Since the 60s and 70s, new fees, costs, partnerships and structures have been built on top of what used to be a pretty simple idea, turning it into a confusing system that’s no longer recognizable. I swipe, you get paid 2-7 days later, the value of a dollar drops by ~2.75%, and $48 billion is lost. At its core, the thing feeding this beast and moving your money from Bank A to Bank B is a 40-year-old system, facilitating a $33.9 trillion dollar exchange, called the Automated Clearing House (ACH). Unfortunately, the way that it works, the processes that it requires, and the parties needed to be involved, take transactions two to five days to clear. Compounded by 80 reject codes (which have a full 90 days for everyone to wrestle with), rampant fraud and unrealistic hours of operation, ACH isn’t the engine for real-time payments.