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Faster payments on the automated clearing house network and on real-time payments systems are gaining momentum, according to statistics released Thursday by Nacha, the standards body for the automated clearing house system, and by the Real Time Payments network, operated by 22 of the world’s biggest banks.
The total value of same-day payments in the third quarter rose 15% to $970.4 billion, compared to the same period last year, according to Nacha’s release. The double-digit growth in this category continues years after Nacha launched the faster settlements in 2016 with credits. Debits followed a year later.
Meanwhile, The Clearing House Payments Co., operator of the Real Time Payments network, reported early Thursday the network set a single-day record Oct. 3 with 1,808,967 transactions. That traffic carried $5.2 billion in value, TCH said.
The result underscores the progress the RTP service has gained since the service began eight years ago, TCH officials say. “Seeing 1.8 million payments in a single day underscores the momentum we’re seeing across the instant payments ecosystem,” said Jim Colassano, senior vice president of RTP Business Product Management at The Clearing House, in a statement. TCH is based in New York City and is owned by many of the nation’s biggest banks.
For the ACH network, same-day activity rose in tandem with overall traffic, the network reported, as total transactions in the latest quarter increased nearly 5% year-over-year, to 8.8 billion. The network’s fastest rise came in peer-to-peer payments, which recorded growth of 22.7%, yielding a total of 122.2 million transactions for the quarter. That result beat the year-ago increase of 20%, according to Nacha’s statistics.
