Same-day ACH just had its best quarter. Does that make stablecoins a harder sell for corporate treasury?
I have sat through a lot of vendor pitches in the past two years where the opening slide shows a wire transfer taking two days and a stablecoin settling in seconds. The implicit argument is that legacy rails are broken and you need new plumbing. That argument was always a little lazy. After Nacha's Q2 2026 numbers dropped last week, it needs to be retired entirely, or at least made much more specific.
Same-day ACH (Automated Clearing House, the US domestic batch payment network) processed over 271 million transactions in Q2 2026, a year-on-year volume increase of roughly 21 percent. Financial services firms drove a significant share of that growth. The dollar volume per transaction is also climbing, which tells me this is not just high-frequency, low-value consumer payroll. Corporate treasury operations are using these rails more, and using them faster.
That context matters when a vendor like MoonPay walks into your office this week with a new business stablecoin platform promising faster settlement and lower cost. The honest question a CFO should ask is: faster than what, exactly?
Where same-day ACH actually stands today
The current same-day ACH window structure gives originators three daily processing windows, with the last cut-off at 4:45 PM ET on business days. Funds are available to the recipient by 6 PM ET the same day. The per-transaction cap is $1 million, raised from $100,000 back in 2020 and then again progressively, which has made it viable for a broader range of B2B (business-to-business) payments.
The cost per transaction through same-day ACH runs between roughly $0.26 and $1.00 depending on your bank or processor relationship, compared to $25 to $45 for a domestic wire. For domestic, business-hours, USD-denominated payments below $1 million, the rails are objectively good. The settlement risk is low, the regulatory framework is clear, and your ERP (enterprise resource planning) system almost certainly has a working integration.
