Few payments professionals have been able to observe and influence the industry as much as Jane Larimer, President and CEO of Nacha, who has helmed the organization that governs the ACH Network through challenging industry transitions and considerable organizational success.
In her nearly 31 years at Nacha, Larimer has seen firsthand the shift away from analog and inefficient transactions and toward real-time, secure payments.
During this tenure, ACH has become the backbone of the payments industry, processing trillions of dollars each year. However, Nacha has not been content to coast on this success. Instead, the organization has continued to lead the payments conversation through innovation, education, and interconnectivity.
In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Larimer discussed the biggest accomplishments and hurdles in her storied career, the many new projects on Nacha’s docket, and why—after over three decades—she is still excited to be a part of the payments industry.
The Accelerating Shift from Paper to Digital
Although the financial services sector has undergone a widescale digital transformation, it didn’t happen overnight.
“One of the first things that I think of among my accomplishments was there were still a ton of paper checks then, only maybe 50% of Americans got paid with Direct Deposit,” Larimer said. “There were billions of checks, so one of the first projects I did at Nacha was check conversions. What that meant was stripping the information off the MICR line of a paper check and then converting that into electronic payments—that was literally the first year.”
Earlier in this transition, Nacha took on an electronic benefit transfer (EBT) initiative aimed at moving from paper-based to electronic solutions. The goal was to reduce reliance on paper food stamps, which were high-risk for fraud and carried social stigma.
To address this issue, Nacha worked with networks, merchants, and financial institutions to shift the paper-based system to a card usable on debit card networks. This effort ultimately led to the launch of the Quest Card.
For years afterward, Larimer and Nacha worked to make digital payments the norm. Once ACH became an industry workhorse, Nacha introduced Same Day ACH, evolving an overnight-to-two-day settlement process into four daily settlement windows.
“That was just a huge sea change in 2016,” Larimer said. “Everybody’s been saying this for a long time and we’re always talking about the pace of change. Back in 2000 and 2015 we thought that things were changing quickly, but what we’re seeing is that pace of change has accelerated, and it’s always going to be accelerating.”
A Momentous Year for Payments
This momentum isn’t slowing down, as faster payments, digital assets, and artificial intelligence continue to reshape the industry. Nacha is advancing a series of initiatives aimed at expanding capability while bolstering trust in the payments space.
One of the most significant developments is the planned increase of the Same Day ACH transaction cap from $1 million to $10 million—timed to coincide with its 10-year anniversary. This enhancement is expected to broaden adoption by enabling a wider range of commercial use cases for what has already become a fast-growing payment method.
At the same time, Nacha has approved new risk management rules taking effect this year, reflecting a parallel priority: addressing the rising threat and volume of credit-push fraud. Together, these changes underscore a dual focus on scaling payment capabilities while reinforcing system integrity.
“How can we speed returns up so that you have not just the forward transaction going more quickly, but also that return transaction as well,” Larimer said.
“We have a lot of irons in the fire,” she said. “We are working as hard as we can in conjunction with the industry to make the ACH as efficient as it possibly can be, and to meet the needs of the end users of the [ACH] Network and all the participants with the [ACH] Network—the financial institutions, our processors, our corporates, and consumers.”
Beyond rulemaking and ACH Network enhancements, Nacha is also continuing to engage the industry through education and convening. One recent milestone was its Smarter Faster Payments conference in San Diego this spring, which brough together the ecosystem for more than 130 educational sessions spanning topics from stablecoins and faster payments to compliance and risk.
In an often fragmented and rapidly changing industry, conferences like this play a critical role in helping industry professionals synthesize emerging trends and translate them into practical strategy.
“It’s trying to invest in the things that you think are going to go forward, because along with all the cool stuff, there’s a lot of noise,” Larimer said. “It’s using discernment to say these are things that are important to me, they’re important to the industry, and let me learn enough about them to be able to make that determination about where are we going with this. Could this be of use to my company?”
“How much do we have to understand about this to be able to appropriately discern whether it is strategically lifted up as a priority or say: ‘Not right now. This bears watching, but this isn’t where we need to be placing our bets right now,’” she said.
Relevant Education in a Fast-Moving Industry
Alongside conferences, accreditations have become an increasingly important way to stay current in the payments industry. For newcomers, the challenge is not a lack of information, but an overabundance of it—where separating insight from noise can feel like a steep learning curve.
Accreditations like Nacha’s Accredited Faster Payments Professional (AFPP) and Accredited ACH Professional (AAP) can serve as valuable tools for onboarding new employees and refreshing the knowledge of seasoned veterans.
However, the benefits of these accreditations extend beyond education. They are also widely viewed as an industry-wide mark of credibility.
“We were really happy to be working with the U.S. Faster Payments Council on the AFPP, because we’re believers in education at Nacha,” Larimer said. “Accreditation is a great way to not only learn the material, but then to be able to bring it back to your organization to help them, because I truly believe that people who understand their business are a lot better at it.”
“They understand the nuts and the bolts, and having your AFPP or your AAP shows the world that you know it too,” she said. “It’s great for career-building and it’s a great benchmark.”
An Outsized Impact on the Industry
Despite the complexities of the payments space—and in many ways because of them—the industry remains one where careers like Larimer’s are possible.
“I love this job, I love this industry, and I love payments,” Larimer said. “Things that I value deeply are the relationships in the payments business, where you’re out at a conference and you see people that you’ve built relationships with over the years. It’s the people you can give a call to if you have a question, or if you need something, or if there’s an issue.”
“When I go to Smarter Faster Payments, there are people that I met my first year at Nacha who are still coming to it,” she said. “Then, there are people that I’ve just met this year that I’ve already had back and forth with because I’ve learned from them. It’s a relationship business and I’m a people person, so that makes me happy.”
Along with professional relationships, the payments sector offers the promise of lifelong learning for those curious enough to explore and willing to grow.
Together with networking and accreditation, there are also evolving industry-wide initiatives such as those led by Nacha’s Payments Innovation Alliance. The Alliance serves as an innovation consortium for the payments industry, with current work spanning pay-by-bank, AI, and quantum computing.
Larimer also praised the Nacha staff as “outstanding, smart, and good-at-what-they-do folks.”
“We’re small—we’re less than 80 people—but I think we have an outsized impact on the payments industry,” she said. “I couldn’t be prouder of the folks that I work with, and I just look forward to doing everything we can to make the ACH as strong and as effective as possible.”
And as for what the future holds?
“For right now, there is so much happening. I cannot imagine being bored,” said Larimer. “I think we have a lot in front of us and there’s a lot of exciting opportunity out there for the industry. And I just look forward to building it all with the industry.”