It’s an exciting time in payments here in the US, but it’s also a confusing and difficult-to-navigate time for many. Let’s talk about why and what Liftoff Solutions is doing to solve this.
With the launch of FedNOW and the increasing adoption of RTP, we can finally send funds instantly between most bank accounts in the US. We also have options for how to do that – from transferring funds to a friend via Venmo to deciphering how your bank wants you to send that payment via Zelle, RTP, or FedNow.
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The FedNow Service will help enable financial institutions to deliver end-to-end faster payment services to their customers. |
At the same time, ACH still dominates retail payments in the US by volume and transactions, and even with the introduction of RTP and FedNow, ACH continues to grow. ACH is so old that the average Senator remembers its creation during their teenage years. In those decades of use, it has become the country's infrastructure and foundation of finance. At current growth rates, RTP and FedNOW won’t overtake ACH till 2037, and likely, we will still be sending payments via NACHA files sent over sFTP in 2050.
This puts the entire payments industry in a difficult position: how do we navigate a world where ACH might be in decline but still dominant, where some banks can do some things on RTP, and where the newest entrant, FedNow, has powerful backing, supports a broader set of use cases, but is still far from ubiquitous.
Our customers, prospects, and peers in the industry know that people want to use instant payments but don’t want to build multiple integrations to different payment systems or manage the complex logic to route transactions between systems. Instant might seem significant if you’re an online gaming startup starting with a blank slate, but what about the rest of us?
Unlock 100% Instant ACH Coverage Seamlessly link every instant payment rail to ACH, granting you access to RTP, FedNow, and Liftoff Solutions Instant Settlement for all your ACH transactions.
As a small commercial lender, you’d love to have 60%+ of your disbursements and repayments completed in less than 10 seconds, but you don’t have the budget or the access to engineering talent to invest in this. If you’re a payroll provider for a restaurant,
you’d love to have payroll land in a server’s account a few minutes after their shift ends, but you don’t want to be in the business of tracking what payment rails and what employee bank account is accessible on which payment system. Fifty years of ACH means 50 years of legacy implementations that need a bridge to the world of instant payments.
Liftoff Solutions was founded with the intent to combine blockchain and ledgering. Over the past five years, we’ve built deep expertise in the world of ACH and how a seemingly frozen file format in practice contains incredible complexity that we needed to learn to manage. We transitioned from blockchain to our own ledger a while back, but in building our original platform around the ability to offer services on the Ethereum blockchain, we created an orchestration and ledgering platform designed to transact 24/7 and to work across methods and providers to turn ACH transactions into instant ones.
This week, we’ve announced our ACHNow product, where you can plug us into existing ACH infrastructure – including giving us those NACHA files you’re sFTPing now – and we will settle them instantly, choosing the right rail and provider based on your need (you can literally call it “cheapest” or “fastest” or anything between), turning them into instant payments if possible. If not, we use our Instant Settlement product to settle funds to your account immediately.
ACH pulls are a nightmare, as anyone who’s had to implement or use them knows, and with ACHNow, we’ll reduce those problems by attempting them instantly. The percentage of instant transactions will increase dramatically over the next few years as RTP and FedNOW coverage increases.
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The FedNow Service will help enable financial institutions to deliver end-to-end faster payment services to their customers. |