NEW STUDY: What Corporate Treasurers Want From Faster Payments

From employers who use the service for direct-deposit payments to landlords and utility companies that use it to collect rent or monthly bills, same-day ACH has been gaining in popularity and putting a variety of payment types in the fast lane.

The same-day ACH rollout has been in full swing since 2016, when phase 1, SDA credits, became available. Most recently, the second phase, requiring financial institutions to receive SDA debits, went live last year. And the third and final stage, which requires FIs to make credit and debit funds available by 5:00 p.m. local time on the day a transfer is initiated, goes live in March.

Whether it’s SDA credits or SDA debits, one of today’s most popular use cases for same-day ACH is account-to-account (A2A) transfers. About 25.2 percent of companies use SDA credits for A2A transfers, while 25.8 percent use SDA debits. Business-to-business (B2B) payments are also a highly popular use case, with 16.4 percent of companies using SDA credits for B2B payments and another 18.2 percent using SDA debits.

Reasons for using SDA services vary. For SDA credit, most respondents (29.4 percent) like it because it’s fast. Others said they prefer it because it’s more convenient (20 percent), more secure (16.2 percent) and because it saves them time (13.6 percent). For SDA debit, the findings are similar. Most respondents like SDA debits because they are fast (24.3 percent), while others like that it is more secure (20.1 percent), saves time (18 percent) and is more convenient (17.5 percent).

The Corporate Survey, a NACHA collaboration, asked 500 corporates and government agencies about their current and planned SDA credit and debit usage. Based on their responses, SDA is bound to transform payments in a wide range of verticals, including manufacturing, transportation, health care, professional services and more.

The survey includes nearly 300 data points, which gauge how corporations plan to adjust both their payment operations and practices based on the availability of SDA credit and debits, the limits of transferrable funds (currently at $25,000) and future plans for SDA adoption.

Some key takeaways found in the Corporate Survey include:

• In 2018, 59 percent of corporations plan to increase their use of SDA credits.
• Over 40 percent of firms plan to use SDA credit in lieu of paper checks.
• Just six months into its rollout, the future of SDA debit is looking bright, with its use projected to increase to 48 percent.
• Fraud is very rarely associated with ACH – for over 91 percent of corporations, SDA products were not associated with fraud.

About the Survey

The Same-Day ACH Corporate Survey is designed to gauge demand and use of SDA. The report compiles and analyzes responses of 500 corporations and government agencies in the United States on their current and planned use of SDA credit and debit.