What It's Like to Work at Federal Reserve Bank of Boston

In one sentence, why does the mission matter to your team — and what decision did it guide recently?

The mission of the FedNow Service is to make instant payments ubiquitous and accessible to every American citizen and business. This gives them the power to pay — and get paid — instantly. If you’re one of the many Americans living paycheck to paycheck, that can be life-changing. Enabled by additional safety features added to the service, we recently decided to increase our maximum transaction limit a second time, bringing it to $10 million. Your average citizen isn’t sending $10 million payments, but this change enables financial institutions for a new set of use cases, like funding real estate transactions and loans. That brings more banks and credit unions onto the FedNow Service, putting the power of instant payments in the hands of more Americans every week. As our network grows — we now have more than 1,500 participating financial institutions — more Americans can do more things with their money instantly.

Which community or customer initiative best demonstrates your mission — and how is it measured?

I was drawn to the FedNow Service because of the ability to improve lives, to help our most vulnerable avoid the cost of alternative financial services, like payday loans and check cashing services — services that cost nearly $200 billion every year. That’s a real, tangible positive impact on people’s lives. Recently, we started processing federal disaster relief payments over FedNow. When you talk about impacting lives, that’s getting financial relief to folks in what is likely the worst moment of their lives. That’s the power of instant payments in action — to have a meaningful impact on the world. How do I measure that? In a sense you don’t need to; every one of those payments is a citizen to whom we helped get support. How do you measure that kind of impact on someone’s life?

Do employees believe the mission is real? Share a moment or ritual that proves it.

Short answer: Yes. Longer answer: Also, yes. The mission gives us a purpose that’s bigger than ourselves, and in many cases, it connects to personal experience. I remember when I was just out of college, I kept cash in stashed envelopes to make sure I could pay what I needed to. One of the biggest challenges was managing when my rent was due versus when my pay actually hit my bank account. Being able to get paid and pay my bills in real time would have been game-changing. Some of my team members have shared similar stories. We regularly talk about our mission. When our first payment to a veteran was processed shortly after launch, we shared it and celebrated. When our first emergency payment was processed, we shared it and celebrated. When we processed a record number of those payments, we shared and celebrated. The need for those payments is very real, and the ability to help those folks, albeit indirectly, well that’s a rare privilege for a technologist.

What new skill or role did you want to learn? Explain why this was important to you.
The new skill that my team and I wanted to explore was using artificial intelligence to automate the process of manual issue triaging. The recent advancements in AI technology have led many enterprises to adopt it without clearly identifying the specific problems it can solve. Our team’s approach was to focus on the problem first and then explore if AI could be a safe and viable solution.

As the team responsible for monitoring, logging, alerting and troubleshooting issues related to instant payment transactions on the Federal Reserve’s FedNow® Service, we often found that the end-to-end triaging process was time-consuming and burdensome for our site reliability engineers. They had to sift through various logs, monitoring dashboards, metrics and traces to identify the root cause of customer issues. This repetitive and complex task was taking a toll on the SREs and was also delaying the resolution of customer problems.

Automating the triaging process using AI was important to us because it would boost productivity, offload repetitive analysis tasks, enable real-time problem detection and automate root cause analysis. Autonomous AI agents and models are well-suited for predictive analysis, routine task elimination and continuous learning and adaptation. By implementing such a solution, our operational team could focus on strategic initiatives rather than getting bogged down in the details of issue sorting.

How did your employer help support this time of learning and/or professional development? Be specific.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston actively encourages its employees to upskill and reskill through structured training programs, bootcamps, courses and certifications. Career development goals are a part of our team objectives, performance reviews and rewards for employees willing to learn and apply their newfound knowledge to their day-to-day work.

During every FedNow Program Increment, the last sprint is dedicated to innovation days, where teams can experiment with different prototypes to address any pain points. In the last couple of Program Increments, we were able to take various AI courses to gain a fundamental understanding and get hands-on experience through problem-first based bootcamps.

What was the outcome of this experience? How did it impact your future growth in your profession?
The learnings we gained through the bootcamps, certifications and courses enabled us to safely and responsibly apply our newfound knowledge during the innovation sprints. We were able to develop a prototype for an autonomous root cause analysis triaging system, leveraging AI-native tools. This co-pilot for SREs reduced the mean time to detect, mean time to resolve/recover, facilitated faster root cause analysis and improved event correlation.

This experience has been invaluable in shaping my professional growth. I have learned how to design, vision and iterate using the latest cutting-edge technologies, such as AI, to solve business problems efficiently. This has expanded my skill set and has given me a deeper understanding of how to leverage emerging technologies to address real-world challenges in the financial technology industry.