I’ve been attending the NACHA Payments conference for many years, either as a banker, technologist, or industry research analyst. In recent years, the focus (and name) of the conference has shifted to Smarter. Faster. Payments.

When I wrote on my NACHA Payments conference experience last year, both commercial bankers and corporate treasurers were lukewarm on adopting the new RTP® network from The Clearing House (TCH). The majority of supplier and payroll payments are scheduled in advance, making low-cost domestic ACH the payment type of choice. In addition, most treasury management systems (TMS) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems can only initiate and approve payments in batches. To transmit the payment file to their bank, a host-to-host file channel is typically used, with the bank picking up the payment file and processing the outgoing payments in yet another batch transaction.