The Fed-chartered initiative, comprised of the over 500 Faster and Secure Payments Task Force members, has been tasked with representing, addressing, and assessing improved payments systems. The Dwolla proposal offers an alternative to the 40-year-old $40 trillion bank transfer system that can take up to four days to transfer funds.

“The success of the Fed’s initiative represents an unprecedented awareness of the potential returns offered by a more secure, modern, and instantaneous payment system,” said Dwolla CEO and founder Ben Milne. “The submission reveals how FiSync works today and could work tomorrow. It's a powerful way to strengthen market fit, collaborate with other platforms, and accelerate adoption in the emerging faster payment market.”

Since 2012, financial institutions (FIs) have enabled real-time transfers using FiSync, a specialized communication and interoperability protocol for banks and credit unions. The system ensures availability of good funds via a credit push model, executes real-time transfers in seconds—not days, and extends faster payment services and capabilities to nearly any device, platform, or use case.

Key benefits of the proposed solution

The faster payment proposal expounds on the capabilities and services of Dwolla’s existing FiSync platform to offer a seamless comprehensive faster payments solution.

Future-proof, interoperable: will be agnostic to settlement path, operator, existing banking system, and standards to help ensure compatibility with FIs, today and tomorrow

Access and monetization: accounts for API access via FIs to enable faster payment system access, capabilities, and services with platforms and applications; and/or build new revenue streams or improve existing products and services at the FI (e.g., the ability to append additional metadata to a transaction).

Data Protection: strong standards-based cryptography will ensure message integrity, enforced Transport Layer Security (TLS) will protect data in-transit and Authenticated Encryption will protect data at-rest.

Additionally, proposed system components will enable pre-authorizations, on-boarding on first use, and fraud sharing, while deterring fragmentation and promoting secure interoperability. Governance suggestions in the proposal layout a payment landscape that ensures and promotes interoperability, access, inclusion, and specialization.

The Faster Payments Task Force

The Federal Reserve’s Strategies for Improving the U.S. Payment System established the Faster Payments Task Force in support of its strategy to identify effective approach(es) for implementing a safe, ubiquitous, faster payments capability in the United States. The Faster Payments Task Force objectives are to:
• Represent views on future needs for a safe, ubiquitous faster payments solution
• Assess alternative approach(es) for faster payment capabilities
• Address other issues deemed important to the successful development of effective approaches

The proposal process allows task force members to submit comprehensive faster payment solution proposals to be analyzed using 36 effectiveness criteria identified by the task force. Both the proposals and assessments will be provided to the full task force later this year for review and comment, prior to their publication in early 2017.