Fed picks Kim Robbins to run its payments arm and FedNow

Federal Reserve Financial Services, the arm of the Fed that sells payment services to banks, has chosen Kim Robbins as its top payments executive, Payments Dive reported. She replaces Mark Gould, who is retiring, and starts on Nov. 16. This article looks at what she inherits: an instant payment rail that works, but that most eligible US banks have not yet joined.

A new head for the Fed's payment business

The appointment was announced on Thursday in a press release. Payments Dive describes Robbins as a Federal Reserve veteran of nearly 20 years. Since March 2024 she has been chief operating officer and first vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, where she has worked in one role or another since January 2012.

She is not new to payments. Earlier she was chief of enterprise services at Federal Reserve Financial Services. According to the release, she was also chief administrative officer of FedNow, the Fed's instant payment system. Earlier still, she spent seven years at the retailers GAP and Payless ShoeSource, managing business lines.

Her job covers more than FedNow. Her remit also takes in the retail, wholesale and securities services the Fed offers to banks and credit unions. In plain terms, these are services the Fed sells to financial institutions.

Robbins framed the moment in broad terms. "With rapid innovation transforming the industry, it is clear to me that we are in a pivotal moment in payments", she said, as quoted by Payments Dive.

How the money moves on FedNow

FedNow is a rail, not a consumer app. Only US financial institutions can connect to it. A customer asks their bank or credit union to pay someone. The sending bank passes the instruction to FedNow. The Fed moves the funds between the two institutions' accounts at the central bank, and the receiving bank credits its customer. According to Payments Dive, payments arrive in seconds or minutes, instead of the days some transfers can take to settle.

Settlement here means the moment the money is final between the banks. On older rails, a payment can be promised quickly but settled later. On an instant rail, the two happen close together. That shifts work onto the banks: they must screen for fraud and check balances in real time, because there is little time to stop a payment once it is sent.

FedNow went live in July 2023. Part of the aim was to bring smaller banks into faster payments. Large banks had a head start: the banks that own The Clearing House started the private RTP Network in November 2017. So the US now has two instant rails, one run by the central bank and one owned by big private banks.

Adoption is the real test

Gould spent his last three years on the launch, which ran from mid 2023, and on persuading banks across the country to join. As of this month, just over 1,900 US banks and credit unions use FedNow, Payments Dive reported. Some 8,500 institutions are eligible. Most of the market, in other words, is still outside.

The Fed is trying to close that gap. Last month it started a discount program meant to draw more institutions onto the service. A rail only becomes useful when both the sender's bank and the receiver's bank are connected, so each new member makes the network more valuable for the others.

The service is also not cheap to run. The Fed reported in late 2024 that operating FedNow cost about $246 million that year, after roughly $100 million of development spending in 2023. Those figures help explain why reach matters: a costly network needs volume to justify itself.

Who carries the risk

For a bank, joining an instant rail is a trade-off. Customers get money faster. But the bank takes on the job of catching fraud before funds leave, since instant payments are hard to pull back. Smaller banks may also need to upgrade their core systems and staffing to run around the clock. Those costs and risks sit with each participating institution, not with the Fed.

For the Fed, the risk is different. If too few banks join, FedNow stays a niche service next to the private RTP Network and older rails. That is the strategic problem Robbins inherits along with the title.

What to watch

Three things are worth tracking once Robbins takes over on Nov. 16.

• Whether the count of connected banks and credit unions moves meaningfully beyond just over 1,900, and whether the discount program plays a part.
• Cross-border use. The Fed is studying it, and last month said support was close, but it gave no details on how or when.
• How she balances FedNow against the Fed's other retail, wholesale and securities services, which also sit in her remit.

Sources

• Payments Dive, 12 Oct 2026

Written by AI from the sources above and published automatically: before release, a script confirms every figure against the sources and checks for copied text. No editor reviews it. Treat it as background reading, not financial advice.