This story was delivered to BI Intelligence " Fintech Briefing " subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here . On October 4, the US Federal Reserve announced the launch of a major new study on digital payment technologies, bitcoin, and fintech more broadly, CoinTelegraph reports. The bank explained that this new research is part of its ongoing effort to introduce a faster payments system, which would allow transactions to be processed instantaneously and outside of the central bank’s operating hours. The study will be led by the Fed’s Faster Payments Task Force, which is charged with making technologies like bitcoin secure enough to be used for faster payments, with the goal of eventually implementing a system throughout the country. The study will focus primarily on the security and implementation of faster payments technology. The Faster Payments Task Force will be subdivided into two groups, each comprising about 500 members. The first group will focus on how to make a faster payments system "ubiquitous" in the US and will publish its findings in January 2017; the second group will concentrate on improving the security of technologies that would underpin such a system, namely cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, and will publish its report by mid-2017. The Task Force’s strategy leader, Sean Rodriguez, said the aim of this research is to encourage businesses and end consumers to adopt this technology when it becomes available. US institutions have been looking to modernize the country’s payments system for a while. Earlier this year, the Fed held discussions with software giant IBM about launching its own digital currency. And in March, Jack Henry, a leading US payments solution group, partnered with The Clearing House to look into developing a faster payments system for the US. Unlike other countries such as the UK , […]
