Hi everyone, welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal and this is our fifth episode of 16

minutes, our new news show, where we cover recent headlines of the week, The A6 and Z way,

why they're in the news, why they matter from our vantage point in tech, and share our experts

views on the trends involved as well. You can catch up on past episodes at A6NZ.com slash 16 minutes or subscribe to it as a

separate feed in your favorite podcast player app. This week we have two episodes since we'll be

skipping next week. This episode covers these two topics that came up in the news, a quick take on

Barney's filing for bankruptcy and what that means in the context of the death of retail,

but first we go deeper into the Federal Reserve announcing Fed Now, which is a much bigger deal than it

seems. What, why, and how. Okay, so the first segment this week covers some news that came out of

the Federal Reserve, which is that just this week, they announced that they

are going to create something called Fed Now, a real-time payment service, so it would be open

24-7 days a week, that would allow people to get access to their checks faster.

And even though it was announced this week, it actually is not out there in the wild yet.

It aims to launch in a few years. And just to give you announced this week, it actually is not out there in the wild yet. It aims to

launch in a few years. And just to give you some more context, this is really targeted over half the

population who live paycheck to paycheck and need access to their money sooner. And right now,

they're forced to pay a lot of late fees and overdraft fees. I mean, overdraft fees alone were $34 billion

in just the last year alone.

And of course, many big banks are lobbying to stop this. And some of them have an alternative

that they've proposed. Citibank, U.S. Bank Corp, and J.P. Morgan Chase have their own instant

payment system, which was launched in 2017 and operated by clearing house payments. Now,

let me introduce our expert, a 6thency general partner, Angela Strange, who is on the fintech

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