Most readers will be familiar with the various systems available in the U.S. for transferring funds between entities, be it for personal or business purposes. We recently covered that Nacha, the ACH governing body, grew its ACH Network volume during 2022.
Nacha posted that the ACH Network processed 30 billion payments in 2022, encompassing $76.7 trillion. Those figures were up by 3% and 5.6% over what the network handled in 2021.
There are both credit and debit payments in eight separate categories across ACH, including Same Day ACH (SDA). SDA also has sub-categories, including B2B. Overall B2B payments across Same Day ACH are up 44% year over year. We would expect that one reason for the increased SDA for B2B network activity was the transaction limit increase from $100,000 to $1 million in March 2022. Overall, SDA transactions totaled 697.5 million and were valued at $1.7 trillion last year. Those were increases of 15.5% and 86.3%, respectively, over prior.
What’s more, Nacha and the ACH operators (The Fed and TCH) introduced a ‘late night service’ last year, which allows for payments file delivery up until 11:30pm on business nights. This has made file delivery more efficient and has apparently been particularly beneficial on Fridays, with 50 million new files delivered on average.
Interested readers can click out to the Nacha site as well, where there is a fair amount of historical data available for ACH by category. Again, a continuing trend for faster and better, with B2B one of the use cases where strong growth is expected, which will be boosted by the launch of FedNow later this year. Members will also be familiar with some of our thoughts on faster payments given recent research on the topic, as well as the many postings on these pages related to payables in general.
Overview by Steve Murphy, Director, Commercial Advisory Service at Javelin Strategy & Research.