This is an excerpt from
The Future of US Digital Payments 2025: ACH & Beyond.
The ACH
network, known as the backbone of the US payments infrastructure, is evolving to become a flexible, programmable, and fraud-aware payment rail.
This is to ensure the needs of new business models are met across on-demand payouts, gig economy payments, or instant lending disbursements.
ACH will effectively serve the new payments ecosystem
ACH is quickly becoming an enhanced rail that is ready to serve the new generation of fintech firms, platform organisations, and enterprise use cases.
The expansion of Same Day ACH –
designed to enable payments to be sent and received at speed within the same business day – and the
increase of transaction limits to $1 million, is a substantial shift for digital payments in the US.
While ACH is not yet real-time, these improvements ensure that transactions that need predictable, low-cost delivery within the same business day can be completed in a fast, reliant and cost-efficient way.
Agility and scalability will need to be prioritised in 2025
Beyond speed, ACH is now agile and resilient. Where ACH historically relied on file-based transmission protocols (FTP), technology vendors that specialise in banking-as-a-service (BaaS) can now offer
RESTful APIs that can handle ACH filing.
This allows ACH transfers to be tracked programmatically, validated in real-time, and reconciled correctly.
In 2025, automation is yesterday’s innovation. Agile development and scalable workflows should be prioritised, especially as ACH starts to be used for payments across business models that involve complexities such as split payments, multi-party reconciliation,
or recurring bills.
ACH will continue to be the rail that can be relied upon
ACH will remain the underlying rail, but with enhancements such as support for virtual accounts, automated exception handling, and accurate reconciliation, ubiquity can be bolstered.
In line with this, it is important to reiterate that while ACH is not a real-time network, it is to its advantage that it is a key component of the multi-rail engine.
ACH will continue to be the backup mechanism when
instant payments fail and an option when requiring a cost-effective method for recurring and batch transfers.
What does the industry think of the future of ACH?
Renata Caine, general manager, senior vice president, embedded finance, Green Dot, in conversation with Finextra, explored how the “evolution of the ACH network in 2025 will continue being defined by advancements in speed and security and driven forward
by investments in technology and increased competition in our space.”
She continued: “Technology is enabling faster payments via improved settlement times, same-day ACH and other innovations, while also improving fraud detection using tools like AI that can reduce unauthorised transactions and generally enhance security for
consumers and businesses.
“As speed and security continue improving and these technologies are advanced further by embedded finance, consumers’ preference for instant payments will grow in tandem. To keep up with this demand, new use cases will emerge to support these consumers and
deepen customer relationships.”
Also speaking to Finextra, Taira Hall, head of payments strategy at Citizens, highlighted that the “ACH network’s focus on speed and availability” will be an “evolution catalyst of the payments landscape with the potential to unlocked new use cases for emerging
businesses.”
Through open banking APIs and the prospective addition of AI automation, TCH has the tools in place to allow for greater data sharing, enhanced fraud detection, and the reduction in payment errors.
“We also envision RTP to grow in its use cases in 2025 as the demand for instant transactions continues to increase in the form of A2A, on-demand disbursements, and gig economy payments."
