In just five short years, Same Day ACH – Nacha’s faster payments solution – has gained remarkable traction, with the payments community putting it to work in several use cases.  

To learn more about the creative ways Same Day ACH is making a difference in the move toward faster payments, PaymentsJournal sat down with Michael Herd, SVP of ACH Network Administration at Nacha, and Sarah Grotta, Director of Debit and Alternative Products Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group. 

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Same Day ACH turns five years old 

On September 23, 2021, Same Day ACH celebrated five years since its initial launch. Since then, the network has seen immense growth in both the number and value of payments made via Same Day ACH. This volume growth is apparent in the chart below:   

“The main thing that these results show is that Same Day ACH has gone mainstream, and that we have entered another high growth phase of same day ACH,” explained Herd. While adoption rates were slower in the earlier years of Same Day ACH, increasingly widespread availability has contributed to its more recent rapid growth. In fact, the ACH Network continued to thrive and evolve even during the pandemic.  

New use cases are contributing to this growth. “Same Day [ACH] use cases are built right into a payment processor service and are not an afterthought. And so I think that is a significant contributor to why we’re seeing some of the growth numbers that we are right now,” he added. 

Quantifying the growth of Same Day ACH  

In the first six processing days of September 2016, there were 1.3 million payments worth a total of about $1.5 billion transferred through Same Day ACH. In the first half of 2021, there were more than 291 million debit and credit Same Day ACH payments worth a total of $439 billion. Those figures are up 86.3% and 123%, respectively,