The proposal from NACHA to create a same-day ACH scheme is a great step forward in meeting the needs of corporates and consumers, and bringing in new payment volumes in B2B, P2P and eCommerce into ACH.

It also opens the door for some significant changes across  many financial institutions in the country. Compared to the FedACH, which is optional for financial institutions to ‘opt in’ to, this will be compulsory for NACHA members, so organizations have got to respond.

As with any proposal of this type, even those that have been anticipated by the market, it can be difficult to know what the first steps are once the announcement has been made.

There are two paths that organizations facing change often take – the first is a lack of real response at all. They see it happening but they don’t really know what it means for them and a lot of the proposal is still quite vague, so they decide to ‘wait and see’ what others do. The other response is to panic – with different people or departments creating committees and looking and what it means for them, without a true bigger picture.

However, what we have seen with other same-day ACH projects around the world is that the best response is a measured one – and one that includes all relevant parties from the beginning. For a same day ACH in the US this
would include business, operations, risk, technical, fraud and innovation people, probably headed up by someone in the payments team, to assess all the issues, understand the opportunities and implications, and come up with strategic proposals of how to respond.

This will prevent ‘make do and mend’ strategies as has been seen all too often in the past, where financial institutions patch their technology to deliver the services needed without thinking of the long-term challenges as adoption increases and volumes grow.  It will also encourage everyone to consider how they can maximize the potential offered by the new proposal, and stay one step ahead of the competition.

It can be a daunting prospect, but for organizations across the US looking at this now I would tell them to seize the opportunity to stay ahead of these changes from day 1.