Phixius Teams With Aliaswire on Account Verification for Small-Volume ACH Users

ACH payments platform Phixius and FinTech payments company Aliaswire have teamed up to allow financial institutions (FIs), FinTechs and businesses with a small volume of ACH transactions to comply with Nacha’s WEB Debit Account Validation Rule, according to a Nacha press release Monday (June 6).

Phixius by Nacha offers efficient, safe exchanges and verification of payment-related information through its peer-to-peer network and the Aliaswire allows lower-volume ACH users to access Phixius to verify routing and account numbers on ACH payments, the press release says.

“Many smaller organizations came to Nacha looking for options to comply with the WEB Debit Account Validation Rule and validate account information,” Nacha Managing Director of Strategic Initiatives and Network Development George Throckmorton, who oversees Phixius, said in the press release.

“The partnership with Aliaswire will ensure that all financial institutions, FinTechs and businesses offering consumer ACH debits will have a reliable option to verify the consumers’ account information in compliance with the Nacha Rule,” he said.

Phixius has enabled more than 1,700 financial institutions and more than 7,000 businesses to verify account information since its launch last year. The service expects to facilitate more than 1 million validations this year, according to the press release.

Earlier this year, Nacha’s WEB Debit Account Validation Rule became enforceable, requiring that the first use of an account number or account number changes be validated as part of a commercially reasonable fraudulent transaction detection system.

“We are excited to partner with Nacha’s Phixius to provide a real-time option for low-volume originators to comply with the WEB Debit Account Validation Rule,” Aliaswire President Scott Goldthwaite said in the press release.

Related: Higher Dollar Limit, Swelling B2B Payments Support ACH Network’s Q1 Growth

ACH payments are steadily growing, according to a Nacha report last month. The ACH Network experienced overall growth in the first quarter of 2022, in large part thanks to B2B payments and an increase in the Same Day ACH dollar limit, even with the end of government assistance programs tied to the COVID-19 pandemic, the report says.

B2B payments were up 15.5% year over year in Q1 from the first quarter of 2021, with more than 1.4 billion automated clearing house (ACH) B2B payments made in the first three months of this year, a 35.5% increase from the first quarter of 2020, when COVID-19 initially closed many workplaces.