FedACH is the Federal Reserve Banks' automated clearing house (ACH) service. In 2007, FedACH processed about 37 million transactions per day with an average aggregate value of about $58 billion. For comparison, Fedwire processed about 537,000 transactions valued at nearly $2.7 trillion per day in the same year.[1]
Unlike Fedwire, which processes transactions in real-time, FedACH is a batch processing-based system. The Federal Reserve Banks began offering ACH services to depository institutions in the United States in the early 1970s. In July 2023, the Federal Reserve launched the FedNow service, a real-time processing system for facilitating instant payments and transfers.[2] While Fedwire typically handles lower-volume but high-value, real-time transactions, FedNow will be geared towards high-volume, lower-value transactions. These are similar to many of the transactions historically handled by FedACH but which FedNow will be able to process in real-time and around the clock.
FedACH is one of the two major participants in the ACH Network in the United States, the other being the Electronic Payments Network, an ACH service operated by The Clearing House Payments Company, a private entity owned by an association of major US banks.