Did you know there’s such a thing as International ACH Transaction, or IAT? There is. In fact, there were nearly 121 million IATs in 2024, both debits and credits, which is impressive, but Nacha believes much greater use can be made of this payment tool. That’s one of the reasons why Nacha has issued both a Request for Comment on some proposed changes to IATs in the Nacha Rules, as well as a Request for Information on IAT topics.

“The purpose is to increase the usefulness of IAT as a transaction, reduce the time and effort spent on exceptions, and ensure that we are carrying useful information with the transaction,” said Amy Morris, Nacha Senior Director, ACH Network Rules. “Many corporates that I talk to do not know that IAT exists. They did not know that there was another way to initiate or receive an international transaction other than a wire.” 

Among the proposals in the RFC are:

• Allowing the IAT, the U.S. portion of an international payment, to be eligible for same-day processing.
• Expanding the fields to include the date of birth for consumers involved in the IAT.
• Clarifying and updating certain field descriptions.

Another proposal would require financial institutions to list their IAT contacts in the ACH Contact Registry, which is securely housed on Nacha’s Risk Management Portal, where information is available only to registered FIs, Payments Associations and the two ACH Operators. 

“Today, IAT is an optional contact and many financial institutions have entered information. We would be moving it from an optional to a mandatory, since all FIs are required to receive and handle IATs,” said Morris. “That would be our third mandatory type of contact in the database.”

Morris also noted two items on the RFC which would pertain to all ACH payments. One would “specifically define what the valid characters are for ACH records,” said Morris. “We would have a table in the Guidelines that would provide the specific valid characters.” The other would have the current Return Reason Code R16 apply solely to a frozen account. A new R90 code would be used when a payment is returned because of instructions from the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). 

See the Request for Comment and Request for Information, including the entire list of proposals and questions, and how to comment and provide information, on Nacha’s website. Responses are due May 30, 2025.