Well, the good news is that the Fed recently rolled out the first phase of a replacement ACH system (FedNow) that does instant transfers.

The bad news is that it will be decades before most major payment systems move to it.

I haven’t worked in fintech long enough to tell you why it was modeled to take so long, but I would hazard a guess that it’s because the primary method of moving money was paper checks and physical card impressions until the last couple decades.