Fedwire Funds Service: payment-level transaction data (restricted access)

Confidential supervisory data: not exercised here

Fedwire transaction data is confidential and held by the Federal Reserve. It is not for sale and not publicly downloadable: it carries no provenance badge because there is no access path we can run here. Aggregate Fedwire volume and value statistics are published, but the payment-level records are restricted. Researchers reach them only through a Federal Reserve affiliation or an approved restricted-data arrangement, inside a secure environment, with output subject to disclosure review. The page documents what the collection is and the gotchas; treat it as unverified. This is the honest grade under the institute’s Verified discipline.

Fedwire Funds Service is the Federal Reserve’s real-time gross-settlement (RTGS) system for large-value interbank payments. The transaction data is the payment-level record of each transfer: sending institution, receiving institution, value, and timestamp. It is the canonical source for studying interbank payment flows, liquidity, and contagion through the payment system. A paper we distill uses it: Kotidis & Schreft use Fedwire payment-level data (payments sent and received by banks, in number and value) to trace how a cyberattack on a set of banks propagates through the payment system.

• Cost: not for sale. Restricted-access confidential payment data.
• Source: Federal Reserve (the Fedwire Funds Service).
• Coverage: large-value interbank transfers settled over Fedwire; complete at the payment level within the system, aggregated to the institution (RSSD) level for most research.

Access (restricted)

• Aggregate statistics are public; payment-level data is not. The Fed publishes Fedwire volume and value aggregates; the payment-level records are confidential and are not posted.
• Through a Federal Reserve affiliation or approved program. Payment-level access is limited to researchers at the Federal Reserve System or others granted entry to the restricted data, worked inside a secure environment with output subject to disclosure review.
• Records are typically aggregated to the depository-institution (RSSD) level for analysis; the raw transfer-level data does not leave the secure environment.

Gotchas (the ones that bite pipelines)

These are the failure modes to expect; they are documented, not verified here.

• Fedwire is not all payments. It settles large-value transfers; small-value and many retail flows go through other rails (ACH, CHIPS, card networks). Fedwire flows are not the firm’s or system’s entire payment activity.
• Identity is at the institution, not the underlying customer. A payment is between member institutions; the ultimate originator and beneficiary are not the Fedwire participants. Do not read a participant as the economic party.
• Bilateral flows can net or gross differently. Gross RTGS records every transfer, but research aggregations may net within a day or a pair; a netted series understates gross throughput. Be explicit about the aggregation.
• Timing and intraday dynamics matter. Payments carry timestamps, and liquidity and queuing dynamics are intraday; collapsing to daily totals discards the timing that often drives the question. Decide your time resolution deliberately.
• Mapping to bank identifiers. Participants must be linked to RSSD IDs and then to other bank data; mergers and reorganizations break the link over time. Verify the crosswalk for your window.
• Output is disclosure-reviewed and cannot be redistributed. Payment-level results leave the secure environment only after review, and the micro-data itself cannot be shared.

Citation

Cite the source, e.g.: Fedwire Funds Service transaction data (Federal Reserve), confidential; accessed under restricted-data arrangement, YYYY-MM-DD. For the public series, cite the Fed’s published Fedwire statistics. State the aggregation level (for example RSSD), the time resolution, and the sample window.