Those transactions were up 15% during the second quarter compared to last year, helping drive overall growth of 5%, the payments network that underpins most U.S. payroll, bill pay and B2B invoices said Monday (July 21).
“The continued robust growth of Same Day ACH shows how it is serving payments use cases for consumers, businesses, government agencies and other organizations,” Jane Larimer, president and CEO of Nacha, which operates the ACH network, said in a news release provided to PYMNTS. “As we enter the second half of the year, we expect to see this trend continue.”
In all, ACH Network growth continued during the quarter, with 8.7 billion payments valued at $23.3 trillion, respective increases of 5% and 7.9% year over year. The network saw 336.4 million same-day payments, moving $980.3 billion in value, up 15% and 22% respectively. During the first half of this year, Same Day ACH handled 662.4 million payments valued at almost $1.9 trillion.
“Business-to-business ACH volume grew apace, with more than 2 billion payments, up 10.6% from the same period in 2024,” the release added. “Claim payments to healthcare providers grew by 9.9% to 138.2 million payments.”
The report follows a quarter in which the volume of Same Day ACH payments climbed 19.1% year over year to reach 326 million, with the value of those payments increasing 24.8%.
In related news, PYMNTS explored the “speed-and-security paradox” surrounding faster payments in a recent conversation with Bill Wardwell, senior vice president of payments, treasury and supplier services at spend management platform Coupa, and Katie Elliott, senior risk and fraud officer at B2B payments network Bottomline.
“I know it seems counterintuitive, but I’m going to say it: Slowing down is the best practice for faster payments,” Elliott said.
She said her remedy is to introduce friction into high-risk moments like vendor onboarding or a change to routing instructions, while allowing an already vetted payment to proceed across real-time payment or same-day ACH rails. When urgency is not part of the equation, business email compromise schemes that rely on fear and deadlines lose their potency.
The hidden enemy is fragmentation, Wardwell added. Pointing to a soon-to-be-published Coupa survey, he said that nearly 80% of the companies that suffered payment fraud were using multiple payment workflow systems.
