MUFG upgrades ACH
- MUFG expanded its partnership with Finastra to modernize US ACH payment infrastructure. - The deal focuses on improving speed and resilience for US‑dollar ACH processing. - Incumbent banks are upgrading legacy rails to compete with real‑time fintech payment solutions. (x.com)
MUFG is moving its U.S. Automated Clearing House, or ACH, payments onto Finastra software as big banks rebuild old payment systems for faster money movement. (finastra.com) Finastra said on April 16 that MUFG selected its Global PAYplus platform to support ACH services in the United States, expanding a partnership that already covered payments modernization in Japan and Europe. (finastra.com) MUFG Americas Chief Information Officer Alla Whitston said the bank began replacing its core payments engine in 2021 as part of an International Organization for Standardization 20022, or ISO 20022, migration, and then decided to move its legacy U.S. ACH platform after that first phase was completed. (finastra.com) ACH is the batch network that handles direct deposit, bill pay and many business transfers in the U.S., and it is still enormous even as instant-payment options spread. Nacha said the ACH Network processed 35.2 billion payments worth $93 trillion in 2025. (nacha.org) The pressure on banks is speed. The Federal Reserve’s FedNow service has offered instant payments since July 20, 2023, while traditional ACH usually settles later rather than in seconds. (federalreserve.gov) MUFG and Finastra said the new setup is meant to give the bank a single payments architecture across three regions and across ACH and cross-border flows, rather than separate systems for each rail and market. (prnewswire.com) Finastra said the platform is cloud-native, modular and built for ISO 20022 from the start, which banks use to standardize payment data so systems in different countries can exchange richer information with fewer manual fixes. (prnewswire.com) Finastra also said MUFG’s straight-through processing rate now exceeds 95%, meaning most payments can move from instruction to completion without staff rekeying or repairing data by hand. (fintechfutures.com) MUFG says it operates in more than 50 countries and regions, and the U.S. ACH upgrade fits the bank’s broader effort to make domestic and cross-border payments run on the same modern stack. (mufgamericas.com) The immediate change is not that ACH becomes an instant-pay rail. It is that one of the world’s largest banks is spending to make a decades-old U.S. payments system faster to process, easier to update and harder to break. (finextra.com)
