Nacha, the electronic payments association, has a new chairman: Steve Ellis, a veteran payments executive with Wells Fargo & Co.
Mr. Ellis' two-year term began Jan. 1, Nacha announced Monday.
The Herndon, Va., trade group develops policies regulating automated clearing house payments, which are becoming a more important part of the payments infrastructure. The banking industry is aggressively promoting the use of electronic payments instead of paper checks, and the ACH system is one of the most commonly used alternatives.
The use of ACH payments made through banks' online bill-payment services has exploded in the past few years. So has accounts-receivable conversion, or ARC, the conversion of checks into ACH files at biller lockbox sites. But there is still plenty of room for growth; 36.7 billion checks were written in this country in 2003, but Nacha says only about 1.25 billion ARC payments were made last year.
"The ability to act as a steward to the transition was appealing to me," said Mr. Ellis, an executive vice president with Wells' wholesale services group, in an interview Friday.
He said he plans to focus on payments by businesses. Though consumers have enthusiastically adopted online bill-payment, many businesses still receive paper invoices and pay by check. Mr. Ellis said he wants to develop programs that would encourage them to pay electronically.
"We are going to do a lot of work on B-to-B checks," he said.
Under Nacha's ARC rules, billers can transform consumer checks into ACH payments but cannot do the same for checks from businesses. That is because the positive-pay services that many businesses use, which compare incoming checks with the account holder's list of authorized payments, require that banks receive the original paper checks.
ARC for business checks " is certainly something we want to look at," Mr. Ellis said.
As Nacha's chairman, he succeeded Leonard J. Heckwolf, the senior vice president and product head for ACH and retail lockbox operations at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. Mr. Heckwolf, who also held the Nacha post for two years, said he will remain a member of the group's 19-member board to provide a sense of institutional memory and advise Mr. Ellis.
Nacha also named Richard W. Burke, Jr., a senior vice president with Commerce Bancorp Inc. of Cherry Hill, N.J., as its vice chairman; and Philip C. Ahwesh, a vice president with PNC Financial Services Group Inc. of Pittsburgh, as the board's secretary and treasurer.
