With the FedNow instant payment transaction limit set to rise from $1 million to $10 million this month, following the RTP network’s increase in February, Dave Scola, US Chief Executive of Form3, explores the potential impact on companies, payment providers, and the resilience and competitiveness of the US payments landscape.
This year, the Federal Reserve Financial Services (FRFS) announced it will increase the FedNow Service network transaction limit from $1 million to $10 million in response to growing commercial demand, effective from November 2025.
The move follows the Real-Time Payments (RTP) network, which increased its own transaction limit from $1 million to $10 million in February 2025.
Businesses are now sending larger, more time-sensitive payments in real time, and expectations for speed, reliability, and transparency are rising just as quickly.
This signal of maturation underscores how quickly the US instant payments ecosystem is scaling, but more importantly, how crucial resilience and interoperability will be as adoption accelerates.
With Europe and South America having led the way in instant payments, now is the US’s chance to close the gap.
Coexistence, not competition
No conversation about real-time payments in the US is complete without comparing FedNow to The Clearing House’s RTP network. Some frame it as a rivalry, while others argue the reality is more nuanced.
RTP remains the more mature and widely adopted network, especially for consumer-facing flows like earned wage access and brokerage transfers. However, FedNow is gaining traction among institutions prioritizing higher-value and time-sensitive B2B payments and transactions requiring liquidity management and risk visibility.
Both networks serve different segments. The long-term opportunity lies not in picking winners but in building connective tissue across them, including common messaging formats, fraud signals, and identity layers that allow banks and fintechs to deliver a unified experience, regardless of the underlying rail.
Technology is a crucial factor in creating this connection, and with fintechs providing intelligent routing capabilities, financial institutions do not have to concern themselves with building two different rails.
Resilience is the real challenge
As the US enters a new phase of instant payments adoption, the focus must shift from competition to connectivity, resilience, and trust.
This year marked a major moment in the evolution of US payments: the successful ISO 20022 migration of the Fedwire Funds Service. After years of planning and preparation, the cutover went smoothly, an impressive feat given the complexity of the change and the scale of the ecosystem involved.
This is a milestone that supports future interoperability across rails.
And with the FedNow transaction limit increase and more participants joining, resilience is becoming the defining test of instant payments in the US. In recent years, cloud outages have wreaked havoc on banks’ payments systems, and institutions are more reliant than ever on their cloud service providers (CSPs).
It’s easy to think of cloud outages as purely a technical challenge, but for banks, the impact runs far deeper. When payments fail, reputations suffer, customers lose confidence, and regulators take notice.
Institutions should ask themselves: if our cloud provider suffered a critical failure today, could we continue processing payments seamlessly? If the answer is no, it’s time to reconsider the institution’s approach to resilience.
Building trust with customers
Ultimately, end users don’t care which rail a payment travels on. They care that it’s fast, safe, and always available. For banks, the competitive differentiator is not only access to RTP or FedNow but also having a resilient architecture that uses both intelligently.
To compete in this new environment, banks are embarking on digital strategies, of which cloud adoption is an intrinsic part. The most resilient model for this is a ‘multi-cloud’ strategy.
A multi-cloud approach means distributing workloads across multiple cloud providers, ensuring that no single point of failure can disrupt the entire system.
Mid-sized banks in particular can’t afford to wait. Early adopters gain customer stickiness, new revenue, and reduced fraud losses. Laggards risk disintermediation by fintechs and money-centre banks already offering seamless instant capabilities.
As instant payments become ubiquitous in the US, resilience and the infrastructure that supports them will separate leaders from laggards.
Developing a multi-cloud strategy provides a solid foundation for IT resilience and introduces a wide range of additional advantages, including greater agility, the ability to scale and a range of other benefits.
Looking ahead
Instant payments are no longer a “nice to have”. They’re becoming an expectation from both consumers and businesses. Other regions, such as Europe and South America, have been ahead of the curve, but it’s high time the US catches up.
Coexistence between FedNow and RTP isn’t a weakness; it’s a strategic strength for the US system, ensuring redundancy and innovation. However, success hinges on resilience, interoperability, and trust.
Those that invest early in multi-cloud architectures, intelligent routing, and robust interoperability will not only ensure continuity but also gain a competitive edge in a landscape where speed, reliability, and confidence are non-negotiable.
Dave Scola is the US Chief Executive at payments technology firm, Form3. Scola joined Form3 in 2022 to lead the charge to bring Form3’s platform and capabilities to bear on the US market. He has worked in transaction banking for over 20 years and has joined Form3 from SWIFT, where he was Chief Executive for the Americas, UK, and Ireland with responsibility for the company’s largest relationship as well as its global securities business. Prior to SWIFT, Scola was the Global Head of Financial Institutions at Barclays, responsible for the bank’s correspondent banking, FI trade, flow FX, and liquidity management businesses for FIs. Scola has also worked at Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York in both product and strategy roles and across various products lines including cash, trade finance, custody and corporate trust. Scola holds an MSc in Development Economics from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and a BSFS in International Relations from Georgetown University.