Organizers of the Check ACH Coalition said Wednesday that more than half the participants at an online seminar want to pursue the proposed project, which would link the automated clearing house payments system with check-image exchange networks.
Tuesday's seminar drew participants from 229 organizations, including vendors, trade groups, consultants, and 168 banks and credit unions. Afterward, 51% of the participants said they wanted to proceed with the project, while only 2% said they were not interested. Forty percent were undecided, and 7% said they lacked the resources to participate.
"We felt things went very well," said Danne Buchanan, the executive vice president of e-business at Zions Bancorp. of Salt Lake City, one of the coalition's founders. "We viewed it very much as a success."
John G. Feldman Jr., a senior vice president at Bank of America Corp. and its image transaction and payments executive, said the coalition's objective is to extend electronic payments to institutions that may be unable to conduct check-image exchange.
"We're not deviating from image exchange. We're not replacing image exchange. We're trying to augment image exchange," Mr. Feldman said. He said he expects the biggest use of "check ACH" would be low-value consumer payments paid from accounts at small and midsize institutions.
Mr. Buchanan said that "some of the biggest credit union processors in the nation have stepped up" to participate in the effort. "I don't think we're going to have any problem finding that marketplace."
During the seminar the coalition's organizers proposed holding a face-to-face meeting Oct. 3-5 in Dallas or Chicago to develop the business requirements for a pilot test of the converged system.
Executives from the banking companies that organized the Check ACH Coalition - Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Wells Fargo & Co., and Zions - said they would like banks of all sizes to participate.
They said that depending on the results of the proposed October conference, they hope to have the business requirements sorted out by yearend and to begin a pilot test in 2007.
The Tuesday session was the first public discussion of the topic since the coalition members outlined their ideas in May at the Payments 2006 conference sponsored by Nacha, the electronic payments association, and at the Bank Administration Institute's TransPay conference.
The coalition aims to link the two systems so that all financial companies can process more checks electronically. One slide from the presentation showed Check ACH as a bigger share of total volume than paper checks and IRDs by 2008, when more than two-thirds of checks are projected to clear as images.
But Tuesday's answers to specific questions were generally along the lines of "That's an issue we need to decide."
For example, the presentation referred to a "trusted check archive." One participant asked what kind of interoperability would be needed for an institution to gain access to the archive to retrieve images.
Earl Jennings, a senior vice president for check processing at JPMorgan Chase, replied, "It's still a work in progress, what those words mean."
Another participant asked why organizers made a preliminary decision to process the transactions under Regulation CC, which governs checks, rather than Reg E, which governs ACH.
"That's the key word - preliminary," said Jeffrey B. Kline, a senior vice president in the enterprise payment strategies group at Wells Fargo. "I'm sure there's going to be plenty of discussion of Reg E and Reg CC that we really need to leave to the conference to make sure we have all the participants' views represented."
Mr. Kline called the project "not an edict but an economic opportunity."
"We cannot be effective or successful with only a small number of institutions or industry players participating," he said.
The organizers urged people to enroll for the conference by Sept. 6 at www.checkach.org.
