As described at http://engineering.gusto.com/how-ach-works-a-developer-perspective-part-3/ http://engineering.gusto.com/how-ach-works-a-developer-persp... , ACH

As described at http://engineering.gusto.com/how-ach-works-a-developer-perspective-part-3/ http://engineering.gusto.com/how-ach-works-a-developer-persp... , ACH has called itself a 'next-day' settlement system yet funds transferred on a Thursday may not be available until the next Wednesday (6 days later) since they leave several days of buffer in case of returns and do not count weekends or holidays. And that's only if the transfer is done early in the day. If it's the evening, it could take 7 days. Unless they changed something else, changing from so-called 'next-day' to 'same-day' would only reduce that by 1 day from 6 or 7 days to 5 or 6 days, which isn't really that significant and certainly isn't what people think of when they see 'same-day'. It says "for transactions that can be initiated before 2:45 PM ET on business days (not on weekends or holidays)" so it's still broken with several days of delay, but there is a line that says "RDFIs will be mandated to make funds available from same day ACH credits (such as payroll Direct Deposits) to their depositors by 5:00 PM at the RDFI's local time." Does that require them to drop the return buffer? That could at least cut it down to only 2 or 3 days delay. If it does cut the delay in half, that's a mixed blessing since it reduces the pressure to develop a better protocol or even change ACH implementations to reduce the delay to a few minutes. It's just a series of 3 requests and 3 responses - even with processing, that shouldn't take more than a few minutes. And if they added an extension for the receiving institution to confirm success in the return file (or another file), everyone involved would be better off (except the bankers making interest while the money sits in limbo, I guess).