Financial institutions favoring ACH card, electronic transactions

In recent years, electronic payments have drastically changed the payment processing industry and many believe it is for the better. In the corporate sector, ACH cards and other wire-based transactions have simultaneously improved the efficiency of operations and yielded new security challenges. However, despite these perceived obstacles, merchants, payment processors and financial institutions seem to all be leveraging electronic payments with their clients. American Banker reported recently that financial institutions have been incentivizing electronic payment adoption among corporate clientele in an attempt to remove paper from the equation and streamline processing. The source asserted that most are framing electronic payments as a method of better controlling the enterprise balance sheet. This, American Banker explained, is largely related to the processing of vendor payments, as well as employee expense sheets, as tracking all cash flowing in and out of the business is much simpler and far more timely. According to the Association of Credit and Collection Professionals, electronic payment transactions have been outpacing paper checks for years. In 2009, Federal Reserve data showed that there were more than 19 billion ACH transactions, and 109 billion total electronic payments. This was more than four times the number of transactions made with checks.