IBM has won a tender to modernise the Federal Reserve's ACH platform, which processes up to 100 million transactions per day and half of all US payments.
Based out of the Atlanta Retail Payments Office, the Fed's ACH and cheque clearing system processes billion of transactions annually on behalf of commercial banks. The new infracture provided by IBM will enable the central bank to input, process, clear, settle and provide billing/accounting functions for all ACH payments in all 12 districts across the Federal Reserve system.
“By modernising our payments systems, we will be well positioned to converge our existing retail payment operations and payment infrastructure onto a unified platform,” says Brian Egan, SVP, of the Retail Payments Office of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. “This will enable us to process payments more cost effectively and position us to more quickly adapt to changes in the ACH and electronic check payments environment."
The move comes at a time of great upheaval in the nation's ageing payments infrastructure as public and private sector networks upgrade their systems to cater for the arrival of real-time and mobile P2P payments.