More than $80 trillion. That’s the value of the payments processed via ACH in 2023. Regions processed more than 440 million transactions, making it one of the top 10 ACH originators in the country.
But what is ACH and what does this mean for Regions and its customers?
“ACH payments are facilitating things like tax refunds, rebates, salary and benefit payments, as well as invoice and trade payments and ecommerce purchases, just to name a few,” said Tim Mills, Emerging and Digital Payments Group manager at Regions.
Mills was recently joined by Devon Marsh, Senior Director of Network Administration at Nacha, the governing body of the ACH network, to discuss electronic payments and the evolution of the ACH Network.
Nacha was formed in the 1970s to administer the ACH network in response to the increasing volume of paper checks to resolve some of the operational inefficiencies and risks associated with them.
“The ACH network is one of the most secure and efficient systems for processing electronic payments here in the U.S. Some would even say it’s the grandfather or, the ‘OG,’ of electronic payments.”
Tim Mills, Emerging and Digital Payments Group manager at Regions
“The ACH network is one of the most secure and efficient systems for processing electronic payments here in the U.S.,” said Mills. “Some would even say it’s the grandfather or, the ‘OG,’ of electronic payments.”
Fifty years later, it’s still delivering on the safety and efficiency that electronic payments offer over checks.
When the network began, “it made payday vastly more efficient for many working people, who, because of direct deposit, no longer needed to take a physical check to a bank or other institution to deposit or cash it,” notes Marsh.
But that was just reflective of the first of many key milestones in the evolution of Nacha and the ACH network.
More recent innovations include the addition of same day payments as an ACH option, which eliminates the overnight processing required to settle and clear these electronics transactions while still keeping payments safer than checks.
“With a paper check, it might go in someone’s mailbox, making it susceptible to being picked up; it could lie on someone’s desk or be fraudulently manipulated. The data could be altered then be deposited by somebody other than the intended,” explains Marsh. “Electronic ACH payments mitigate those risks inherent to paper checks.”