Despite Rapid Change, ACH Still Anchors the Payments Industry

Even as agentic commerce, open banking, and stablecoins have captured much of the payments industry’s attention, one of the ecosystem’s most established networks continues to prove its relevance. The ACH Network processed 5.5% more volume year-over-year through Q2 2026, reinforcing its position as a foundational rail for the next generation of digital payments.

Equally notable is that this momentum was driven across all sectors and segments, including commercial, government, and consumer payments.

In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Michael Herd, Executive Vice President of Network Administration at Nacha, and Ben Danner, Senior Debit Analyst at Javelin Strategy & Research, discussed the drivers behind growth in both ACH and Same Day ACH volume, as well as the fraud rules recently implemented to help secure transactions.

Looking ahead, the ACH Network’s role may become even more significant, as scale, reach, and reliability position it to support the next generation of payment experiences.

Growing Through Digitization

One of the strongest drivers of the ACH Network’s growth has been B2B payments and transfers, with payment volume from this sector increasing nearly 10% through the first half of the year.

This growth is partly attributable to the continued digitization of payments that were previously dominated by paper checks, including supplier payments and contractor payouts. A similar trend continues in the government sector.

“A change from last year at this time is that the federal government’s payment volume is back to modest growth, it’s a bit over 3%,” Herd said. “The government has been issuing tariff refunds, depositing seed funds for the new tax-free newborn accounts, and of course, they are working on efforts to eliminate check disbursements in favor of electronic payments.”

“Whereas a year ago federal government volume was flat, this year it’s back into a modest growth posture,” he said.

Another growth driver has been consumer online payments and transfers, which increased approximately 6.5% through the first half of 2026. This growth has been fueled by a surge in new account-to-account (A2A) use cases and broader acceptance.

“A2A payments are becoming more mainstream, these are things like your P2P and digital wallets which are growing with consumers and also use the ACH Network for disbursements,” Danner said. “There’s adoption by large merchants as well, things like pay-by-bank. The other thing is customers broadly turning towards digital ways to pay bills instead of paper checks or cash payments, moving into these wallet apps using traditional ACH.”

The Same Day ACH Surge