For Immediate Release
ACHDIRECT Adopts EPN STP 820
Standard For Business-To-Business Payments
Leading Cash Management Provider
Supports EPN’s Remittance Standard
New York, NY, Oct. 10, 2005 – The Electronic Payments Network (EPN), the ACH business of The Clearing House Payments Company, today announced that ACHDIRECT, a leading provider of cash management services, will adopt the EPN STP 820 remittance standard.
EPN STP 820 was developed by EPN, the ACH payments business of The Clearing House Payments Company L.L.C., working with industry groups, software providers, banks and businesses to facilitate straight-through-processing for B-to-B electronic payments. The standard enables corporate trading partners to transmit detailed remittance information within their electronic ACH payments and allows recipients to automatically post the transactions to their accounts receivables applications. The EPN STP 820 standard is supported by NACHA and the Association of Financial Professionals (AFP).
The adoption of the EPN STP 820 by ACHDIRECT will strengthen the company’s flagship technology, Payments Gateway, a high-capacity modular payment processing environment designed for maximum flexibility and availability. The third-generation design in Payments Gateway enables customers to process credit card, debit card, and electronic check transactions in either real time or batch mode.
“By incorporating the EPN STP 820 remittance standard into our processing environment and client tools, ACH Direct will be able to provide our clients with a completely automated method of distributing remittance information to their trading partners along with the actual payment itself,” said ACHDIRECT CEO Jeff Thorness. “ACH Direct is very excited about extending these capabilities to our clients because it will vastly simplify the previously complex process of communicating and linking remittance data to the corresponding deposit.”
The EPN STP 820 standard addresses one of the key obstacles in business-to-business payments: the lack of a single standard format for remittance information. The AFP Payments Advisory Group, which represents a broad cross-section of corporate treasury and finance professionals, has said the EPN STP 820 “appears to address key barriers to the efficient delivery of remittance information with electronic payments, if properly implemented.”
“ACHDIRECT’s adoption of the EPN STP 820 standard will help more businesses initiate electronic payments and move away from checks,” said Rossana Salaris, Senior Vice President of The Clearing House Payments Company, responsible for EPN. “As support for the standard continues to grow, every industry will benefit from the cost savings and operational improvements that result from widespread adoption of B-to-B electronic payments.”
A Federal Reserve study showed that of the 3.9 billion business-to-business remittance payments each year, only 14% are executed electronically. Of these electronic payments only 32% could be posted automatically. This standard will dramatically increase the automatic reconciliation of electronic payments.
Copies of EPN’s research “Barriers to Electronic Payments” and the EPN STP 820 Implementation Guide are available on the EPN website at www.epaynetwork.com.
About ACHDIRECT
ACHDIRECT is one of the largest privately held electronic funds transfer processors in the United States with over $3 billion in transactions processed in 2004. ACHDIRECT has been providing payment-processing solutions to a wide mix of clientele since 1998 and continues to develop ways to help clients face an increasingly complex and competitive business environment. Additional information about ACH Direct can be found at www.achdirect.com
About EPN STP 820
EPN STP 820 was developed by the Electronic Payments Network (www.epaynetwork.com). The EPN STP 820 specifies up to 10 required data elements, with two elements – customer name and customer account number –as mandatory. The EPN STP 820 specifies up to 10 required data elements, with two elements – customer name and customer account number –as mandatory. When invoices are being paid, there are eight additional fields such as invoice number, gross invoice amount, and amount paid to be included with the electronic payment for each invoice being paid.
About EPN and The Clearing House Payments Company
The Electronic Payments Network, a payments business of The Clearing House Payments Company, is the only national private-sector ACH operator in the United States. Its membership consists of over 1,600 commercial banks, credit unions and savings banks. EPN processed more than 3.4 billion payments in 2004. The Clearing House Payments Company (www.theclearinghouse.org) is a private-sector, global payment systems infrastructure that clears and settles more than 20 million payments for $1.5 trillion per day. The Clearing House manages payment services that span the entire spectrum of paper, paper-to-electronic and electronic payments. For more information on The Clearing House, contact Chip Savidge, chip.savidge@theclearinghouse.org, 212.613.9896, or Greg Berardi, greg@bluemarlinpartners.com, 415.239.7826.
