This enhances the industry leader's ACH and wire fraud prevention capabilities for PRO-TECH and ACH Dispute Xpress.

"Our connection to the Federal Reserve Bank allows all U.S. financial institutions, regardless of size or processing scenario, to take full advantage of our fraud prevention services," said Debbie Peace, CEO of ACH Alert.

Many financial institutions use a third-party data center to receive their incoming ACH items. In order to use ACH Alert's fraud-fighting tools, the choices for those financial institutions have been to engage their data center to work with ACH Alert or pull an Information Extract File (a copy of the live data going to the data center) from the Fed and send the data to ACH Alert.

ACH Alert's connection to the Federal Reserve Bank allows financial institutions to use the PRO-TECH and ACH Dispute Xpress services without interrupting the flow of live data to an existing third party, while eliminating the need for a financial institution to receive an Information Extract File and load and retrieve data from ACH Alert. ACH Alert can now receive an Information Extract File and send return entries to or from the Federal Reserve Bank on behalf of a financial institution. This can cut out steps for those financial institutions, helping them to focus more on serving their customers and growing their business.

For PRO-TECH, the financial institution simply sets up its customer in the ACH Alert system and ACH Alert does the rest. For financial institutions using Dispute Xpress, they simply look up the ACH items in dispute, take the digitally signed Written Statement of Unauthorized ACH Debit, and the rest is handled by ACH Alert.

"We originally developed this program for financial institutions that outsource receipt of their incoming ACH items to a third party," said Peace. "But we've been pleasantly surprised by the number banks and credit unions that receive their own ACH items and opt to use our outsourcing service to eliminate a file load/retrieval process from our systems. So now they're not just generating additional revenue from these fraud prevention tools, they're also saving administrative time and costs. It's a true win-win."