NACHA Reports Record Wave of ACH Payments
NACHA today reported that more than 12 billion ACH payments were made in 2004, a 20 percent increase over 2003. The growth was largely driven by the rapid expansion of ARC -- the accounts receivable check conversion application -- which experienced a nearly six-fold increase in volume to more than 1.25 billion payments.
Internet-initiated ACH payments also grew significantly with 967 million ACH debit payments worth over $300 billion initiated over the Internet, a growth rate of over of 40 percent from 2003.
"The tremendous growth in ACH payments is the result of the substantial benefits that consumers, companies and financial institutions receive when moving from manual, paper-intensive processes to electronic payment processes," said Steve Ellis, Chairman of NACHA and Executive Vice President of Wells Fargo & Company's Wholesale Banking Group.The nation's financial institutions originated 21.6 percent more ACH payments than in 2003, the industry's best performance since 1991 when Direct Deposit was first being promoted nationwide. The number of these payments was 11.06 billion, a jump of nearly 2 billion over 2003, and valued at $25.5 trillion. The remainder were originated by the Federal government -- 952 million ACH payments in 2004, up 3.0 percent, and valued at $3.1 trillion.
Separately, NACHA released lists of the top 50 originating (PDF) and the top 50 receiving (PDF) financial institutions for 2004.
The financial institutions in the NACHA Top 50 of originating institutions accounted for 91.6 percent of all inter-bank ACH payments in 2004, the identical percentage as in 2003. The Top 5 institutions accounted for 56.7 percent of all ACH origination activity; the Top 10 accounted for 71.6 percent. Both of these figures are increases of about 4 percentage points over 2003.On the receiving side, the financial institutions in the NACHA Top 50 accounted for 52.1 percent of all inter-bank ACH payments in 2004. The Top 5 institutions accounted for 25.7 percent, and the Top 10 accounted for 33.7 percent. Just as on the originating side, these figures show some concentration among the Top 10 institutions, but not among the Top 50 as a whole, indicating that there is significant growth in ACH payments for financial institutions outside the Top 50.
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