Businesses are showing increased interest in using universal payment identification codes, The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC said.
The New York company, which introduced the antifraud tool in 2002, said Monday that the number of payments made with the codes in the first three quarters of this year jumped tenfold over the same period last year, to 47,700.
The value of those payments jumped almost 700%, to $2.9 billion, The Clearing House said. A hundred codes were issued to businesses, compared with 24 in the same period last year.
The codes function as a substitute account number for companies that want to receive automated clearing house payments but do not want to give out a bank account number. Customers route ACH payments to a company’s UPIC number rather than to a standard bank account number; the bank that receives the payment forwards it to the recipient.
The Clearing House said that 13 banks now offer UPICs, and that 215 have been issued to date to a variety of users.
Rossana Salaris, a senior vice president with The Clearing House, said in a press release that the growing demand for UPICs “demonstrates the increasing importance of a secure account identifier in helping to reduce fraud and streamline the payments process for corporate treasurers.”
