Personal opinion: significantly. FedNow instant payments are a penny for up to $100k transfers, with the eventual plan to support up to $500k transfers.

I don't see how it would impact Apple Pay, for example. In Australia, we have instant payments already, and Apple/Google/Samsung Pay is used alongside it - completely separate.

Funny, never had a problem with it, even across countries

If it’s anything like Canada’s INTERAC e-transfers, you ask for the person’s email address; they receive an email bouncing them to a SAML sign-on portal with support for all major banks, which lets them use their bank to SSO into the payment system; and then the payment system uses the SSO-reflected banking details as the destination for depositing the money.

It will eventually support aliases (like Zelle does) as well as cross border payments, but my understanding is that it won’t at launch (as the desire is to get the ACH delays gone first). I don’t have consumer UX insight, only into the ISO20022 message plumbing (user->institution->Fed->institution->user).

In India, we have UPI and other forms of instant transaction system (all of them are free in any decent bank, I believe).

With UPI, you can connect your bank account (no matter which bank it is) with any UPI based payment app and create IDs which can be shared for receiving or requesting payments. (These IDs are unique on basis of both app and bank).

So I can connect my bank account to gpay and create a new ID. Send them to others who are using gpay or any other UPI app (bank apps also have UPI functionality built in). They can send the payment to the ID (which will be automatically added to my bank). This is instant.

It can also be used for requesting payment by others and I can accept or decline the request.

Alternatively, phone numbers can also be used to fetch the IDs a person has if you have enabled it (it's by default)

In the UK (and I believe all of Europe), the system is indeed based on bank account numbers and sort codes, but popular banking apps like Monzo will do WhatsApp-style contact lists, where banking details of your phone contacts are synced and you can just pick them from the list (note: account number are not considered secret sensitive information). Banking apps will usually save someone’s details for future usage.

In Australia the system is called Osko and we link our mobile phone numbers or email address to it.