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NEWS RELEASE
Contact:
NACHA Issues Training
Materials on New Back Office Check Conversion
Businesses and
Financial Institutions Can Access Online at No
Charge
Herndon,
Virginia, November 14, 2006 - With businesses
and the financial services industry gearing up for
back office check conversion, NACHA - The Electronic
Payments Association has released resource materials
that businesses and financial institutions can use
to begin training customer service staff about the
new ACH check conversion application. Enabled by new
NACHA rules that become effective March 16, 2007,
back office conversion (BOC) allows businesses and
billers that accept checks at the point-of-sale or
at manned bill payment locations to convert eligible
checks to ACH debits in a centralized location.
"NACHA and its
members are committed to educating the marketplace
and consumers about check conversion," said Mark
Tizzard, Payment Strategies Director of Wachovia,
and co-chair of the BOC Education Task Force, the
group that spearheaded this effort. "The training
materials provide businesses, processors, and
financial institutions with a tremendous amount of
organized and interactive information to answer
their customers' questions about back office check
conversion."
The training
materials can be accessed and downloaded from the
Business or Financial Institution sections of the
Electronic Payments web site at
http://www.electronicpayments.org. Currently,
the material includes interactive training decks and
a sample consumer "take-away." Additional
information for consumers will be available closer
to the implementation date in March. The materials
were produced by NACHA's BOC Education Task Force
and are available to businesses and financial
institutions at no charge.
"Several
requirements of NACHA's back office conversion rules
are intended to ensure that customers are properly
notified that their checks may be converted," said
Peter Hohenstein, Senior Vice President of Bank of
America, and the other co-chair of the BOC Education
Task Force. "Even so, consumers may still have
questions that either the businesses or their
financial institution will need to answer."
The rules include
notification and information requirements that are
consistent with those recently required by the
Federal Reserve's changes to Regulation E. In
addition, NACHA's rules require the provision of a
working customer service telephone number that is
answered during business hours.
Check conversion
has been available in the marketplace since
September 1999, when NACHA's interim rules for
converting checks at the point-of-purchase went into
effect. NACHA estimates that more than 2.3 billion
checks were converted into ACH payments in 2005.
About the ACH
Network and NACHA - The Electronic Payments
Association
The Automated Clearing House (ACH) Network
facilitates commerce, electronically, by serving as
an efficient, reliable and secure payments system. NACHA, led by member depository financial
institutions and payments associations, fulfills
this purpose by managing the development,
administration, and governance of the ACH Network,
and by providing superior services and value to its
members as the industry association responsible for
ACH payments. NACHA represents more than 11,000
financial institutions through direct memberships
and a network of regional payments associations, and
650 organizations through its industry councils.
Visit NACHA on the Internet at
www.nacha.org or
www.electronicpayments.org.
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