Nacha’s 2026 Rules Focus on ACH Risk and Transaction Transparency

The Payments Podcast by Bottomline

Episode Transcript

Owen McDonald (Host): Welcome to The Payments Podcast. I'm your host, Bottomline Managing Editor, Owen McDonald. The B2B payments sector is buzzing about new Nacha rule changes centered on stronger fraud protections, improved data clarity, and network modernization. This phased project touches on domestic and cross-border payments as well as higher transaction limits and more. To walk us through what's new, we're very glad to be joined by Mark Dixon, senior consultant with Nacha Consulting Services.
Mark Dixon, welcome to The Payments Podcast. 

Mark Dixon (Guest): Yes. Thanks for having me.

Owen McDonald (Host): We're very, very happy you're here, Mark.
Kicking it right off, if we zoom out over the next 18months of the Nacha rule changes starting in March 2026, what's the overarching theme, Mark? When we spoke, it was framed as a compliance for all parties, quote, unquote. Expand on that if you could.

Mark Dixon (Guest): Yeah. So, obviously, starting this year, a big portion of these rule changes are designed to have all industry participants actively involved in the process of identifying fraud scenarios. So a big portion of this is really to get everybody on the same page and working collaboratively on identification, and then also working towards potential recovery scenarios if things are caught after the fact. But I like to talk about it from a more proactive standpoint, versus reactive. Historically, especially with credit push fraud scenarios, I think the industry has been much more reactive in the way that we've identified and handled those.

And these, rule changes are really designed to help the industry participants be much more proactive in identification and then recovery, and acting upon that.

Owen McDonald (Host): For corporates and their banks, how will new risk management and transparency rules impact day-to-day payments? What's going to feel or seem different to users, and what are the most critical deadlines pertaining to this in 2026?

Mark Dixon (Guest): Yeah, great question. I would like to say that industry participants won't see a huge change to the way that they're doing their payment processing today because our new rule changes are really intended to codify risk management practices that probably should already be in place today. What I think you might find, though, is everybody slows down a little bit in those senses of urgency where we're trying to push payments out the door because we have a million things going on.

Maybe we just take a little bit more time to go: Does this make sense? Does something look a little bit odd about this? And should I take a little bit of time and care with this before I let that payment leave the door, and potentially be a fraud scenario?

So that's where I think the industry will see these business participants and and corporate originators going. Let's look at what we're doing today. I do think over time, we'll see an evolution because I think we're going to identify gaps. I think we're going to say, 'Oh, we're doing all these processes. Maybe we need some scalability with it?' 

Maybe that means technology enhancements, process changes. I think that's where the industry will go. When we're looking at this year, obviously, your March 20 is going to be the first deadline for folks to meet, and then everybody is going to need to meet the June 22 deadline. It's actually June 19, but with the holiday, June 22 is the effective date for all industry participants.

Owen McDonald (Host): Those are important dates for sure! Mark, Nacha has been working on raising the same day ACH transaction limit to $10,000,000. How would that change fit into Nacha's longer term plan for the network? Is it a way of maintaining parity across payment rails while also managing risk, for example? What's behind that?

Mark Dixon (Guest): So if if you look at the history of same day ACH, which to me is really just modern ACH, it's the way ACH should work, because you should have the flexibility of picking an effective entry date that's either today or the future depending on what your use case is for it. Right? So the pace of same day ACH and limit increases kind of go along with how industry participants view the risk around it.

Financial institutions, in particular, were looking at this as 'oh well, you know, faster payments means faster fraud'. We used to hear that a lot! I think as everybody's gotten more comfortable, they've been like 'you know what? It's okay for that limit to be higher.' We have an expectation and a demand now where industry participants that are going to leverage same day ACH need those limits to be higher. There is some synergy, obviously, across other faster payment mechanisms with the limit change increase as well, sure, but to me it's just the natural evolution of same day ACH and ACH modernizing that's leading us to these increased limits.

Owen McDonald (Host): I would say that B2B transactions are greatly implied in there, wouldn't you?

Mark Dixon (Guest): Yes. Because it allows those participants that are doing those large dollar payments, those wholesale type of transactions, the ability to leverage same day ACH functionality, which is really critical for them.

Owen McDonald (Host): Exactly. It's being said that new risk-based monitoring rules and data standardization, like marking ACH payments as payroll or purchase, work hand in hand. Mark, explain how better standardized data helps companies spot ACH anomalies with higher accuracy.

Mark Dixon (Guest): Well, this is a great tool and, actually, we've displayed this visually - like a puzzle. These particular descriptions are part of that puzzle, and they kind of sit on top. And the reason for that is because all industry participants now have the data richness aspect where they can monitor and they can flag transactions that potentially seem anomalous. That can happen at the originator level, even when I'm just inputting the information and I'm flagging my own transactions to make sure they make sense and that there's not something weird going out. The ODFI (the originating financial institution) now has that data to look at as well, and they can flag potential scenarios where it's being used correctly or it's being used incorrectly, or it's a potential trigger for a transaction that just doesn't make sense at all.

Similarly, once you get those now to the receiving institution who now also has monitoring requirements, they can use that data to do mismatches. So they can look at purpose mismatches. Maybe you have a CCD record, which is a corporate transaction going into a consumer's account, and it's marked as payroll. Well, that doesn't make sense. Why would that be going into that account at all? So there's just those potential scenarios where the data richness can help us trigger and look for those anomalous transactions, which is a big part of this new rule set.

Owen McDonald (Host): That's very important, I think, for the integrity of the system, and I'm quite sure that's going to become clear pretty quickly. Moving on, Nacha's second annual 'Smarter, Faster Payments Conference' is any day now. How is the narrative around B2B payment trends generally changing at this year's event, Mark? What are the innovations, like agentic AI, that are creating the most attendee buzz, would you say?

Mark Dixon (Guest): I would say, obviously, stablecoins is one area in particular that's a huge, huge buzz for the industry. The legitimization of the Genius Act, which really helped us figure out that we can all play in this space - people are trying to figure out exactly how to do that. But it created the opportunity for everybody to think 'how is this modernizing?' And I've heard lots of treasury folks, in particular, thinking about what does stablecoins mean from a liquidity management standpoint or for cross-border transactions? How does it actually change what I'm doing in the treasury space? 

To your point, AI continues to be a hot topic. Agentic AI is really interesting because you have the potential for completely automated workflows. Or I could be a treasury person that says, hey, I want to consolidate my cash flows into my master account. I want you to give me the best path forward, perfect exchange rates, making sure that I'm maximizing returns and that when it ends up in the account, I'm not losing out on the initial value that I received in localized currency. That's all something that potentially an agentic model could accomplish. And those are definitely conversations that I think you're likely to hear at Smarter, Faster Payments, as everybody's really excited about this whole idea of treasury modernization.

Owen McDonald (Host): Okay. Last question. We've just come through the ISO 20022 migration for financial messaging on Swift. Nacha is changing its own rules around international ACH transactions and more. How are these changes running in parallel, Mark? What extra transparency does this give to FIs and corporates trying to meet global expectations while steering clear of fraud?

Mark Dixon (Guest): Yeah. So, obviously, we have our our traditional addenda records, which contain the details, the remittance information, that 'payment story' so to speak. And our ability to support what's happening from a mapping perspective with ISO records and data richness is really critical. So the idea of making IAT (international ACH) transactions more data rich and more standardized was a really critical aspect to make sure that data could be meaningful. And Nacha does support data mapping from an ISO perspective. So we obviously are not an ISO-formatted payment rail, but addenda records can be formatted to meet ISO intake so that information can be very meaningful from a global perspective.

Owen McDonald (Host): Okay, very good! Business payments are getting smarter, faster, and less friendly to fraudsters. This has everything to do with changes being made by Nacha to the ACH network this year and next. Keep a sharp eye on those technical deadlines because fortune favors the prepared, especially in business payments.

Our thanks again to Nacha's Mark Dixon for his sharp insights. To our audience, the smartest people in B2B payments, thanks for listening. Hit subscribe. Catch us again on your favorite podcast platforms, including Apple, Spotify, Blueberry, iHeartRadio, and YouTube. Bye for now.

The Payments Podcast, from Bottomline.