This is not a consumer-facing, social payment platform (e.g. Venmo), it is another payment rail (e.g. ACH, wires).
Laypeople are not the target audience for this, payment rail users are (i.e. entities who regularly utilize ACH/wire transfers or build services on top of them).
Not necessarily. In Germany we have "GiroPay", which literarily redirects you to a prefilled form in your online banking website. You have to choose your bank, enter your PIN, and click "okay". It's basically the same complexity as PayPal. (It's not hugely popular currently because it's fairly new and credit based services like PayPal have a headstart.)
But GiroPay is a product built on whatever payment rail is in use in Germany. In the same vein you need "FedPay" to make this as easy for the consumers. FedNow by itself won't really cut it.
Basically you know how you can ACH payments from your account to someone else’s and back but it only happens the next morning as long as the next morning is a business day? Now it would happen instantly on any day.
That said, FedNow is still an improvement over ACH. ACH is fundamentally batch-based processing, they just run the batch multiple times per day now. And all the batch times are East Coast biased, so people on the West Coast get worse service.
Laypeople are not the target audience for this, payment rail users are (i.e. entities who regularly utilize ACH/wire transfers or build services on top of them).