Even as agentic commerce, open banking, and stablecoins have captured much of the payments industry’s attention, one of the ecosystem’s most established networks continues to prove its relevance. The ACH Network processed 5.5% more volume year-over-year through Q2 2026, reinforcing its position as a foundational rail for the next generation of digital payments.
Equally notable is that this momentum was driven across all sectors and segments, including commercial, government, and consumer payments.
In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Michael Herd, Executive Vice President of Network Administration at Nacha, and Ben Danner, Senior Debit Analyst at Javelin Strategy & Research, discussed the drivers behind growth in both ACH and Same Day ACH volume, as well as the fraud rules recently implemented to help secure transactions.
Looking ahead, the ACH Network’s role may become even more significant, as scale, reach, and reliability position it to support the next generation of payment experiences.
Growing Through Digitization
One of the strongest drivers of the ACH Network’s growth has been B2B payments and transfers, with payment volume from this sector increasing nearly 10% through the first half of the year.
This growth is partly attributable to the continued digitization of payments that were previously dominated by paper checks, including supplier payments and contractor payouts. A similar trend continues in the government sector.
“A change from last year at this time is that the federal government’s payment volume is back to modest growth, it’s a bit over 3%,” Herd said. “The government has been issuing tariff refunds, depositing seed funds for the new tax-free newborn accounts, and of course, they are working on efforts to eliminate check disbursements in favor of electronic payments.”
“Whereas a year ago federal government volume was flat, this year it’s back into a modest growth posture,” he said.
Another growth driver has been consumer online payments and transfers, which increased approximately 6.5% through the first half of 2026. This growth has been fueled by a surge in new account-to-account (A2A) use cases and broader acceptance.
“A2A payments are becoming more mainstream, these are things like your P2P and digital wallets which are growing with consumers and also use the ACH Network for disbursements,” Danner said. “There’s adoption by large merchants as well, things like pay-by-bank. The other thing is customers broadly turning towards digital ways to pay bills instead of paper checks or cash payments, moving into these wallet apps using traditional ACH.”
The Same Day ACH Surge
As successful as conventional ACH has been, Same Day ACH has achieved even more impressive results, with volume up more than 26% compared with the same period last year.
“It is interesting that the growth drivers are the same sectors as overall ACH growth, though in different proportions,” Herd said. “It’s consumer online payments and transfers that are the strongest driver of Same Day ACH growth. We saw more than a 50% year-over-year increase in Same Day ACH payments for consumers.”
“We see strong use cases for the types of transfers with A2A or wallets, but also with some types of bill payments, too,” he said. “I’m thinking about credit card bill payments. You use your card, get your bill, and make your payment from your bank account, and credit card issuers are looking to collect those funds more quickly using a Same Day ACH transfer.”
B2B Same Day ACH activity has also accelerated, with volume increasing roughly 30% year-over-year. Business use cases include cash concentration, merchant settlements, tax payments and withholding remittances.
However, many corporate treasurers have implemented exception processes for Same Day ACH because transactions have been capped at $1 million. These processes will likely no longer be required starting Sept. 17, 2027, when the Same Day ACH transaction cap is lifted to $10 million.
This should broaden business adoption of Same Day ACH—not only because of the payment type’s speed, but also because improved visibility into payment settlement allows treasurers to better optimize liquidity and cash flow.
“Same Day ACH is another tool in the treasurer’s toolkit to make business payments,” Danner said. “Think of the limit increase as being useful in terms of things like big supplier payments or commercial real estate deals, brokerage investment account funding, and insurance claims, which will now be able to move up to that $10 million limit on Same Day ACH rails. It’s about increasing the flexibilities for those making money movement decisions.”
Keeping the ACH Network Secure
As the volume and value moving across the ACH Network have increased, protecting transactions from the growing threat of fraud has become critical. This is why Nacha members adopted transaction monitoring rules that establish participants’ responsibilities for identifying and attempting to prevent fraudulent activity.
For scams such as business email compromise, every party in the payment chain—from the business originator initiating the payment to the financial institution receiving funds into a specific account—should have monitoring processes and procedures in place.
For businesses, this can include measures such as account validation, particularly when payment account information is being used for the first time or when existing account details are changed.
“That’s something that any business payment originator can utilize, which is to not trust, but to verify and validate requests to change payment information,” Herd said. “For receiving institutions, these procedures can include things like identifying deposit anomalies such as a large-dollar business payment to a consumer account. That’s one of the characteristics of a successful business email compromise that receiving institutions can attempt to identify and hopefully interdict.”
“As we move forward now that these rules are in place, we’ll be looking to receive and share success stories from the field and how those successes were achieved,” he said.
The Open Banking Transformation
The ACH Network will likely continue to benefit as the open banking model gains traction. Many consumers already use open banking technologies or processes to provision routing and account information for ACH payments.
Younger consumers, in particular, are more comfortable connecting their bank accounts to third parties to make and receive payments. A recent Nacha study found that approximately 89% of consumers under the age of 34 are comfortable linking their bank accounts to services, wallets, and apps.
This contrasts sharply with older consumers, many of whom still rely on both paper checks and ACH payments to meet their financial needs. Another key difference is that older users may use a checkbook to obtain routing and account information for ACH transactions, while younger consumers may not have a checkbook at all.
As a result, linking accounts through open banking services is likely to accelerate until it becomes the predominant mechanism consumers use to enroll in services and make payments.
“Open banking and pay-by-bank are things that are going to grow for the younger consumer and the next-generation consumer,” Danner said. “I don’t think they will even think of it as an ACH payment anymore, it’ll be just logging into my bank account and making a bank payment.”
The Future of ACH
Although open banking is already here, emerging forces could alter the future of ACH payments and help sustain the ACH Network’s momentum.
“ACH is going to be a common method to move U.S. dollars into and out of stablecoin and token exchange networks, and this will take place through digital wallets,” Herd said. “Digital wallets are already well-established in the ACH ecosystem today for the A2A types of transfers and to do things like investments or even things like sports gambling that run on a digital wallet model.”
“There’s probably a vanguard of people that use wallets to move dollars into and out of stablecoins or other kinds of cryptos, but I think in the future it would be more commonplace to move dollars into and out of stablecoin or digitized token exchange networks that are becoming more commonplace to the general population,” he said.
Along with open banking and digital assets, the future of the ACH Network, and payments more broadly, will likely involve AI agents. However, many considerations must still be ironed out before full-scale agentic commerce becomes mainstream.
“I think it’s going to include authorizing and initiating ACH payments for just about all the ACH use cases,” Herd said. “There will be industry discussions around both tools and standards to enable the use of AI agents and payments, and there are also going to be conversations about what guardrails are needed around issues such as payment authorization, and also identity, authentication, and trust around the use of those AI agents.”
