Federal Reserve Board Seeks Comments On Payment System Upgrades

Payment Systems Federal Reserve

On November 27, the Federal Reserve Board requested comments on proposed changes to its procedures for posting debit and credit entries to institutions’ Federal Reserve accounts for ACH debit and commercial check transactions. In a policy statement, the Board seeks comments on a proposal to change the posting time of ACH debit transactions processed by the Federal Reserve Banks' FedACH service overnight to 8:30 a.m. ET from 11:00 a.m. ET to align with the posting of ACH credit transactions. For commercial check transactions, the Board seeks to move the posting time for receiving most credits for deposits and debits for presentments to 8:30 a.m. ET, and to set two other posting times at 1:00 p.m. ET and 5:30 p.m. ET. The Board is also proposing to establish a set of principles that would be applied to any new posting rules for the Reserve Banks' same-day ACH service. In a related proposed rule, the Board offered for comment companion amendments to Regulation J to permit Reserve Banks to obtain settlement from paying banks by as early as 8:30 a.m. ET for checks that the Reserve Banks present, and to permit the Reserve Banks to require paying banks that receive presentment of checks from the Reserve Banks to make the proceeds of settlement for those checks available to the Reserve Banks as soon as 30 minutes after receiving the checks. Comments on both the policy statement and the proposed rule are due 60 days after the documents are published in the Federal Register.