Financial institutions have been happy with the fees generated by not having this system in place. And the Fed is explicitly not allowed to compete with its member banks.
Isn’t ACH a service by the fed? If this is a service for financial institutions, I don’t expect them to make it free. I don’t see how this changes much except maybe making Zelle obsolete or at least changing the back end of it.
Not really. ACH is more of a protocol for non-realtime payments. This is for realtime. While there is a fed ACH the largest ACH provider in the US is The Clearing House LLC. Which, as the name suggests, is a private company.