Federal Reserve Proposes Expansion that Would Permit Use of FedNow for Cross-Border Payments

On April 8, 2026, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System issued a proposal to amend Subpart C of Regulation J, which governs the FedNow® Service. The proposal would permit FedNow participants to use intermediaries other than Reserve Banks to send funds transfers through FedNow.[1] This change would permit FedNow to be used for cross-border payments, aligning FedNow with the Fedwire® Funds Service, which is widely used for cross-border payments and has “permitted intermediaries for decades.”

Currently, banks that are FedNow participants may not use intermediaries (other than Federal Reserve Banks) for funds transfers sent through FedNow.[2] This means that FedNow is not currently available for cross-border payments because both the originator and the beneficiary must be customers of U.S. banks. When the Federal Reserve announced details of FedNow in 2020, it acknowledged this limitation to domestic payments, but noted plans to consider expanding to cross-border payments in the future.[3]

In its current proposal, the Federal Reserve indicated that it expects that allowing participants to use intermediaries other than the Reserve Banks would enable cross-border payments to be processed through FedNow. In particular, either the sending U.S. bank or receiving U.S. bank would be permitted to act as a correspondent bank for a non-U.S. bank. As a result, an international portion of a payment could be processed through that correspondent bank outside of FedNow, with FedNow being used for the domestic portion of the payment.

Comments on the proposal will be due 60 days after publication in the Federal Register.