Electronic Checks

By John Stewart Transactions on the automated clearing house network grew 5.4% in the second quarter, the second straight period of 5%-plus expansion for the 40-year-old system, which reaches virtually every financial institution in the country. That’s according to numbers reported by NACHA, the organization that regulates the ACH. The …

By John Stewart As participants in the 40-year-old automated clearing house network get ready to implement same-day clearing capability, network growth continues to percolate, according to the latest numbers from NACHA, the Herndon, Va.-based rules-setting organization for the ACH. Transactions totaled 4.72 billion in the first quarter, an increase of …

In the last 10 years, the electronic movement of money has become easier than ever. More people are banking online, paying bills electronically, and making payments with their mobile devices. In fact, one-quarter of all smart-phone users have made a mobile payment in the last 12 months, and half of …

The use of smart phones and tablet computers to photograph and deposit checks through online-banking apps surpassed scanner-based remote deposit capture several years ago, but 2014 was a record breaker, according to new findings from research firm Celent, a unit of the Oliver Wyman Group. Some 2,100 banks and credit …

All things considered, the holidays were kind to the ACH. Transactions on the automated clearing house network grew 4.7% in the final three months of 2014 compared to the fourth quarter of 2013, while dollar volume moved by the network climbed 4.9%, according to statistics from NACHA, the governing body …

A proposal to speed up processing on the automated clearing house network from next-day to same-day settlement will go to a ballot among NACHA voting members as early as next month, according to information posted this week on NACHA’s Web site. NACHA took comments on the proposal from early in …

By John Stewart While payments executives are abuzz about how mobile devices are transforming the business, they are slowly coming to realize that not all mobile users—and certainly not all mobile devices—are equal when it comes to such metrics as the average value of payments and rate of usage. The …

NACHA on Tuesday opened for comment a sweeping proposal to introduce a same-day settlement mechanism for the automated clearing house network. The comment period will run through Feb. 6, the regulatory body for the ACH announced. If the proposal is approved, the ACH network will process almost 1.4 billion same-day …

Financial institutions, processors, and regulators have been moving toward systems that speed up electronic payments, but ironically their success in replacing paper checks with electronic processing may undermine their efforts. That’s because image exchange, the process by which paper checks are replaced by electronic images for clearing, has driven down …

For the past decade, image exchange has been one of the undisputed success stories of electronic payments—so much so, in fact, that nearly all banking and retail executives take it for granted that paper checks will clear as images and funds will likely settle the same or next day. But …