Dive Brief:

• Federal Reserve Chief Payments Executive Mark Gould will retire from his post later this year, after working at the central bank for 35 years, according to a Thursday press release from the central bank.
• The Fed is seeking a successor for the job, which sits within the Financial Services division, and expects to name a new appointee later this year, according to the release. A Fed spokesperson declined to provide any additional information on the search.
• Gould suggested his work may not be done. “The Federal Reserve — and the people in it — have shaped much of my life and career,”  he said in a LinkedIn post Thursday, the day he told his team the news. “Looking forward, I’m grateful for the chance to pause and refuel for whatever comes next.”

Dive Insight:

Gould has held the chief payments post for about five years, named to the role in March 2021, according to the Fed’s release. He began his career at the central bank as part of the retail payments division in May 1991, according to his LinkedIn profile.

In his current role, Gould has overseen the Fed’s financial services related to U.S. retail, wholesale, cash and instant payment offerings, including adapting the services to increasingly digital forms of payment. 

One of Gould’s top accomplishments in the role of chief payments executive was to launch the central bank’s first and only instant payments system called FedNow in July 2023. It was a bid to speed up transactions in the U.S. financial system that can sometimes take days to settle, and to extend such services to smaller financial institutions across the U.S.

“Every day leading the Fed’s payments business has been both an honor and an adventure,” he said in his LinkedIn post. “Whether it was building momentum for FedNow, navigating crises and their impact on global demand for US currency, or striving to enhance the resilience and customer experience of our retail and wholesale payment services, the work has been as challenging as it has been rewarding.”

With FedNow, financial institutions have the ability to send payments within seconds and can tap the services around the clock, seven days a week.

While some banks have embraced such real-time payments since the 2017 launch of The Clearing House’s RTP network, which also provides such services, smaller banks may have been reluctant to adopt services offered by an entity that is owned by their larger bank rivals.

Most of the biggest U.S. banks have signed onto the FedNow system, but some industry professionals have questioned whether the roll-out of the system has met with the expected success, given less than 2,000 of nearly 9,000 U.S. banks have joined FedNow to date. The Fed’s goal has been to attract about 7,500 financial institutions to the system. Only U.S. banks can join the FedNow system.

Corporate uptake of real-time payments services offered by FedNow and RTP has also been seen as sluggish in a U.S. economy where businesses still make wide use of paper checks. That’s despite efforts by President Donald Trump’s administration to push along payments modernization.

Most recently, the Fed has considered ways for extending FedNow services for cross-border use.

The FedNow system cost about $246 million to operate as of 2024, and required about $100 million for development in 2023, according to a 2024 report from the central bank.