Nine Nacha staffers attended the Association for Financial Professionals' 2024 conference in Nashville, Tennessee, held Oct. 20-23. That’s more than 10% of our entire staff! Throughout the event, the Nacha team shared valuable insights on ACH payments and efforts to prevent payments fraud. Here are the highlights. 

Rob Unger, Managing Director of ACH Network Development, led an engaging and well-attended session, "Strategies for Driving Customer Payment Efficiency," joined by EdaBeth Brown from DirecTV, Julia Hager from Allstate Insurance and Attie Muse from Verizon. These consumer billers described strategies to leverage “autopay” to streamline payment processes and create metrics to influence customer payment behavior. Julia of Allstate and Attie of Verizon shared that about two-thirds of their consumer bill payment collections are made by recurring ACH debit, and EdaBeth of DirecTV said that their figure was about 40% but that they aspire for greater numbers.  

I led another highly attended session (others can decide whether it was engaging!) with Joe Hussey, Managing Director of Wells Fargo, and Lee-Ann Perkins, Assistant Treasurer of Ankura Consulting. The topic was "Enhancing Your ACH Payments Strategy," focusing on how corporate payments and treasury practitioners professionals are identifying new opportunities to evolve their ACH payments strategy, particularly into the “bill payment adjacent” space. That’s the term I use to describe recurring or repeat consumer-to-business payments that have similar characteristics of bill payment and for which ACH is a preferred payment method. These opportunities include donations, subscriptions, dues, services and account transfers. In this session we also covered the "ACH wish list" shared by many corporate practitioners, which includes expanding Same Day ACH (the latest proposal is out!), assistance with fraud detection and prevention, and better account validation. A final gold nugget from this session was Lee-Ann’s number one item on her wish list, “Make checks illegal.” If only I could. 

In addition to these sessions, EdaBeth and I teamed up for "Pay by Bank: The Many Benefits for Corporates and Their Customers," which we delivered to a standing-room only audience on The Payments Stage in the AFP exhibit hall.  We presented DirecTV’s case study on how Pay by Bank is converting customers to ACH for bill payment when they don’t have, don’t know or don’t want to share their routing and account numbers directly. 

Finally, Nacha sponsored, and I participated as a panelist in the Payments Symposium, "Navigating Fraud in 2024 & Beyond." A number of corporate practitioners shared their own organizations’ experiences with fraud and fraud attempts. My two biggest takeaways from this session are: 1) check fraud is a very big problem, and 2) business email compromise (BEC) scams are getting much more sophisticated, including through the application of artificial intelligence. 

Nacha's booth proved to be a hit with AFP 2024 attendees, drawing more than 170 corporate practitioners who stopped by to learn about the latest Nacha Rules changes and Nacha initiatives, including Phixius and Nacha Consulting. The most frequent question posed to the Rules team was, “When is the Same Day ACH limit going to be raised.” 

The energy and enthusiasm at AFP 2024 reflected the ongoing importance of ACH payments for financial professionals. Nacha looks forward to continuing these discussions and supporting organizations as they optimize their payments strategy for the future. 

Thank you to AFP for the great conference, and congratulations to Andrew Deichler for re-joining AFP as new Director, Payments Practice. And many thanks to my Nacha colleagues – Stephanie Prebish, Rob Unger, Debbie Barr, Brad Smith, Dan Roth, Sara Greene, Mark Dixon and James Jenkins.