Annual payment volume over the Automated Clearing House (ACH) Network is expected to double by 2006, according to a new report from Nacha, the US-based electronic payments association.
In a report presented by Nacha's Next Generation ACH Task Force at the Payments 2002 conference held this week in Dallas, the ACH Network is set to become the batch-processing payment delivery and settlement system of choice for financial institutions and their corporate and retail customers in the United States.
In 2001, almost eight billion ACH payments were made worth $22.2 trillion. For the past ten years, the annual growth rate has averaged 15 per cent. The Next Generation ACH report predicts that for the next five years, growth rates will continue at 15 per cent or higher, reaching more than 15 billion payments annually by 2006.
The ACH Network is commonly used for direct deposit of payroll and government benefits such as social security, direct payment of consumer bills, business-to-business payments, federal tax payments, and, increasingly, e-cheque and e-commerce payments.