Credit Gateway

Overview

The Credit Gateway is a deposit program that the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Management Service (FMS) uses for the receipt of federal agency Fedwire and Automated Clearing House (ACH) credit transactions. The Credit Gateway is a component of FMS’s Collections and Cash Management Modernization (CCMM) initiative, which is a multi-year effort to simplify and modernize the collections and cash management programs of FMS and the U.S. Treasury.

The Credit Gateway is a service operated by a commercial bank that has been designated as a financial agent of the government. The bank processes FMS transactions using its own infrastructure and commercial software. However, the transactions settle at Federal Reserve Banks, rather than at the commercial bank. The Gateway interfaces directly with Federal Reserve Bank systems to process transactions. As collections are processed by the Gateway, detail transaction information is sent in real time to FMS reporting systems, namely the Transaction Reporting System (TRS).

The Gateway consolidates several legacy programs and helps in the decommissioning of CA$HLINK II, which is a long-standing goal for FMS. Some of the benefits of the Gateway include:

• Reduced costs through the decommissioning of redundant legacy applications
  
  
• Increased insight into transactions through a tiered account structure that provides the ability for agencies to receive cash flow data at a more granular level than has been the case previously
  
  
• Improved cash forecasting and decision making by providing near real-time access to transaction information
  
  

The Credit Gateway is being implemented in multiple phases over the course of two years. Current legacy collection systems are being migrated one at a time to the new Gateway. Migrations so far have included the Fedwire Deposit System (FDS) and the Remittance Express (REX) applications. The Federal Reserve Electronic Tax Application (FR-ETA) has also migrated, under specially branded Credit Gateway functionality called the Federal Tax Application.

Future migrations will include FMS’s electronic lockboxes and ACH credit collections associated with the Electronic Federal Tax Payment System EFTPS. FMS will make every attempt to minimize impacts to agencies and external customers during these migrations.

For more information on the Credit Gateway, please e-mail us at: Settlement.Services@fms.treas.gov.