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Nevada could be poised to take a leading position in the race for payments modernisation with the passage of the Nevada Payments Bank Act, which supporters say will slash costs while making payments faster and more efficient.
The bill, piloted by Assembly speaker Steve Yeager (D-Las Vegas), had bipartisan support as it passed out of the Ways and Means Committee on Tuesday (May 27, 2025).
It creates the Nevada Payments Bank to process credit card transactions and ushers in a new kind of bank that exists just to move money, not lend it, by creating a payment bank charter for non-banks.
This allows them to access rails such as FedNow and thereby cut out middle men and all their associated costs.
Instead, banks will have to pay the state’s Commissioner of Financial Institutions an access charge of 0.025 percent for each transaction.
Faster payments
A spokesperson for Yeager stressed that consumers will see no change in the way they pay, but behind the scenes, payments will be processed faster and more securely.
“Consumers will benefit as retailers and payment apps can more quickly adopt modern tools like real-time transfers, peer-to-peer payments, and instant checkout — services that are slow and expensive under the current system.”
He added that under the previous system, companies such as PayPal and Square spent billions of dollars every year paying fees to traditional banks and networks to access the payment rails.
“If even one of the top 10 merchant acquirers in the U.S. were to establish a Nevada Payments Bank, the state could see upwards of $250 million in new General Fund revenue — from just one company. That’s the scale of opportunity we’re talking about.”
Although the bill had bipartisan support in the Assembly, it faced opposition from the Nevada Financial Institutions Division (FID), which said it lacked the capacity to keep track of a complex payments bank and that the bill conflicted with federal banking regulations.
Supporting the bill, however, the Retail Association of Nevada rejected the FID’s claims and said that as payments banks do not engage in lending, federal banking regulations are not fully applicable.
It also said that with strong regulatory tools, defined authority and secured funding, the FID is well positioned to oversee payments banks effectively.
Payments modernisation
Speaking at the Assembly’s Ways and Means Committee, Bryan Wachter, senior vice president at the Retail Association of Nevada, said: “If we keep regulating payments the way we’ve always done, we’ll keep getting the same result: high costs for businesses, limited competition, and no savings for consumers.”
He added that the Nevada Payments Bank Act “offers a better path — one that modernises our financial infrastructure while keeping strong oversight in place, and positions Nevada to lead”.
As Nevada presses ahead with payments modernisation, other parts of North America are finding the process far slower and more onerous.
As covered by Vixio, Payments Canada recently launched a consultation on the legal architecture of its much-delayed Real-Time Rail (RTR) payments system.
Originally scheduled to launch in 2019, the project has faced a series of setbacks and delays.
The RTR, part of Canada’s payments modernisation, underpins Payments Canada’s objectives of providing clear rules, open risk-based access enabling competition and innovation, and ubiquity, with wide reach to the majority of Canadian current accounts.
