A two-day delay, and a fee that shouldn't have happened.
Why FMI works exclusively on instant payment rail integration, and what we believe every community institution deserves access to.
Eleven years in community bank payment operations.
Thaddeus Merriweather spent eleven years running payment operations at community banks across the Southeast, watching the ACH network do exactly what it was built to do — reliably, if not quickly. Batch windows, business-day cutoffs, and weekend closures were simply how payments worked, for everyone, for decades.
A paycheck, a holiday weekend, and an overdraft fee.
A customer's direct deposit was submitted before a holiday weekend, sitting in ACH transit while a rent payment posted against an account that hadn't received it yet. The overdraft fee that resulted was entirely a function of timing — the money existed, it just hadn't been allowed to move yet. Around the same time, The Clearing House's RTP network was proving that instant, 24/7 settlement was technically possible. The gap wasn't technology. It was that connecting to it required infrastructure most community banks didn't have the team to build alone.
He founded FMI in 2018 to be that infrastructure layer — starting with RTP, and expanding to FedNow the moment the Federal Reserve launched it in 2023.
FMI stands for Financial Market Infrastructure.
It's the term regulators and central banks actually use for the systems — payment networks, clearinghouses, settlement systems — that the rest of the financial system depends on to function. We didn't invent the term. We just decided a company built entirely around helping smaller institutions plug into that infrastructure should be named plainly after it.
Four things that haven't changed since 2018.
Instant settlement isn't a luxury feature.
For a customer living close to the edge of their balance, the difference between instant and next-day settlement is the difference between a fee and no fee. We treat that as the actual stakes of this work.
Liquidity management gets solved before go-live, not after.
A bank that hasn't planned for 24/7/365 funding needs will find out the hard way, at 2 a.m. on a Sunday. We won't take a client live without that plan tested first.
We work with whatever core banking platform you already run.
We're not in the business of telling a community bank to rip out its core system to get on an instant rail. Integration should meet the institution where it is.
Smaller institutions deserve the same rail access as the largest banks.
FedNow and RTP were built for financial institutions of every size. We exist specifically because getting there shouldn't require a large bank's technology budget.
Meet the team applying this daily: Our Team, or see exactly how an engagement starts on the How It Works page.