NACHA, The Electronic Payments Associations, are celebrating 40 years, and have a great plan for the next few years as well. Jan Estep, President and CEO at NACHA, gave a presentation bizarrely entitled ‘Innovations via ACH – The Next 40 Years’ started with a  summary of the evolution of the ACH network in the USA:

Source & Copyright©2014 - NACHA  

But thankfully, they are not resting on their laurels.

In 2012, NACHA developed a blueprint on how they were going to move forward over the next 40 years by modularly building on ACH settlement as this figure shows:

Source & Copyright©2014 - NACHA  

NACHA are working hard to ensure that they develop the new services incremently. Taking every opportunity to add functionality and services to improve by not insisting that everyone has to join before a service goes ahead, e.g. during the AFP Conference NACHA announced enhancements to the XML-ACH remittance Opt-In programme. This will ensure that development is not delayed until everyone is ready

Moving payments faster

The Opt-In and the modular methodology will enable NACHA to develop two approaches to ‘moving payments faster’:

• real-time 
• same-day 

which, as Estep was careful to point out, serve different needs and unique markets. 

Same-day ACH will have a phased implementation starting with ACH credit, ACH credit and debits both with 5 p.m. ET settlement, and then finally a mid-day ET settlement would be added:

Source & Copyright©2014 - NACHA 

Currently NACHA are developing a request for comment for industry and user feedback.

Corporates can expect same day and real-time ACH in 2016/2017, but it will still depend on so many factors.

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CTMfile take: The modular and Opt-In approach is developing impressive momentum and this time won’t be stopped. We really can now expect same-day and real-time ACH in the USA, sooner rather than later. Although, it will still take a couple of years.