Why can Amazon get almost anything in the world to your door faster than your bank can move money? It’s because the Federal Reserve allows banks to sit on your money and profit from that.
Delays of a few days don’t mean much for people who always have a financial cushion. But for the half of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, it costs tens of billions a year. This is why there are more payday lenders and check cashers than McDonalds and Starbucks combined. This is despite the fact that the law actually requires banks to make your money available much faster—it’s just not enforced.
In 1987, Congress required the Fed to reduce the time banks can hold certain types of deposits, like checks, to “as short a time as possible.” Back then, banks physically processed checks, flying them around the country. Today, you can deposit a check on your phone (through a law I helped write) and banks email the image. Technology has changed, but the Fed’s regulations have not.
That’s why I have used a little-known legal procedure, modeled after our First Amendment right, to formally petition the Fed to follow the law. The question is whether anyone can actually hold the Fed accountable.
The consequences of slow payments are profits for banks and costly workarounds for those who can least afford it. Float, the interest earned on money in transit, is one source of profit. But the real profit center created by slow payments is the myriad fees and costly loans charged to those who can’t afford to wait several days for their checks to clear.
Overdraft fees, nearly non-existent in the late 1980s, ballooned to nearly $30 billion a year by 2019. When some banks started giving people access to their money faster, overdraft fees collected by those banks fell by $5 billion per year.
Time makes a massive difference for people living paycheck to paycheck. My research uncovered that 70% of people who used check cashers had bank accounts. Why spend $20 to cash a check when your bank deposits it for free? Because check cashers give instant access, while banks can sit on the money for days. Payday lenders are another expensive workaround to give folks with bank accounts faster access to their paychecks. Americans would have saved $100 billion dollars in less usage of these three high-cost services had the U.S. adopted real-time payments when the Bank of England did in 2008.
Why hasn’t the Fed followed this policy while central banks around the world innovated? The Fed has a conflict of interest. It operates its own payment system while regulating other private payment systems. Imagine if Blockbuster was in charge of setting regulations for streaming services. Would Netflix have replaced them?
I thought the Fed’s refusal to require faster payments was because its own system couldn’t run faster and the Fed was afraid of losing market share to private competitors who had better systems. Then the Fed decided to build its real-time payment system, called FedNow.
It took the Fed four years to unveil FedNow last July despite warnings that building such a system would unnecessarily delay faster payments for Americans who need them.
How is FedNow doing? No one knows because the Fed refuses to say. When Senator John Fetterman (D-PA), asked the Fed a simple question: How much money has gone through FedNow, the Fed simply refused to answer, citing the number of financial institutions that signed up to the network. However, the Fed refuses to tell Congress or anyone else how many banks have signed up in “receive only” mode as opposed to “send and receive.” Imagine a phone network where everyone is willing to accept calls but no one can make them. Not very useful.
Banks make more money through overdraft fees, float, and charging customers for faster access to their deposits than by letting their customers take advantage of the full benefits of FedNow. Some banks charge customers 2% for immediate access to their funds, not too far off from Venmo who charge you 1.75% to immediately put your Venmo balance in your bank account. One prominent life insurance CEO tried to use FedNow to help his claimants and found “Markups of six- to 20 times (that) discourage businesses from switching to faster payments, even if some may ultimately do so.” Yet the Fed does not even track what banks charge their customers for FedNow, instead believing that banks “often provide consumer-facing payment services at low or no cost.”
The First Amendment ensures Americans' right to petition the federal government for change. The Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 included this right for citizens to petition for rulemaking to agencies including the Federal Reserve. Thus, I petition the Federal Reserve to follow the law requiring the hold period for checks to be reduced in line with available technology.
My petition serves to hold the Fed accountable on payments. More broadly, it promotes an alternative method to push regulators to use their powers for good. Researchers like me usually opine on regulations, write white papers proposing new regulatory systems, or run data sets showing how regulatory changes could help. But when a regulator refuses to act in the face of facts—and even worse, hide facts they don’t like—what can folks do?
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