This article doesn't really go into much detail, but this shouldn't be surprising. IT in financial services is the most insanely complicated, heavily regulated, mishmash of every technology under the sun going back about 60 years that it's a miracle it works as well as it does.

This is also why fintech/insuretech/etc startups tend to fail so spectacularly...because in almost every case they severely underestimate the difficulty and don't understand the enormous scale and expense of the past several decades of that were carried out by established and already very profitable companies.

It's incredibly hard to justify getting rid of something that already provably works (what every single person that thinks we should flip a switch and get instant payments is advocating). There is a tendency to portray financial IT services as being risk-averse...there is maybe some truth to that but I'd characterize it more like a situation where those on the outside are simply not aware of the enormous amount of risk already being taken just to make minor improvements to existing systems with 50+ years of business rules encoded into them.

For all of those reasons, FedNow looks to me like it's actually been a fantastic success so far. I'm not sure what the WSJ was expecting to see. They aren't (to my knowledge) hundreds of billions over budget and a half decade past due...that is about as good as one could have hoped for.