NACHA Announces Two New Fees to Recoup Administrative Costs

NACHA announced Monday it has begun levying two new so-called network administration fees. One fee, a flat charge of one-one-hundredth of a penny, applies to all transactions passing through the automated clearing house system, except those considered on-us, or handled within a single financial institution. The Herndon, Va.-based governing body for the ACH also has introduced a $42 annual fee for all banks that use the ACH. Both fees took effect Jan. 1. The transaction fee applies to all interbank ACH credits and debits, originated as well as received, and regardless of whether they are commercial or governmental payments, according to the announcment. With this administrative fee as well as the annual fee, a bank generating 9,580,000 transactions a year that are not on-us would pay $1,000. NACHA says the fees are meant to support, at cost, network programs sponsored by NACHA. These include risk management, quality improvements, and enforcement of existing rules as well as development of rules for new ACH applications, the announcement says. The two ACH operators?the Federal Reserve and the Electronic Payments Network?will bill and collect the fees on NACHA's behalf, with the first appearance of the fees occurring with the January invoices. The annual fee will be billed at a rate of $3.50 per month. NACHA says that, though the new fees are set for this year, they could change later, depending on action by NACHA's board of directors. On another matter, a NACHA spokesman says in an e-mail message to Digital Transactions News the organization has been developing a “comprehensive risk-management strategy,” parts of which will be released for comment in the course of the next few months. A previous effort in this direction at NACHA led to a proposed fee to oblige originating banks to compensate receiving institutions for handling costs imposed on them by transactions that turn out to be unauthorized. The charge, known as the network return entry fee, was voted down by the organization's membership in 2005 (Digital Transactions News, June 10, 2005). Though a majority of members voted for the NREF, the vote fell short of the super-majority required to enact it. NACHA's then chairman, Steve Ellis, executive vice president at Wells Fargo & Co., told Digital Transactions News in an interview last spring he supported the NREF and hoped NACHA would reintroduce it (Digital Transactions News, May 10, 2006). “At this time, we have no news or change in status to report about NREFs,” the spokesman says in his e-mail.