Welcome to your Tuesday brain‑espresso. Sip these seven-day highlights and stride into the first meeting sounding like you main-line ISO 20022 for breakfast.
Table of Contents
1 | Headlines
Visa Earnings as the company prints cash, then ploughs US $30 bn into itself.
Visa earnings and Q2 net revenue leapt 9% and cross-border volume kept humming, so management unveiled a record US $30 bn buy-back program. That’s bigger than Discover’s entire market cap and telegraphs supreme confidence that tariffs-driven wobbliness won’t dent swipe-fees any time soon.
FedNow fills the dance floor.
The Fed’s real-time rail now boasts >1 300 participating institutions in all 50 states – 95% of them community banks and CUs. Daily value is already averaging US $540 m, and the network will double its single-payment cap to US $1 m this summer. Payroll, escrow and wallet top-ups are the early killer apps.
Coinbase + PayPal shove PYUSD into the payments arena.
Coinbase waived all fees on PayPal’s stablecoin and added instant USD redemption, betting that merchants will soon settle directly in PYUSD instead of clunky card rails. Congress edging toward a stablecoin bill gives the move political tail-wind.
Fiserv feels the swipe-slowdown.
First-quarter processing revenue in its merchant unit fell 9 %, spooking investors and knocking the stock 7 % pre-market. Shoppers are trimming discretionary spend and tariffs aren’t helping – an early canary for acquirer earnings.
PayPal beats, but branded checkout still drags.
EPS crushed estimates (US $1.33 vs US $1.16), yet TPV growth in branded checkout remains stuck in first gear. Management is pinning its turnaround on Fastlane one-click guest checkout and passkey logins, ambitious goals in a world where Apple and Google own the last-mile.
2 | Deep-dive upgrade: FedNow in the real world
Where is it today:
| Metric | At Launch (Jul 2024) | Now (Apr 2025) | CAGR-ish | “So-what?” |
| Participating FIs | 126 | 1,342 | ≈1,000 % | Reach now covers ≈73 % of retail deposits – enough to justify corporate integration projects. |
| Avg Daily Value | – | US $540 m | – | Liquidity desks can treat FedNow like a miniature wire system for off-cycle payroll, escrow and earned-wage access. |
| Average Ticket | US $22k | Corporate-sized, not latte-sized, indicating early traction in B2B not P2P. | ||
| Ceiling per Payment | US $500k | US $1m (June 2025) | +100% | Pulls auto loans, insurance disbursements and SMB supplier pay into scope. |
Use-cases that are actually live:
- Off-cycle payroll & earned-wage access – ADP, Paychex and a string of fintechs are pushing instant credits so staff can cover Friday emergencies on a Wednesday night. Small FIs join via FedNow’s service-provider interface rather than coding ISO 20022 messages from scratch.
- Marketplace payouts – Platforms like Turo and Etsy are piloting “instant cash-out” so sellers receive funds minutes after an order ships instead of waiting on ACH next-day settlement.
- Real-estate escrow – Title agents in Florida used FedNow hours before a hurricane shut branches, releasing keys while wire rooms were dark.
| FedNow | RTP (TCH) | |
|---|---|---|
| FIs live | 1,342 | ~450 |
| Daily value | US $540m | US $1.44 bn |
| Per Payment Cap | US $1 m (soon) | US $10 m (live) |
| Request for Payment | Roadmap Q4 2025 | Live since 2019 |
Road-blocks still ahead
- Alias directory – no universal “$cashtag” yet, so consumer P2P remains Zelle’s turf.
- Fraud allocation – mid-tier banks fear instant and irrevocable; the Fed is still tweaking the “configurable delay” feature and Reg E liability guidelines.
- Interoperability politics – RTP insists on its own settlement and data fields; billers will keep sitting on the fence until a converter or formal bridge emerges.
Bottom-line: At the current onboarding run-rate of ≈40 banks a week, FedNow could clear 3 000 institutions by end-2026, forcing corporates to add an instant-push option to every pay flow or look stodgy next to Brazil’s Pix.
3 | Word of the week: RTP (Request to Pay)
Definition
An ISO 20022 message that lets a payee pull funds via a real-time rail—think “invoice that pops up in your banking app, ready for one-tap approval.”
Why the cognoscenti care
- Fraud armour: Customer explicitly authorises each debit; no account numbers flying around.
- Working-capital magic: Merchants get immediate confirmation (or failure) instead of a two-day ACH shrug.
- Cross-rail glue: RFP is the missing link to make FedNow, RTP and cards interoperate for bill-pay and gig-economy payouts.
Who’s live
NPCI UPI—collect requests power India’s e-commerce COD conversions.
4 | Your payment fact for the week
The SMS Coke that uncorked mobile money
Helsinki, 1997. Sonera engineers bolt a GSM module inside a Coca-Cola vending machine outside the company cafeteria. Thirsty passers-by text a four-digit code to a short-number; the machine’s modem pings the mobile switch; a can rolls out; 8 Finnish markka (≈US $1.50 then) appears on the next phone bill. One third of all drinks in the first fortnight were bought this way.
Why it mattered
- Carrier billing prototype. The soda proved telcos could act as de-facto acquirers, clearing micropayments long before Apple or Google dreamt of app stores.
- Hardware hack to business model. The original goal was simply to auto-phone the refiller when cans ran low; charging for product via SMS was a happy accident that spun into a new revenue stream.
- Global copy-cats. By 1999 Norwegians could buy cinema tickets the same way; by 2001 Australians were texting for pizza.
Tech nuts-and-bolts
| Step | What happened behind the curtain |
|---|---|
| 1 – Text sent | User SMS hits Sonera’s SMS-C; message includes machine ID. |
| 2 – Auth & charge | SMS-C passes ID to mediation platform; billing engine posts a premium-SMS charge to subscriber account. |
| 3 – Vend | Packet via GSM to the machine’s onboard board flicks the solenoid; inventory counter updates. |
| 4 – Settlement | Telco remits net proceeds (after 15–30 % clip) to Coca-Cola distributor weekly. |
Lasting legacy
- The experiment legitimised “charge-to-carrier” as a payments rail, now a US $54 bn market for digital content.
- It set the UX north-star: tap phone, get stuff instantly. Everything from NFC wallets to QR super-apps chases that same dopamine pop.
- It reminds us innovation often begins with a janky prototype and a thirsty engineer.
So next time someone claims Apple Pay invented mobile payments, just whisper “Dial-a-Coke” and watch the history rewrite itself.