled by a small group of legacy players. This is one of the key reasons RILA supports the Federal Reserve’s involvement.”
“Legacy players” presumably means big banks as well as bank card networks Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc., with which many retailers have had legal and political fights, though the letter signed by RILA senior vice president of government affairs Austen Jensen doesn’t mention any company by name. A RILA spokesperson, however, tells Digital Transactions News by email that “your interpretation is correct.”