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What is ACH Payment? | A Complete Guide to ACH

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What is ACH Payment? | A Complete Guide to ACH

What is ACH?

ACH (Automated Clearing House) is a network that is used for electronic transfer of money between bank accounts in the United States. It's operated by an organization known as NACHA (previously NACHA - National Automated Clearing House Association) It is also known as"The ACH networks as well as the ACH scheme.

Processing payments through the ACH network was in place in the late 1970s. ACH transferred financial transactions worth greater than $61.9 trillion by 2020, which is an increase of close to 11 percent over the previous year. This included consumer, government and business-to-business transactions as well as international payment transactions.

The ACH scheme includes a range of different kinds of payments that we'll explore in the following paragraphs.

What exactly is what is an ACH payment?

A ACH payments is form of electronic bank-to bank payment that is accepted that is accepted in the US. Payments made through ACH are processed via the ACH network, instead of being processed through card networks, such as Visa and Mastercard.

An ACH payment may also be called an ACH transfer or ACH transaction.

ACH payments cannot be made within countries like the UK, Eurozone, or anywhere else outside of the United States. In fact, the ACH network is only a US payments network that is only available to US residents. Furthermore the ACH network only applies to banking, which means you can't use ACH payments using credit or debit cards.

There are two main types of ACH payment types:

  • Direct Deposits

  • Direct Payments

Direct Deposit is a broad category of deposits from companies or the government to consumers. This includes reimbursement for employee expenses government benefits, tax as well as other tax refunds interest and annuities.

Direct Payment refers to the use of money to make payments, whether by organizations or individuals. This kind of ACH transaction is the main topic of this guide. every mention of ACH transfer, payment ACH transfer and ACH transactions in the guide is referring specifically to Direct Payments except where stated otherwise.

Different types of ACH transfers

There are two kinds of ACH transfers: ACH credit and ACH debits. They differ in the way the funds transfer between accounts - when using ACH credits, the funds are put into an account in contrast, when using ACH debits, the money is taken out of the account.

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