Despite ACH’s dominance, $15 trillion in B2B payments still moves by check, often reflecting complex approvals, disputed invoices and supplier-specific requirements.

Faster rails can’t fix fragmented invoice data, missing remittance information or unresolved commercial disputes. The next opportunity lies in automating those workflows.

The real payoff isn’t converting more transactions to ACH, but reducing reconciliation costs, improving working capital visibility and gaining control over high-value payments.

The check was supposed to be dead by now. Instead, it has become a $15 trillion reminder that moving money and settling a business obligation are not always the same thing.

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According to research briefs from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland published in September, ACH accounted for 41% of business-to-business payments by number in 2024, compared with just 13% for checks. Yet businesses still made approximately $15 trillion in check payments by value, and nearly 90% continued using checks for at least some transactions in 2025.

A company can automate thousands of routine supplier payments, migrate recurring invoices to ACH and eliminate much of its manual accounts payable workload without getting meaningfully closer to eliminating checks. That’s because the payments that remain are frequently those involving disputed invoices, unusual approval requirements, incomplete supplier information or commercial relationships that don’t fit neatly into standardized workflows.

7 billion, per the Fed’s research. 4 trillion to $15 trillion.

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