According to statistics released by NACHA, more than 12 billion ACH payments were made in 2004, a 20 percent increase over 2003. The growth was largely driven by the rapid expansion of ARC - the accounts receivable check conversion application - which experienced a nearly six-fold increase in volume to more than 1.25 billion payments.

"The tremendous growth in ACH payments is the result of the substantial
benefits that consumers, companies and financial institutions receive when moving from manual, paper-intensive processes to electronic payment processes," said Steve Ellis, Chairman of NACHA and Executive Vice President of Wells Fargo & Company's Wholesale Banking Group. The nation's financial institutions originated 21.6 percent more ACH payments than in 2003, the industry's best performance since 1991 when Direct Deposit was first being promoted nationwide. The number of these payments was 11.06 billion, a jump of nearly 2 billion over 2003, and valued at $25.5 trillion. The remainder were originated by the Federal government -- 952 million ACH payments in 2004, up 3.0 percent, and valued at $3.1 trillion.

The second area of growth was Internet-initiated ACH payments which increased 40.4 percent over 2003 to 967 million ACH debit payments valued at $300 billion. Combined with ACH credit payments, U.S. consumers used the Internet to initiate more than 1 billion ACH payments valued at $350 billion.

NACHA is the leading organization in developing electronic solutions to
improve the payments system. NACHA represents more than 11,000 financial institutions through direct memberships and a network of regional payments associations, and 650 organizations through its industry councils. NACHA develops operating rules and business practices for the Automated Clearing House (ACH) Network and for electronic payments in the areas of Internet commerce, electronic bill and invoice presentment and payment (EBPP, EIPP), e- checks, financial electronic data interchange (EDI), international payments, and electronic benefits transfer (EBT). Visit NACHA on the Internet at http://www.nacha.org.

PR Release