NACHA Creates Corporate Payments Council to Promote B2B Electronic Payments

The Corporate Payments Council goal is to bring together stakeholders in the wholesale payments arena to develop solutions and best practices that will result in greater use of electronic B2B payments. The Council will work with companies, financial institutions and other industry groups on: 1) straight-through processing issues; 2) the next generation of remittance information formats and standards; 3) corporate payables best practices for ACH credit origination; 4) risk management and 5) compliance issues and opportunities presented by HIPAA, child support, OFAC, Patriot Act and other regulations. The first meeting of the Corporate Payments Council will take place November 13-14, 2003 in Herndon, Virginia. Interested parties may attend the meeting at no charge. The total number of business-to-business payments over the ACH Network grew by a respectable 12.4 percent in 2002 to 1.6 billion, and comprised 17.4 percent of all ACH payments. The dollar value of these B2B payments was $18.4 trillion, an average of $11,481 per payment, and 75 percent of all ACH dollars. Financial electronic data interchange (EDI) on the ACH Network grew by a more robust 27 percent in 2002. In 2002, more than 526 million EDI-formatted remittance records were exchanged over the ACH Network. Year-to-date ACH figures for B2B payments and financial EDI show similar growth rates.