Preserve ACH’s upside with fewer trade-offs.

Despite being an older technology, ACH (Automated Clearing House) payment has grown into one of the most popular online payment rails. It moves funds directly between U.S. bank accounts. It offers lower costs, fewer declines than credit cards, and broad coverage across U.S. financial institutions, and it supports recurring and high-value payments well. Delayed settlement, NSF returns, and fraud raise the operational stakes, which is why more ACH programs need dedicated, risk-based processes and procedures, including fraud monitoring.

Riskified reviews every ACH payment and returns an approved, approved with delay recommendation, and declined decision, with a guarantee for all fraud chargebacks. Riskified instantly backs every approved payment against fraud, regardless of how you fulfill. Non-sufficient-funds coverage works differently. It depends on following Riskified’s instant-or-delay call on that specific transaction: if Riskified recommends a delay and you fulfill anyway, an NSF return on that order isn’t guaranteed.

No. The recently amended rules set a baseline expectation for fraud monitoring, but stop short of prescribing specific technologies. Nacha intentionally adopted a technology-neutral, outcomes-based framework, giving institutions flexibility in how they comply as long as the results hold up.

They’re different problems, and they call for different detection. Fraud is a bad actor. Insufficient funds are usually a legitimate customer whose account came up short after you already fulfilled the order, though not always. Because Riskified treats this risk on its own terms, we built dedicated detection for it: a distinct set of identifiers and signals that flag NSF risk on its own merits, not as a fraud model afterthought. Both losses land on your books the same way, and Riskified guarantees both.

But bad actors know this, too: we’ve seen fraudsters running dozens of identical small-dollar deposits back-to-back, often within the same minute, deliberately engineering millions in NSF exposure.

Lower-risk payments receive instant fulfillment, so trusted customers receive their orders right away. Higher-risk payments are held for three business days before fulfillment, reducing loss exposure without slowing down customers you already trust.

If you initiate ACH debit payments online to collect payment from customers, you’re an Originator. Third-Party Service Providers and Third-Party Senders originate ACH transactions on a brand’s behalf, and ODFIs (Originating Depository Financial Institutions) are the banks that send those transactions into the network. Nacha’s newest fraud-monitoring requirements target Originators, TPSPs, TPSs, and ODFIs. RDFIs (Receiving Depository Financial Institutions, the banks on the receiving end) fall under a separate part of the rule that doesn’t apply to brands.

Most tools stop at detection: they hand you a risk score and leave the decision to you. Riskified built dedicated ACH decisioning and detection, not a card-fraud model stretched to include bank payments. That means deep experience across the industries most exposed to ACH risk, detection informed by Riskified’s network of order and transaction history, and a guarantee for both fraud and NSF returns — a risk most ACH tools don’t even name. This means Riskified can help safely and dynamically increase ACH approval rates and conversion from borderline declines.

Riskified built this offering for high-growth brands in money movement, remittance, and crypto exchange industries, for example, that combine aggressive customer growth, high transaction frequency, and high-value payments. It is an acute pressure: customers expect instant delivery, but ACH settlement takes days, and that gap is exactly what fraudsters exploit.