Automated Clearing House (“ACH”) is one of the most popular ways payments are made these days. It is regarded as an efficient, inexpensive, and reliable way one can send electronic funds from one specific source to another. Whether you’re looking to send or receive money, it’s important to understand the benefits of ACH.
Examples of popular ACH transactions may include direct deposit from employers, social security, as well as tax refunds. Furthermore, when you schedule the payment of bills like those for loans, insurance, mortgage, and utility bills you are often taking advantage of ACH features.
ACH vs. Wire Transfer
ACH is often preferred over wire transfers for a variety of reasons.
- Quicker
- Cheaper
- Easier
Wires used to be the only option to send money. With the evolution of online banking, ACH’s are more self-serving and have less fees involved when compared to wires. Wire transfers have to be processed by a third party or a financial institution. Compared to ACH, wire transfers are more time intensive and costly. Often, ACH’s don’t have any fees at all as funds are transferred directly among banks, no third party involved. This improves the speed of when funds become available, too.
EFT
EFT payment technologies are growing in popularity these days, and are similar to ACH. EFT refers to Electronic Funds Transfer, which is a computerized payment processing. There are various types of EFT payments such as credit cards, direct deposit payments, direct debit, electronic benefit transfer, and wire transfer via banking networks.
Echecks
Echecks is another popular form of payment. While writing a check is still needed from time-to-time, we don’t carry our checkbooks around as much as we used to. Echecks is how people draw funds from a checking accounts without actually writing a check. Instead, the checking information is sent via the computer.
There are various methods of payment nowadays, many of which that weren’t available just a decade or two ago. Technology is amazing in the fact that you can send money to anyone from anywhere in the world and they can receive it in as little as few minutes time.