Royal Credit Union placed second among dozens of entrants in the inaugural NACHA Challenge at Payments Conference 2016 in Phoenix on April 20.
The Eau Claire, Wis.-based credit union's "Team Real Time Royals" was awarded the $10,000 Audience Choice prize for a proposed real-time application program interface — a set of routines, protocols and tools for building software applications — to allow financial institutions and merchants to validate transactions through ACH Network in real time.
NACHA Challenge teams were asked to identify a gap or friction point related to the ACH end-user experience, describe the solution or approach to address it, and indicate who will benefit and how. More than two dozen teams proposed potential solutions to address a variety of challenges and opportunities and competed for up to $25,000 in prizes.
Judges, who were drawn across NACHA's family of organizations including the Payments Innovation Alliance and Direct Membership of NACHA, found that Royal CU's proposal would potentially provide a competitive edge in real-time ACH processing. The proposal was submitted by team captain Jennifer Brantner, product settlement and services manager at Royal CU, and her company colleagues Emily Kurth, Nicole Glodowski, and Erik LeMay.
United Bank in Charleston, W. Va., took first place and received the $15,000 Judges' Choice prize. The bank's "Team Curmudgeon" proposed the creation of a new standard entry class code to identify securities transactions to allow for faster settlement. J. Steven Stone, executive vice president of operations at United Bank, submitted the proposal.
The NACHA contest was created to invite the marketplace to brainstorm potential ways to remove friction and further improve the ACH end-user experience, Scott Lang, senior vice president of association services at NACHA, said in a news release about the competition.
