Written edition
BRICS nations push cross-border payment rails as Fed weighs FedNow's global role
The frontier is splitting along infrastructure lines today: payment rails go geopolitical, AI models morph into agent platforms, and compliance marks arrive just as autonomy renders them moot.
BRICS Payment Push Forces Fed to Rethink FedNow's Borders
The Federal Reserve built FedNow as a domestic real-time payment highway, moving money instantly between U.S. banks. Now BRICS nations—Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and others—are openly exploring cross-border alternatives to the SWIFT network, and that changes the calculation. The Fed never designed FedNow for global interoperability, but if BRICS countries link their own rails and bypass dollar settlement entirely, the U.S. risks ceding influence over how the next generation of cross-border payments works. The question is no longer whether FedNow should go global, but whether the Fed can afford to stay local while others write the rules.
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