In a letter to NACHA — The Electronic Payments Association today, the American Bankers Association expressed support for a proposal to implement same-day Automated Clearing House transactions. The proposed change would enable same-day processing for most ACH transactions, an ABA news release said.

"ABA strongly supports the NACHA same-day ACH proposal as a fundamental step to promote faster payments across the entire industry," ABA said in its letter.

According to ABA, the NACHA proposal addresses many of the concerns raised by the banking industry in response to a similar proposal in 2011. In its letter, ABA addressed each of the proposed modifications:

• interbank compensation framework — ABA "strongly supports" this fee model as a way to help receiving depository FIs absorb a portion of the costs of same-day ACH functionality;
• phased-in approach — ABA said this will enable FIs to plan their system upgrades over a period of almost three years;
• abbreviated processing times — ABA recommended that the deadline for granting ACH credit to customers be changed from 5 p.m. local time to 6 p.m. local time.

• identification of same-day ACH items — rather than using an existing field to identify same-day ACH transactions as NACHA suggests, ABA would prefer to create a new service class code located in the batch header record.

Read the full text of ABA's letter to NACHA.