There are a lot of payment methods today to consider when thinking about what your customers want. But when considering how to better your business, you may also want to think about where the ACH payment network fits into the mix.
Because your business is often hyper-focused on how to tailor your payments solutions to your customers, it’s easy to overlook how a specific type of payment method can benefit your business on the back-end. Relying on the ACH payment network, however, can open up your business to a new realm of opportunities.
By using ACH payments, your business can have a first-hand look at how to optimize payments, lower business costs and increase multipurpose functionality. Of course, to reap the full benefits of the network, it’s best done by partnering with a payments solutions provider like Payline to make the process even easier.
Where Opportunities Exist Within the ACH Payment Network
One of the biggest fears of any business executive trying to balance the books is not knowing when payments are being processed, or when they will settle. With ACH payment, your business team can know exactly when you’ll be paid — or if there were any issues with a payment. Instead of finding out after the fact if there were problems, ACH payment provides more transparency in the process.
The need to know when your payments are coming through is particularly important for recurring payments. With ACH payments, your business can ditch the manual processing, which means you lessen the chance of payment processing errors.
Speaking of errors, because the ACH payment settlement process occurs multiple times a day, you can better manage the balancing of your books on a regular basis — instead of having to wait for days for transactions to process. Beyond the convenience, since ACH payments are processed through an electronic network in batches, it can sometimes produce fees lower than credit cards.
As for other opportunities that benefit your business, another perk is one that’s growing increasingly important in today’s fraud-filled ecosystem: better security. With the added benefit of encryption technology, an ACH payment can better protect your payments when compared to paper checks, or the old-school magstripe credit cards that haven’t been upgraded.
And on your customers’ side? While there are plenty of benefits to your business alone, you may ask: would my customers actually care about ACH? The short answer: Yes. What this all comes back to is offering customers choices. Because there are customers who prefer ACH, your business can convert those customers faster at checkout.
If you feel that ACH payments might be a solution worth integrating into your business, the team at Payline can help you better understand how, why and when the right time is to jump on the ACH payment network bandwagon. If you’re ready to optimize your payments – and lower business costs — now may be that time.
Anna Lothson is a content contributor for Payline Data. She previously wrote for PYMNTS.com, as a Sr. Content Producer, where she focused on financial services and payments innovation, fraud and security, emerging payments, and FinTech news, research and thought-leadership content across the payments industry.
