Ten years after the UK launched Faster Payments, the US is partway through the launch of a real-time payments network run by The Clearing House (TCH), a private corporation owned by 25 of the largest banks in the country. It will be the first new rails in electronic payments in four decades.
For years, the largest banks blocked efforts to move toward real-time payments, and unlike the UK regulator, the Fed did not insist American banks move to faster payments. In 2012, the big banks blocked an effort by NACHA to go to same-day Automated Clearing House (ACH) payments. In 2014, the Fed hired McKinsey to do a study of real-time and began a series of consultations over several years that concluded with a list of desirable attributes in a payments system and a call for proposals.