ACH

This week's first transaction over The Clearing House's Real-Time Payments system may be a huge step for speeding up payments in the U.S., but it also highlights the long road still ahead.

Financial institutions process hundreds of thousands of interbank payments per day on behalf of their clients, which can be revolutionized by blockchain, writes Angel Diaz, vice president of technology and advocacy for IBM Digital Business Group.

As the banking industry moves closer to adopting a faster payments system, bank executives have begun to think through the impact it will have on clients and banks themselves.

Automated business payments is key to rightsizing inventory purchases, writes Matt Clark, COO of Corcentric.

The industry has the opportunity to expedite gains in interoperability and realize significant cost savings and productivity gains for both the clinical and administrative sides of the industry, writes Chris Seib, chief technology officer and cofounder of InstaMed.

The first round of data is in following the Sept. 15 launch of same-day ACH debit payments, providing a snapshot of what Nacha expects will be a growing channel.

The bank that can effectively enable a corporate customer to manage its working capital and order-to-pay cycle, pay its employees, and provide analytics and insights to forecast cash flow will win the lion’s share of profits, writes Jessica Cheney, vice president of strategic solutions for Bottomline Technologies.

Same-day ACH debits rolled out last month, a year after same-day credits, cutting processing time for these payments from a couple of days to a few hours — but for many emerging use cases, that’s not fast enough. And debit is filling the void.

Workers CU is the latest to make direct deposit funds available to members before the the electronic funds transfer is complete.

As the U.S. continues to shape its faster payments options over the next few years, the connections for such systems have to be able to deliver more information and services with every payment.

A year after launching the same-day Automated Clearing House process for credit payments, Nacha says same-day ACH for debit payments began Friday.

Rather than waiting one to three days for funds through the Automated Clearing House system, merchants will be able to receive settlement payments straight to their debit cards within minutes through a partnership between Visa and the processor Vantiv.

With clients seeking a faster way to reimburse employees for expenses, Shoeboxed turned to payments technology provider Dwolla to help create Fetch.

In early fall, the central bank is expected to announce its next steps regarding how to improve the aging U.S. payments system.

For the last two years, the central bank has allowed the private sector to drive a process aimed at modernizing the nation's payments system. Now the Fed will have to determine what its own role will be.

Same-day Automated Clearing House transactions exist, in part, as a first step in the faster payments initiatives taking place in the U.S. But are they lucrative enough for acquirers to add to their portfolio?

An influential task force established by the central bank envisions a future in which the U.S. has multiple real-time payment systems, and in a new report it lays out a series of actions that will be necessary to stitch them together.

Particularly at risk are service providers with high volumes of automated or customer-initiated debit payments, such as cell phone service providers, utilities, cable companies, insurance, and retailers.

The company wants to meet demand for corporate payments globally, especially in emerging markets.

A deeper dive into the workings of the Amazon Prime Reload program should give the card payments industry serious cause for concern.