BofA Brings Positive Pay to Its CashPro App As Same-Day ACH Builds Momentum

With momentum accelerating behind faster payments on the automated clearing house, fraud prevention is taking on a higher profile at the nation’s banks. In the latest move, Bank of America Corp. on Thursday introduced ACH Positive Pay on its CashPro mobile app. The move will let app users review and then approve or reject transaction requests any time on a smart phone or smart watch.

BofA says the new feature, which has been available to users of the CashPro service online, will bring significant convenience to business users, who will now be able to monitor transaction flows at any time regardless of whether they have access to a desktop computer. The feature also comes as faster payment processing builds on the ACH network. With same-day processing, transactions are moved and settled on the same day they are initiated. Traditionally, ACH transactions follow a next-business-day settlement routine.

“Without the proper controls in place, clients are open to significant risk when sizable ACH debits on their accounts can occur late in the day,” David Kretz, head of global payments and GTS strategy in the Global Transaction Services unit at BofA, says in a statement. “With mobile access to ACH Positive Pay, clients can make time-sensitive decisions from any location and reduce their concerns about missing return deadlines.”

In 2021, BofA clients using the online version of the CashPro App approved payments totaling $384 billion, twice the volume handled in 2020, BofA says. “With ACH Positive Pay, the app now has more ways that clients can make real-time decisions, which for ACH, will carry greater significance when same-day ACH limits are increased,” says Tom Durkin, global product head of CashPro in the Global Transaction Services unit, in a statement.

Using ACH Positive Pay, businesses can create a list of approved vendors for payments, though the approvals carry expiration dates and ceilings on sums that can be paid to any particular vendor.

Same-day activity is widely expected to get a big boost from a network rule change set to take effect later this month. The new rule will lift the cap on same-day transactions to fully $1 million, a 10-fold increase from the current limit. The change was widely requested by ACH participants.

Nacha’s decision to raise the limit follows other moves the organization has made recently to facilitate same-day ACH. In March last year, the network added a new settlement window at the end of the processing day to extend the time in which banks can handle same-day items. As a result, the latest daily deadline for same-day ACH has moved to 4:45 p.m. Eastern Time, two hours later than the former cut-off. The move in part was a response to banks in the Pacific time zone that now have more leeway to enter same-day volume.

Nationwide, same-day volume, which includes both credits and debits, has shown vigorous growth since Nacha, the governing body for the ACH network, introduced same-day credits in 2016. Debits followed the next year. Total same-day volume came to 169.3 million transactions in the fourth quarter last year, up 75% year-over-year. Dollar volume was $268.4 billion, a 93% increase.