The PaymentsJournal Podcast

The payment card was supposed to disappear. As digital wallets, embedded payments, and mobile-first experiences reshaped commerce, the physical card seemed destined to follow the path of other outdated tools. Instead, it has found a new role—not just as a simple way to pay, but as a platform of identity, access, rewards, and deeper customer engagement. According to the Federal Reserve’s 2025 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice, credit cards accounted for 35% of U.S. consumer transactions in 2024, with debit cards adding another 30%—making cards, combined, the dominant way Americans pay. That dominance holds even as mobile wallets grow, since most mobile payments are still funded by an underlying credit or debit card rather than replacing one. Their staying power comes from their ability to deliver experiences that extend well beyond the transaction itself. In a PaymentsJournal podcast, Michael Hughes, General Manager of Arculus by CompoSecure, and James Wester, Co-Head of Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, explored why the physical card remains relevant and how innovative brands are transforming it into a powerful tool for building loyalty, creating new consumer touchpoints, and strengthening relationships between issuers and the people they serve. Consumers Still Value the Physical Card Predictions that digital wallets and virtual payment methods would make physical cards obsolete have not materialized. Much like the continued appeal of tangible products in an increasingly digital world, consumers still value the physical experience of a payment card—particularly as cards have evolved into more premium formats, such as metal designs and customized offerings. When consumers hold metal cards and drop them on the table, Hughes said, they like the sound and the way they feel, along with a real sense of pride the cards carry. That lines up with consumer research: a global study from Capuchin Behavioural Science found that 72% of consumers would use their payment card more often if it were made of metal instead of plastic. However, the future of the physical card depends on its ability to deliver more than payment functionality. The greatest risk isn’t digital replacement, but becoming a commodity that serves only a single purpose. To remain relevant, cards must continue evolving in ways that create value for both consumers and issuers. Today, cards are already expanding into new roles, including venue access, authentication, loyalty, and rewards. This is creating an opportunity for the card to become a central point of engagement that helps brands build stronger and more meaningful connections with customers. Hughes sees an opportunity to redefine what a payment card can be. “Every issuer wants its card to be top of wallet,” he said. “Traditionally, that just meant being the card a customer reaches for at checkout. Hughes describes a much broader version of top of wallet: issuers can drive additional engagement through the card issuer’s app, prompting cardholders to tap their card to earn rewards, verify their identity, or otherwise interact with the brand. That’s a level of engagement traditional payment cards were never built to deliver. Building Engagement Through Data Advances in data collection and analytics have allowed issuers and brands to better understand customer behavior and create more personalized experiences. A co-branded card with a team such as the New York Yankees, for example, can reveal more than spending patterns—it can provide insight into fan interactions, including visits to Yankee Stadium and other brand touchpoints. “Banks have traditionally issued credit cards to earn fees”, Hughes said. “But viewed from another angle, a card can become an engagement tool—combining programs an issuer would already be offering, like loyalty, rewards, or event access, into a single experience. That shifts the value from simply earning points and interchange fees on payments to delivering customer engagement and the revenue that engagement generates.” Wester added: “We tend to think of use cases in terms of financial or quasi-financial transactions, whether it’s rewards or points or tokens. But ultimately it’s about identifying that person and saying, OK, you are who we want to be interacting with. And now you can take the data from that interaction later and say, we’re going to do things with that.” Authentication Without Added Friction As authentication increasingly moves into software-based solutions, consumers are often required to leave a transaction, retrieve a verification code, and return to complete the purchase. While these processes provide security, they interrupt the user experience and create opportunities for frustration or cart abandonment. “If I can take my branded card and allow [the customer] to validate who they are just by tapping [the card] to the phone, the engagement remains constant,” said Hughes. Physical cards offer another avenue for simplifying authentication while maintaining security. Reducing friction can improve both customer engagement and protection, as overly complicated security processes may discourage users from completing necessary steps to safeguard their accounts. “The weakest link in security is always the person,” Wester said. “The less friction in the process, the better it is for consumers.” Expanding the Role of the Card Because payment cards have been part of consumers’ financial routines for decades, issuers often overlook their potential as a broader engagement tool. A multifunction card can support dozens of new use cases, from loyalty and access to authentication and personalized experiences. Hughes advises picking the two or three use cases specific to whatever customer segment an issuer is targeting, and nailing them. That’s an area he believes Arculus is especially good at helping organizations diagnose—it’s not just about the concept, but about designing the application so it’s simple and easy to engage with, not confusing. Issuers only get a couple of chances before a frustrated customer decides they’re done. The key to unlocking the card’s full potential is creating functionality that improves the user experience while driving greater usage. As engagement grows, the resulting data can help issuers and brands continue refining experiences and building stronger relationships with customers. Hughes’s takeaway for issuers is to align incentives and metrics across product, finance, and merchant teams, then ask a simple question: what value can this card bring customers, and how will you measure it? That discipline, he said, is what separates programs built for the short-term versus the ones that last. Physical cards were never at risk of disappearing, only of becoming irrelevant. The ones that evolve from solely a payment instrument to an active engagement platform are the ones with a strong future. The post Physical Cards Reimagined—More Than a Payment Tool appeared first on PaymentsJournal.

There is a growing disparity between hype and reality when it comes to agentic commerce. This is not so much a critique of AI agents’ capabilities, or the infrastructure that has rapidly emerged to support them, as it is an indication that this model is still in its early stages. Many merchants still associate the term “agent” with independent sales organization (ISO) reseller agents, rather than artificial intelligence. In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Hilla Peled, SVP of AI & Data Science at Nuvei, and Don Apgar, Director of Merchant Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, discussed agentic commerce from the merchant perspective, where the primary concern is how businesses can earn customer trust as this emerging model evolves. Although questions remain around the model, that does not mean the progression toward agentic commerce is slowing. On the contrary, now is the time for merchants and providers to develop strategies and prepare for widespread AI agent interactions. Preparing for the Agentic Revolution Despite the apprehension surrounding agentic commerce, there is little debate that AI now plays a significant role in consumers’ lives. It has become a go-to resource for a wide range of tasks, and commerce is no exception. Shoppers are already using AI to compare prices and discover products, and autonomous agentic personal shoppers represent a natural extension of this trend. Most merchants are eager to support this shift, but not if it requires compromising funds or expanding PCI scope. “Merchants aren’t saying, ‘give me a shopping agent,’ but they want to be prepared to the extent that their customers show up with shopping agents,” Apgar said. “Largely, they’re trying to figure out what this means, which standard will prevail, and how they should look at their architecture and their position in agentic commerce.” Many businesses are closely examining how the technical details will be resolved, including how transactions will settle and which standards will govern interactions. One of the most important questions is agent ownership, whether an agent is acting on behalf of the consumer, the merchant, or the AI company that developed it. Establishing this responsibility will influence how all parties approach agentic payments. The ultimate objective is to create trust in the process by ensuring that an agent reliably executes its assigned tasks and delivers an outcome that meets customer expectations. This is no small feat, given the range of fraud and security concerns, including the potential for bad actors to manipulate agents, consumers, or merchants for malicious purposes. The answers to many of these questions remain unclear, meaning the space will likely experience uncertainty and adjustment as it matures. “One of the biggest things that we observe is the gap between what customers are doing when adopting the public agents versus what the PSPs and acquirers are willing to take on,” Peled said. “Everyone is now just preparing themselves to the point where agentic commerce will become much wider.” “We know that 1.5% of purchases in the U.S. have been agentic, which is huge when you think of the current state of agentic commerce,” she said. “At the same time, both customers and merchants and any business across e-commerce today is wondering, ‘What is the next thing they need to do in order to be ready when agentic commerce will explode?’” Volume Follows Trust To better understand the current state of agentic commerce, Nuvei conducted a study examining consumer attitudes and behaviors. The study found that only around 1% of respondents wanted fully automated AI purchasing, while 56% said they would never allow an AI platform to spend without their approval, regardless of the amount. While these findings may appear to challenge the future of agentic commerce, previous technology shifts have demonstrated that consumer preferences can evolve rapidly. “If you remember in 1995, almost nobody wanted to put a card number online, but we know where we are at today” Peled said. “The demand isn’t for autonomy, it’s for the trust trails that make delegation safe. In payments, volume has always followed trust and the infrastructure decisions are being made now, years ahead of the volume.” There are clear parallels between the growth of e-commerce three decades ago and the emergence of agentic commerce today. Along with initial concerns about security and fraud, many believed certain products could never be successfully sold online. For example, some experts argued that online clothing and footwear sales would struggle because consumers preferred trying items on before making a purchase. Agentic commerce may encounter and overcome similar barriers, but potentially at a much faster pace. “Javelin research picked out a few categories—including travel, B2B and commodity purchases—that we think will be the first to earn shoppers’ trust using an agent, but it’s not going to take 30 years like it did for e-commerce to evolve,” Apgar said. “The tech is moving so much faster that it will reach a maturity point and a tipping point for agentic commerce much sooner than it took e-commerce.” A Fundamental Shift in Commerce The accelerated pace of innovation and adoption has already been demonstrated by generative AI. “The AI space has been around for 17 years and the pace that AI has evolved in the last 12 to 18 months is just unprecedented,” Peled said. “There was always evolution, but what we see now with the capabilities and with the actual adoption shows that the hype about agentic commerce is not just hype. People are adopting agents because they understand their power and agents are becoming stronger and more capable very quickly.” This means organizations should prepare for change sooner rather than later, especially businesses serving younger or more tech-savvy customers. However, merchants should recognize that agentic commerce is not simply a gateway to new markets. Instead, it represents a fundamental shift in how commerce operates. “The reality is that this is existing purchase volume. AI doesn’t magically give people more money to spend,” Apgar said. “These are existing purchases that are going to go from whatever channel they’re being made in today—whether it’s retail, e-commerce, or mobile—and be converted to agentic.” “Where is the early impact of that going to be? Which merchants will be impacted the most? Early adopters have the ability to pick up market share from lagging competitors,” he added. A Trust Problem, not an AI Problem The potential for early adoption is why many merchants are closely monitoring the evolution of agentic commerce and attempting to identify the point at which it reaches mainstream adoption. “They understand that at some point, others will eat their lunch if they’re not adopting early,” Peled said. For merchants determining how to move forward, there are practical steps they can take. The first is to audit existing infrastructure and assess whether it can support orchestration without custody. Next, merchants should build first-party capabilities so they are not forced to reintegrate solutions later. Retailers should also stay dialed into market developments and regularly reevaluate their roadmaps. Given the pace of change, this process should occur every few months rather than every 12 to 18 months. This will help ensure that merchants’ technology stacks are prepared as agentic commerce becomes more widespread. To stay ahead of the curve, Nuvei recently completed a live agentic commerce proof of concept. In collaboration with Visa, Arvato Systems, and fashion brand Kings and Priests, the initiative demonstrated an agentic transaction executed through a unified workflow, all within shopper-defined parameters like spending limits and approved categories. “We launched a live Visa transaction where an AI agent purchased, paid inside the merchant’s own experience and cleared across multiple European issuers,” Peled said. “The hard part was never teaching an agent to buy; that’s what agents know how to do. It was giving issuers and schemes across markets a reason to approve a purchase that no human initiated. That is a trust problem, not an AI problem.” The post Delegation with Limits: What Merchants Want from Agentic Commerce appeared first on PaymentsJournal.

Most businesses have no shortage of customer data. They know who their customers are, how they pay, when they tend to pay and, in many cases, exactly when a payment goes wrong. The harder question is what to do with all that information—particularly when a customer falls behind. That makes collections less of a data problem than an action problem. Automated intelligence can bridge that gap, using customer information to determine what should happen next and creating a more effective, individualized approach to collecting payments. In a PaymentsJournal Podcast, Robyn Burkinshaw, CEO and Founder of Blytz, and Christopher Miller, Lead Analyst of Emerging Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, discussed how incorporating AI into actionable reminders can enhance the payment experience for customers and businesses alike. Moving Up from Basic Automation In payment collections, basic automation typically follows a fixed set of rules: send a reminder on a certain day, make a call when an account becomes past due or retry a payment at a predetermined time. Automated intelligence takes a different approach. Rather than simply following a schedule, it looks at what is happening with the customer and uses the data a business already has to determine the next best action. That could mean choosing the right message, channel, timing, tone, or payment option for a particular customer or account. Instead of leaving customer data sitting in a database, automated intelligence turns that information into an active workflow. The result is a more differentiated experience. Higher-risk accounts can receive a more thoughtful, targeted path to payment, while lower-risk customers can move through a faster, more streamlined self-service experience. In both cases, the approach better reflects what the individual customer actually needs “It’s different when you’re talking to a customer who’s a day late than when you’re talking to a customer who hasn’t responded in three months,” said Burkinshaw. “Intelligence is going to pick up on those nuances to make the experience better for the customer, and thus make the experience better for the merchant.” Differentiating Customer Experiences Consider a customer with variable income. Another generic past-due reminder may not help them make a payment. What they may need instead is flexibility: the ability to pay part today and the rest later, use a different card, pay by ACH, or set a Promise to Pay without having to call during business hours. “The notion of differentiated and customized experience is commonplace at the high end of the market,” said Miller. “It is what financial services companies talk about all the time in terms of surfacing offers for well-qualified consumers, or analyzing their transactions to see what next thing might be useful to sell them. The same set of technical capabilities should be applied to this particular use case in a way that drives not just incremental gains, but substantial gains in productivity.” The idea behind the 90/10 rule is that roughly 90% of customers will do what the business wants them to do—make their payments regularly and on time. The remaining 10% are more likely to require additional attention. Automated intelligence can help businesses keep the 90% moving through a streamlined process while focusing resources on the 10% who need more support. Just as importantly, it can help identify which accounts actually require that attention. A customer who pays late every Friday but has never missed a payment should be approached differently from someone who has ignored every outreach attempt for three months. Those distinctions are easy to overlook when every account follows the same rules. Automated intelligence can identify those patterns and use them to shape the next best action. “That’s the shift,” said Burkinshaw. “The future isn’t more reminders, it’s more relevant reminders, and it’s the ability to take immediate action from that reminder.” Preventing Payments from Becoming Collection Events A declined payment should not automatically become a collections event. The customer’s card may have expired. Their payday may have shifted. They may simply need to pay part of the balance today and the rest on Friday. Automated intelligence can help identify what is behind a failed payment and offer the most immediate, realistic path forward. Instead of treating every payment failure as delinquency, it can help businesses distinguish between a temporary obstacle and an account that genuinely requires collections intervention. “We don’t just throw it over the wall and expect our collectors to dial for dollars,” said Burkinshaw. “We’re giving them prescriptive data that makes them more able to make surgical decisions about the problem that needs resolving.” That changes the experience on both sides. For the payer, the experience becomes less punitive and more focused on finding a workable solution. For the business, it can mean better use of collector time and resources, with human attention focused on the accounts where it can make the biggest difference. “We continue to see use cases where people are sent to the principal’s office,” said Miller. “Nobody thinks that we should have a padded chair where you wait in the hall outside—it’s a wooden bench. It’s uncomfortable. But that’s not how you actually resolve the issue in a way that’s favorable to all the participants.” Key Takeaways Traditional automation gives every account essentially the same set of marching orders, regardless of the circumstances. Automated intelligence goes a step further, using the information already available to determine what action makes the most sense for each situation. That makes AI less of an abstract concept and more of a practical tool. Its value doesn’t necessarily come from putting AI front and center. In fact, some of its most useful applications may be the ones customers barely notice. “Over the next five years, AI is going to disappear,” said Miller. “You won’t even know when you’re using it.” As AI becomes increasingly embedded in the business environment, automated intelligence offers a practical way to put it to work. Artificial intelligence may operate behind the scenes, but it can make the automation itself more responsive, helping businesses determine when, how, and where to engage customers in order to collect payments as efficiently and effectively as possible. “The next chapter of payments isn’t about offering more ways to pay,” said Burkinshaw. “It is about knowing which option matters the most in the moment. What we’re building around automated intelligence gives merchants the ability to truly meet customers with the right message at the right time, with the right payment path, before friction becomes failure.” “Let’s not automate failure,” she said. “Let’s automate success. Give customers the ability to succeed before we punish them for failure. This is the future of payments. Be in front of it. Don’t be behind it.” The post From Data to Action: How Automated Intelligence Is Changing Collections appeared first on PaymentsJournal.

Criminals are increasingly aware of the signals banks use to identify “good customers”—and they are using that knowledge to evade detection. At the same time, legitimate customers are adopting behaviors that were once considered tried-and-true risk signals. Data breaches and privacy concerns, for example, have spurred many consumers to use VPNs, a behavior that was once viewed as a reliable fraud red flag. The result is a growing inversion of traditional fraud signals: legitimate customers can look suspicious, while sophisticated criminals can appear trustworthy. In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Diarmuid Thoma, Head of Fraud and Data Strategy at AtData, Jose Pallares, Senior Director of Product Management at Experian, and Jennifer Pitt, Senior Fraud Management Analyst at Javelin Strategy & Research, discussed the convergence of these patterns and how they are reshaping the fraud landscape. This ambiguity has created an environment in which bad actors are thriving and consumers are losing confidence in financial institutions. To combat this threat, financial institutions must adopt methods that are both broader and more granular to accurately identify fraud. The Rise of Manufactured Trust Technology has accelerated this shift, but the underlying challenge is familiar. Whenever fraud systems learn to identify certain behaviors, criminals adapt to avoid them. “Back when I was doing fraud review 20 years ago, if somebody was on a mobile device or a mobile number, that was slightly riskier because landlines were safer statistically,” Thoma said. “Whereas now if you gave a landline, that’s kind of a weird thing. There’s a natural part to that, and people have to keep that in mind, there are these shifts and profiles evolve.” In the past, the prevailing fraud prevention philosophy was to build models capable of detecting abnormalities and inconsistencies. However, criminals are all too aware of this strategy, and it has instead become a blueprint for avoiding detection. Artificial intelligence has also allowed bad actors to deploy these tactics at scale. With a few prompts, even technologically unsophisticated criminals can generate multiple synthetic profiles and manage them at scale. They are also becoming more patient and strategic in how they carry out illicit activities. “Once they had an account, they used to run up the account quickly, do a bust-out, and then run away,” Pitt said. “They don’t do that as much anymore. What they do is they make the account look legitimate over time. To skirt the detection on the forefront, they’re building up that identity with non-financial accounts. They might open up an email account, and once that identity becomes legitimized and verified at one organization, other organizations see it as more legitimate. It’s building that credit profile.” These capabilities have allowed bad actors to manufacture trust at a time when it is more difficult than ever to discern an individual’s intentions. This is partly because consumers have also rapidly adopted technologies like AI and social media, especially among younger and more digitally native generations. “The behavior profile of a good consumer is completely different than it was even five years ago,” Pallares said. “Fraudsters now think or look like good consumers, and consumers—from a fraud systems angle—look completely messy and risky. So how do we level up our existing fraud systems to catch and look at those things differently?” The Compounding Effects of Misclassification Beyond potential fraud losses, gaps in fraud infrastructure often cause legitimate customer activity to be misclassified as fraudulent. As a result, the customer experience suffers. These errors often occur at a time when organizations’ relationships with customers are most tenuous. “There are a lot who from early account set up are coming in and they’re spending a lot,” Thoma said. “They’re doing exactly what you’d be worried about from a commercial point of view, somebody comes in and spends a lot very fast and that’s concerning.” This exemplifies one of the main drivers of false positives: verification often hinges on a single transaction, point in time, or identity element. This short-sighted view can create significant issues for all customers, particularly high-value users. Their behaviors may raise numerous flags, as they may travel frequently, use multiple devices, and leverage a variety of payment methods. “I’ve seen from a bank perspective that good customers were off-boarded because there were signals that they thought were fraud, and it was essentially a false positive where identity elements were flagged as fraud that really weren’t,” Pitt said. “And I’ve seen bad customers get on-boarded because of the same thing. Basically, the decision was wrong, and I’ve seen that a lot.” Left unaddressed, these issues can lead to friction, abandonment, and reduced lifetime value, creating a compounding effect on operations and, ultimately, revenue. This revenue drain can go unnoticed by financial institutions. While many institutions have processes in place to measure fraud, there is often no ready gauge for fraud misclassification. “I think it’s probably a lot bigger than what we think because we just can’t measure it with any degree of accuracy,” Pallares said. “To compound the problem, there are fraud models that are being fed data, and these edge cases that result in false positives don’t make it into the fraud models for behavior. What you’re being measured on doesn’t allow for these edge cases to reduce the risk on those types of consumers.” Trust Is Not Binary The answer is not to abandon fraud signals, but to put them in context. A single transaction, device, or identity element can raise a question, but it shouldn’t determine whether a customer is trustworthy. Financial institutions should take a longitudinal approach to fraud identification, looking at how a customer’s behavior develops over time. Consistent identity markers, such as a longtime email address, established device, or history of legitimate activity can provide valuable context that an isolated anomaly can’t. This also requires fraud models that can adapt as consumer behavior changes. A behavior that once indicated risk may become commonplace, while new patterns may emerge as technology and consumer habits evolve. “Trust is not binary, it’s built,” Pallares said. “You have to look across your different consumer touchpoints and what a consumer is doing, instead of saying, ‘I verify them at account opening, go wild.’ And trust can be revoked. Anytime something looks out of the ordinary and it’s not verified, there’s certain lightweight controls that people can put in place to make sure that once-verified is not always-verified.” That broader view can’t always be found with a single institution. Fraud, payments, and customers experience teams need to share data and intelligence so that decisions are based on a more complete understanding of the customer. Extending that approach across institutions can provide an even stronger defense, particularly as fraudsters move between organizations and manufacture identities across multiple accounts. “When we talk about siloes, it’s within organizations, but it’s also across organizations and across different industries that we need to be sharing,” Pitt said. “Have they been flagged before at another organization? Wouldn’t that help your organization to know if it’s been flagged before, because you wouldn’t onboard that identity? Right now, the exact same synthetic might be used at 100 different banks because fraudsters know that banks aren’t talking.” The challenge is determining which signals represent legitimate complexity and which indicate coordinated fraud. A consumer with little financial history may simple be new to the system, while someone who rapidly establishes connections across multiple organizations may warrant greater scrutiny. The goal, then, is not to find customers who look perfect on paper. It’s to identify customers whose identities and behaviors have been earned over time. Trust Has to Be Earned In a fraud environment where appearances can be manufactured, history becomes one of the most valuable indicators of trust. Financial institutions need the technology, data, and partners to uncover that history and distinguish between customers who look trustworthy and those whose identities and behaviors have earned that trust over time. “When you’re selecting them, it has to be an uncorruptible history because now AI can create history in certain fields,” Thoma said. “In your vendor selection, you look for stuff that can give you the history that is isolated from that, that cannot be replicated, that cannot be created within a week or two and generated. It’s earned history, and that’s really important.” [contact-form-7] The post Why Fraudsters Look Trustworthy and Good Customers Look Suspicious appeared first on PaymentsJournal.

When Same Day ACH launched a decade ago, the primary use case was for exceptions—such as in emergency payroll transactions, time-sensitive bill payments, and other situations where traditional ACH settlement timelines were too restrictive. Those use cases remain relevant, but they represent only a fraction of how Same Day ACH is used today. As organizations have gained greater familiarity with the option and recognized the value of faster settlement, adoption has expanded dramatically. In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Devon Marsh, Managing Director of ACH Network Rules and Risk Management at Nacha, and Ben Danner, Senior Debit Analyst at Javelin Strategy & Research, discussed the evolution of Same Day ACH, the forces driving its growth, and the opportunities that could shape the next phase of faster payments. The broader lesson from the past decade is that payment speed is not simply a question of getting funds from one account to another as quickly as possible. For many transactions, the important consideration is finding the right balance among speed, predictability, risk management, and operational efficiency. Same Day ACH has emerged as an important part of that equation, providing faster settlement while preserving the reach and established processes of the ACH Network. A Microcosm of the ACH Network Same Day ACH began with transaction volumes in the millions. A decade later, it is used for nearly 1.5 billion transactions annually. In many respects, Same Day ACH has become a microcosm of the broader ACH Network. The average dollar value of a Same Day transaction is now nearly equivalent to the average value of transactions processed across the ACH Network overall. That convergence is significant: it suggests that Same Day ACH is no longer confined to a narrow set of specialized use cases, but it is increasingly being incorporated across the same range of payment activities served by traditional ACH. “In the decade since its launch, Same Day ACH has evolved from a credit-only transaction capped at $25,000 to a robust, mature fast rail transacting both debits and credits up to $1 million,” Marsh said. “Now, after the early introduction of debit transactions and after two increases to the per-transaction limit—with another slated for September of 2027—Same Day ACH serves every use case in the ACH Network except for international transactions.” The growth is equally striking from a dollar value perspective. Same Day ACH moved roughly $20 billion in its first year, compared with approximately $4 trillion in 2025, with the ACH Network on track to process even greater value this year. That evolution reflects more than simply increased adoption. The capabilities of Same Day ACH have expanded as well. The first phase supported credit-only transactions, while subsequent changes broadened functionality and increased transaction limits, giving organizations more flexibility in determining when faster ACH settlement makes sense. “The majority of the volume now is on debit, but the majority of the value is on ACH credit,” Danner said. “ACH credits are used for earned wage access, payroll, gig economy transfers and payouts, as well as business payments. So lots of use cases which have expanded beyond where it was initially. Thinking about debit, that’s where you’ve got the originator pulling the funds—bill payments, loan payment, subscriptions, and taxes—where all of that use has been growing as well.” Building on Existing Infrastructure One of the most important drivers of Same Day ACH adoption is something that can be easy to overlook in discussions about faster payments: the strength and ubiquity of the existing ACH infrastructure. Businesses, consumers and government agencies rely on ACH payments for payroll, bill payments, account funding, vendor payments, and other recurring or high-volume transactions. Organizations and consumers are familiar with the payment method, and financial institutions have established systems and processes for supporting it to scale. Same Day ACH builds on that foundation rather than requiring the market to adopt an entirely new payment rail. “Ease of adoption has driven the growth of Same Day ACH,” Marsh said. “Same day transactions are processed on existing infrastructure, they use existing formats, and they’re subject to the same familiar processes as future-dated ACH transactions. And they can reach virtually every deposit account in the U.S. with both debits and credits.” Danner added: “Both consumers and businesses want choice and flexibility. Same Day is fine in many use cases or perhaps even the standard ACH transaction. The key is having that choice of speed and that flexibility to choose.” Finding the Right Speed for the Payment There are now more payment choices than ever, including instant or near-real-time options which have emerged in recent years. However, real-time payments also bring their share of considerations. Instant payments are often irrevocable and lack a debit capability. Both of these factors figure into one’s choice of payment. Although there are use cases where these payments make sense, Same Day ACH can often provide a balance of speed, efficiency, reach, and predictability—particularly for payments where immediate settlement is not essential. “We recognize that some payments travel faster than Same Day ACH, and some travel slower,” Marsh said. “Different payment scenarios have different needs based on the timing, the value, and the business processes involved.” “For a vast number of situations, we believe that Same Day ACH optimizes many of these considerations,” he said. “It provides the benefit of speed as well as the efficiency of batch processing. It enables businesses and consumers to complete payments in urgent situations.” One of the key aspects of this efficiency is that the structure and schedule of Same Day ACH transactions allow organizations time to plan and leverage these payments strategically, which can maximize the value of the payment for both payor and payee. From an accounts payable perspective, most businesses aim to hold on to funds as long as possible to optimize cash flow and liquidity. This also allows for greater accuracy within accounting metrics such as days payable outstanding and gives organizations more effective insights into their operations. Same Day ACH can provide these benefits while accelerating settlement, making it an important option between instant payments and traditional ACH. “Payments that benefit from that faster settlement time include payroll and contractor payments and transfers,” Danner said. “If you think about Same Day ACH credits, that is going to be primarily about accelerating disbursements, letting businesses get money into the account faster.” “If you think about ACH debits on the other side, it’s about accelerating the collections,” he said. “The benefit there is that the biller or that merchant can pull the funds sooner and reduce that time between the initial payment initiation and receiving those funds in their account, which has cash flow benefits.” The Next Phase of Growth From the early days of Same Day ACH, demand has been driven by a broader shift in expectations around payment speed, especially in commercial payments. That demand is likely to become even more consequential as the range of transactions eligible for Same Day ACH continues to expand. In September 2027, the Same Day ACH per-transaction limit is scheduled to increase to $10 million. The change represents one of the most significant expansions of the payment type since its introduction and could broaden the range of transactions for which Same Day ACH is economically and operationally viable. While transactions above the current $1 million per payment threshold represent a relatively small share of overall payment volume, they can represent substantial value and operational importance. Raising the limit has the potential to bring new categories of payments—and new groups of originators—into the Same Day ACH ecosystem. For some organizations, the higher threshold could also simplify payment operations by making Same Day ACH viable across a greater share of their ACH activity rather than requiring them to use different payment methods based on transaction size. “It’s about extending those capabilities and one of those being that per-payment limit, which is certainly going to expand use cases,” Danner said. “I’m thinking about use cases, and it’s things like high-value commercial real estate transactions or large enterprises needing to transfer money between accounts that need that speed. You could certainly cross that threshold into $10 million.” Commercial real estate provides one example of the opportunity. Although certain jurisdictions or transaction requirements may call for a wire transfer to execute a closing itself, Same Day ACH can potentially support other high-value activities surrounding the transaction, including commission payments and escrow funds. The first decade of Same Day ACH demonstrated that organizations value the ability to move money faster without abandoning the reach and infrastructure of ACH. The next decade could be defined by a broader question: not simply whether a payment can move faster, but how organizations can use different speeds and payment methods strategically across the operations. “Same Day ACH will continue to gain momentum as more receivers recognize its benefits,” Marsh said. “Businesses, in particular, that receive Same Day ACH transactions will begin to originate Same Day for their own payments. Originators will convert more future-dated activity to same day because their customers want it and because it’s easy to adopt.” “An increased dollar limit, demand, and ease of use will be the things that drive Same Day ACH growth in the coming decade,” he said. The post 10 Years Running, Same Day ACH Continues to Break New Ground appeared first on PaymentsJournal.