Fintech company Finastra has announced that it is participating in the US Federal Reserve’s FedNow Pilot Program to aid the development of its instant payments service.

The new offering, called FedNowSM Service, is an instant payment service designed to help financial institutions in every US community to offer payment services in real time, round-the-clock. It is expected to be launched by 2023.

The pilot programme aims to support the development, testing and adoption of this instant payments service. It also aims to encourage the development of services and use cases using the FedNow functionality.

Firms participating in the pilot will be allowed to work with the FedNow Service before general availability.

As a participant, Finastra will be responsible for shaping and offering input into the service and adoption roadmap, industry preparation, as well as overall instant payments strategy.

Finastra vice president of Product Management, Payments Product and Platform Ohad Chenkin said: “Finastra has deep expertise and knowledge of instant payment schemes globally, having enabled financial institutions to process payments and implement associated overlay services for instant payment schemes in 12 countries across four continents,”

“We look forward to bringing our knowledge and experience to the FedNow Pilot programme and to help advance instant payments in the United States.”

Last month, financial services provider Shazam announced its participation in the pilot programme for FedNow Service.

In the same month, cloud payments provider Volante Technologies and Juniper Payments also announced that they are participating in the pilot.