NACHA Names Ann-Marie Bartels as Chairman of Corporate Payments Council

Ann-Marie Bartels, AAP, President and Chief Executive Officer of Mid-America Payment Exchange, has been named Chairman of NACHAs newly created Corporate Payments Council. The Councils mission is to develop solutions and best practices that will result in greater use of electronic business-to-business payments. The Councils next meeting is March 8-9, 2004 in Reston, Virginia. Additional information about participating in the Council is available at www.nacha.org. NACHA estimates that in 2003 there were 1.7 billion B2B payments and transfers made by ACH, an increase of about 10 percent over 2002. Examples of B2B ACH payments include trading partner and vendor payments, corporate disbursements to and collections from franchises, dealers, and distributors, intra-company cash management transfers, government vendor payments, and business-to-government tax withholding payments. NACHA also estimates that there were 190 million financial electronic data interchange (EDI) payments made via ACH in 2003, up 13 percent over 2002. Financial EDI is the electronic exchange of payments, payment-related information or financial-related documents in standard formats between business partners. With financial EDI, the remittance information accompanies the payment; that is, the money and the data stay together. The number of EDI remittance records was 674 million in 2003, up 20.5 percent.