Your Checking Revenue is Falling as ACH "Ubiquity" Grows

Jan Estep, NACHA CEO, says “ubiquity” of the ACH network is NACHA’s goal, allowing not just same day settlement, but  eventually "real time” transactions.  All this makes ACH settlement more attractive to non-bank payment providers and retailers.  PayPal can provide faster service as it settles to checking accounts by Debit ACH.  Dwolla has adopted “next day” ACH clearing already, and Western Union is announcing same-day ACH delivery.  Retailers are using decoupled cards to capture shopping information and settle as Debit ACH.  Billers already heavily use ACH debit to clear payments. Online payment providers like PayPal and Amazon now offer in store settlement.  As NACHA points out, debit ACH is by far the largest ACH volume and growing. 

What this means is that non-bank payment providers can offer many purchasing and mobile payment features making their value greater than your bank checking services.  Banks are at the bottom of the settlement pack as shown by our chart below using Mobile POS Ecosystem information.  This allows others to steal our liquidity revenues (overdrafts), interchange and other revenues upstream from us.  Downstream, the settlement arrives as a debit ACH with little revenue, relationship value or payment relevance.

How do you fight back to protect your revenue and relevance?  Define the “payment” values at the top of the ecosystem that will make customers choose our payments methods.  Today the low hanging fruit are “no overdraft fee ever” purchases and payments, liquidity services and consumer control of security in shopping online and in-store.  These are specifically the three services offered by our PaySound^® Checking Plan available exclusively for your bank!