The Ghana Interbank Payments and Settlement Systems (GhIPSS), in collaboration with all banks in the country, has introduced a new service called ACH DC Near Real Time (NRT), that allows Corporate Institutions to make bulk payments faster and almost in real time.
The service, which is an addition to GhIPSS’ existing ACH Direct Credit platform, is designed to enhance the efficiency of making bulk payments such as salaries, dividends and more, within just 15 minutes, instead of the previous 4 to 24 hours.
This means, under this new ACH DC NRT regime, when money is sent from one source account to multiple accounts in different banks, it will no longer take up to 24 hours for the receivers’ accounts to be credited, but just 15 minutes.
A statement from GhIPSS said the platform provides corporate Institutions with a viable alternative to cheques and allows corporate institutions to credit the accounts of beneficiaries on a bulk payments list within 15minutes of presenting payment list to their banks.
“Corporate institutions have the opportunity to make bulk payments anytime between 6:00pm the previous day and 3:00pm the following day and the payees’ accounts will be credit in 15 minutes – almost in real time,” it explained.
GhIPSS said NRT is an efficient payment option which provides transparency and certainty of payments because it allows banks of corporate institutions to re-present returned payment details within the same session and corporate institutions can correct all payment errors for re-presentment without fear of missing payment timelines, adding that the system also allows for deadline payments to be met quickly.
ACH DC NRT can be accessed by organizations through their banks as well as savings and loans companies for the payments of salaries, allowances, pensions, welfare benefits, suppliers and all other bulk payment types.
The statement quoted GhIPSS CEO, Archie Hesse as saying “Direct Credit NRT is a major addition to the plethora of electronic payment solutions, which will be extremely useful to businesses and other organizations.”
He therefore encouraged organizations seeking to make faster bulk payments, to use NRT, to ensure that intended recipients receive the money almost immediately.
ACH DC is a secure and reliable bulk payments service, which allows corporate institutions, to make single or batched payments by electronically transferring funds directly into different bank accounts across different banks within Ghana.
It comes in three forms – Standard ACH DC, Express ACH DC and now the newly introduce ACH DC NRT.
Standard ACH DC allow businesses to make bulk payments to different beneficiary accounts across different banks and recipients’ accounts are credited within 24 hours after payments lists have been submitted to the paying corporate institution’s bank.
Express ACH DC allows that same process within 4 hours, and now ACH NRT has reduced the time drastically to 15 minutes.
