ACH

As the Federal Reserve guides the U.S. on its steady march toward a faster payments system, a thorny issue continues to plague some of the most prominent efforts: Could the smaller banks stay abreast of the technologies that larger banks are readily supporting and deploying?

Customer furor stemmed from troubles FIS had processing payments for MetaBank, the issuer of Netspend and other prepaid debit cards.

American Express is launching Early Pay, a digital financing service that allows large U.S. companies and their suppliers to benefit from discounted bill payments.

Shamir Karkal said his startup will allow fintechs to develop ACH processing for their companies without having to partner with banks.

As the major banks grapple with the slow and steady implementation of The Clearing House’s Real Time Payments (RTP) system, one organization, Ingo Money, is forging ahead in delivering faster payments for its clients and their customers using the card networks’ push payments rail.

More than half of U.S. financial institutions have made same-day ACH funds available without seeing any major shifts in fraud. But observers warn that as same-day ACH introduces broader access and bigger transactions, it will become a bigger temptation for fraudsters.

At this year’s Swift Business Forum in New York, executives said banks can build "more intelligent routing" to speed up payments and reduce the cost of processing and delivery.

Giro Zrt, a Hungarian financial services industry organization that operates a domestic automated clearing house payments network, is teaming with the payments service provider Nets A/S to create a national instant payments service.

Seeing an opportunity to address the multi-billion dollar cannabis industry’s needs for payments processings, Zodaka is launching with a system that focuses more on price than process.

The quest for fast payments is advancing on the consumer side, but most banks are said to be undecided about a host of issues tied to speeding up transactions between businesses.

The move from standard to real-time transactions adds another layer of complexity and creates further opportunities for fraudsters. Quicker transaction times increase the chances of fraudulent transactions going undetected, writes David Worthington, vice president of payments at Rambus.

Redwood CU's home-grown pay-by-text solution won a prestigious award recently, but the credit union is already looking at ways to build even more functionality into it.

Intuit has added new features to QuickBooks Payroll so employers can make payroll at the last minute, delivering same-day paychecks to workers with the option to make direct deposits to contract employees.

When EMV chip cards were launched in the U.S., the initial fear in the security and payment industries was that fraud would migrate to e-commerce. But the migration has actually moved further along to the more lucrative venue of real-time Fed-mandated ACH payments.

Financial institutions providing funds via the Fed's same-day ACH transfers need to their systems protect their customers, are commercially reasonable and, most important, follow strictly the protocols the financial institution has agreed to with its customer, writes Alexander Buchanan, counsel at Waller Lansden Dortch & Davis LLP.

Implementing an electronic payments solution isn’t about replacing one payment method (checks) for an electronic one—as in abandoning checks for ACH, writes Ralph Perdomo, a research analyst at Nvoicepay.

The Clearing House expected to take some time to introduce its new network to financial institutions and play up its benefits.

Nacha has completed the third and final phase of the faster payments launch, requiring banks and credit unions to make Same-Day ACH funds available to depositors by 5 p.m. in local time.

Though the Merchant Customer Exchange failed to deliver a consumer-facing mobile wallet for its mega-retailer backers, Buy It Mobility Networks (BIM) says the underlying technology it provided is still sound.