FedNow Service
The FedNow Service is an instant payments rail operated by the Federal Reserve Banks, launched in July 2023 to move funds between U.S. financial institutions in real time, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, with immediate interbank settlement in central bank money. It is ISO 20022 native and is one of three domestic U.S. rails alongside The Clearing House's RTP network and the ACH network. FedNow is a scheme operator, not a consumer-facing PSP; participating banks and credit unions connect over FedLine (Direct or Advantage), exchange ISO 20022 messages for customer credit transfers, requests for payment, liquidity transfers and system/account reporting, and may optionally use a small set of FedNow REST APIs (Account Balance, Network Intelligence, Participant List, Ping) exposed through the credential-gated FedLine Developer portal. Its public developer surface is documentation- and rulebook-first: ISO 20022 message specifications live behind SWIFT MyStandards and API access is restricted to enrolled institutions, so there is no open, self-serve public API.
Limited machine-readable signal and partial portal coverage — documentation a human can read, but little a machine or agent can consume without scraping.
API Evangelist profiles FedNow Service the way a machine reads it — 7 machine-readable artifacts across 5 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.
Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — FedNow Service scores 36.7/100 (thin), with a separate agent-readiness read of 14/100 (human only). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.
Kin Score
This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance.
Kin Score
How this is scored →scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5
How we profile FedNow Service
Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for FedNow Service. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.
APIs 5
Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.
Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.
FedNow Account Balance API
Account Management API letting a participating financial institution programmatically retrieve its FedNow master account balance information. Documented on the FedLine Developer...
FedNow Network Intelligence API
Risk Mitigation API providing fraud-prevention and risk signals across the FedNow network to participating institutions. Documented on the FedLine Developer portal as an optiona...
FedNow Participant List API
Service Management API returning the current list of FedNow Service participants so an institution can confirm reachable routing endpoints before sending a payment. Documented o...
FedNow Ping API
Service Management API used to verify connectivity and availability of the FedNow Service from a participant's connection. Documented on the FedLine Developer portal as an optio...
FedNow ISO 20022 Message Specifications
The core scheme messaging surface of the FedNow Service. FedNow is ISO 20022 native and defines message types for customer credit transfers, requests for payment, interbank liqu...
Security Posture 2
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.
Resources
Every other property we hold for FedNow Service — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.
Get Started 4
Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call
Documentation 2
Reference material describing how the API behaves
Agent Surfaces 2
MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs
Design & Contract 2
Pagination, idempotency, versioning, errors, and events
Access & Security 2
Authentication, authorization, and security posture
Operate 3
Status, limits, changes, and where to get help
Commercial 3
Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use
Company 2
The organization behind the API
← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/fednow · machine-readable index on apis.io