Automated Clearing House

Banks, billers, and processors seeking to boost electronic bill-payment usage would do well to cast their lot with young, affluent consumers who are heavy users of smart phones, according to new research from Aite Group LLC. This cohort, whom Aite dubs “smartphonatics,” accounts for just 7% of consumers but make …

With competition heating up in the market for person-to-person payments, Fiserv Inc. reports its 3-month-old ZashPay service is making headway with client financial institutions. The service now claims some 400,000 registered users, while more than 400 banks and credit unions have signed on to offer it, with 100 of those …

Mitek Systems Inc., the pioneering developer of remote deposit capture software for mobile devices, is now moving into mobile capture for bill payments. With San Diego-based Mitek’s new Mobile Photo Bill Pay application, a consumer could take a picture of a paper bill with his camera-equipped smart phone, and then …

PayPal Inc.’s 1-year-old person-to-person payment application for financial institutions is catching on with banks, says the PayPal executive charged with marketing the product, part of a collection of payment services PayPal introduced when it opened its platform to outside developers last year. Dan Schatt, senior director and head of financial …

NACHA’s long-awaited Secure Vault Payments (SVP) program, which lets consumers make guaranteed payments online through the automated clearing house network, officially became a commercially available product on Thursday after a pilot that began in the spring of 2008. The new product can now be offered by any bank linked to …

NACHA, the regulator for the automated clearing house network, announced on Tuesday it has launched a long-awaited pilot for a payment method that would let banks convert low-value consumer checks into electronic transactions and then clear them through the ACH. The method, called Deposited Check Truncation (DCT), is intended to …

Overall automated clearing house transaction volumes grew only 1.5% in the second quarter versus the year-earlier period, but most of the electronic-check ACH applications grew faster. The notable exception was ARC, for accounts-receivable conversion of bill payments sent to lockboxes. Continuing a trend that started two years ago and likely …

Transaction volumes are rising on the automated clearing house, but a recently released survey shows a nasty side effect of this growth is a rise in the volume of disputed transactions. Some 63% of processors and financial institutions reported they handled more disputed, or unauthorized, payments last year than in …

A Canadian processor that has sued more than a dozen major banks and PayPal Inc. over a patent it says covers virtually all of the electronic-check payment types supported by the automated clearing house network scored another victory with its announcement on Monday of a settlement with San Francisco-based Union …

NACHA, governing body of the automated clearing house, is considering rules changes that could add volume to the ACH. Among them: allowing recurring payments under the TEL code for telephone-authorized electronic-check conversions; raising the dollar limit to $50,000 for three major e-check codes, and eliminating opt-out notification requirements on two …