In 2024, ACH overtook checks as the most common form of B2B payment in the U.S, but it took more than a century to get there. The Federal Reserve centralized check clearing around 1920. ACH came online in 1972 and spent 50 years catching up.
In the last decade alone, there’s been an exponential increase in payment modalities. Consumer payments gained Venmo, Zelle, Apple Pay, Cash App and tap-to-pay. B2B followed with its own set of new rails, each one adding a different set of fraud controls, settlement timing, remittance expectations and compliance rules.
A single B2B relationship today might involve ACH, virtual card and check, all routing to different payees through different systems. For complex industries like healthcare and property and casualty, that mix shows up every day: one claim payout can route to a provider as ACH, a member as a prepaid card, and a contractor as a check, all off the same adjudication decision.
The payment mix is modern. The infrastructure moving it wasn’t built for how businesses pay now.
For most of the last century, the B2B payment decision was binary: check or ACH.
Today, the decision set is vastly wider. ACH, real-time payments, virtual card, cross-border, embedded. Each with different fraud profiles, settlement timing, remittance expectations and compliance frameworks. Legacy infrastructure wasn’t built for any of them.
“The paper check problem” only makes it worse. When a legacy infrastructure can’t handle a modern payment type natively, the workaround carries its own cost: a separate vendor, manual process and parallel system someone has to maintain.
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