Notice that this is entirely a regulatory problem. Do we imagine that entrepreneurs in the US can't produce the technology for a good payments system? That's not the reason. The reason is that anyone who wants to build it gets squished by the regulators captured by Visa and Mastercard because they don't want anything that would take away their cut.

Zelle made it through by having various limitations that make it hard for it to displace credit cards, and even that took decades before it happened.

> You can't use a debit card because of transaction limits and lack of consumer protections.

My debit card is branded Visa so it has the Visa Zero Liability protections, and I can raise the purchase limit from $6k to $25k using the app.

>In 2026 it is virtually impossible to quickly move money from one account to another because every single bit of it has to pass through the US Federal Reserve's ancient systems

Which is why FedNow went live in 2024. In 2025 it already completed processing of $864 billion in transactions in real time.

https://www.frbservices.org/resources/financial-services/fed...

2026 is already looking to exceed $1 trillion in transactions.

Zelle is not actually instantaneous. It is a frontend to ACH. The clearing of transactions still takes days.