With Guaranteed ACH, consumers can easily initiate a payment online using Plaid’s technology to streamline the account authentication process. Vesta’s real-time decisioning platform — built on 25 years of data science and machine learning — provides the analytics and authentication to guarantee the transaction for both consumers and merchants in real time.

Vesta enables e-commerce companies to grow their businesses by focusing on revenue rather than risk. By extending its pioneering zero-risk, zero-liability payment guarantee to ACH payments, Vesta will help online merchants further increase their profitability by facilitating the use of a less costly payment method while also reaching new potential customers who may not have or may not wish to use payment cards. Additionally, ACH payments have a lower cost for merchants than traditional payment cards.

“Despite the benefits, online merchants have been hesitant to embrace real-time ACH because of the underlying fear of being paid. Until now, there has been no way to know whether a user’s account contains sufficient funds at the time of purchase,” said Ron Hynes, CEO of Vesta. “Guaranteed ACH allows businesses to accept direct payments without fear, eliminating one of the major hurdles to ACH acceptance and real-time payments, while also ensuring that millions of Americans with bank accounts but no payment cards have the ability to shop online.”

“We’re focused on democratizing financial services through technology,” said Lowell Putnam, Head of Partnerships at Plaid. “Broadening accessibility to and confidence in ACH payments helps advance that vision by giving consumers and merchants a secure, convenient, friction-free payment option.”