Faster deposits. Fewer failed payments.

When platforms tell us about the importance of faster ACH payments, two themes come up over and over again.

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1. Cash flow

Merchants need to order materials, pay subcontractors, and keep money moving through their business. Waiting 4 business days (or more with some providers) doesn’t meet the needs of a fast-paced business.

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2. Risk

Businesses need to make decisions about ordering materials, starting work, or delivering products based on confidence that they’ll actually get paid. As a batched next-day process with another 2 business days to wait for returns, traditional ACH adds either risk or delay to every deal.

Rainforest solves for both with fully embedded balance checks. 

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Embedded balance-checked ACH

On validated ACH payments, Platforms can now optionally run a real-time balance check at the time of payment. 

We’ll query the balance of the validated bank account. If the account balance is less than the payment amount, we’ll automatically decline the payment with a refusal reason of Insufficient Funds.

End users will have the option to try again or use another payment method.

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Platforms and merchants will see the refusal reason.

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If the payment is not declined, merchants can have confidence that funds were available at the time of the balance check, significantly reducing the likelihood of ACH returns due to insufficient funds.

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Risk Reduction

Insufficient funds is one of the most common causes of ACH returns. Reducing the likelihood of returns due to insufficient funds will materially reduce the overall return risk.

This gives merchants actionable information that they can use when deciding if they want to order materials, start work, or deliver product at the time of payment or wait until the 2-day return window has passed.

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Faster Payments

Because balance check reduces the overall likelihood of ACH returns, this feature enables Rainforest to make faster ACH payments available to more platforms. Approved platforms can offer T+2 deposit timing on ACH payments that successfully pass a balance check.

This means that balance-checked payments initiated on a Monday will be deposited in the merchant’s external bank account on Wednesday (assuming no bank holidays). 

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Modern pay-by-bank experience

Most embedded payment providers treat ACH like an old floppy disk drive that they begrudgingly have to support because of some niche use case. 

The reality is that ACH is a backbone of payments in the US, and ACH utilization is not declining – it’s growing. ACH rails moved $86.2 trillion in 2024, a 7.6% increase from the year before.

Rainforest is committed to providing a modern ACH experience on par with contemporary payment methods like card and Apple Pay. This means:

• Fully embedded and white-labeled
• Already built into our embeddable components
• Modern bank connectivity features like instant validation and balance check
• Single integration for all payment methods
• Unified reporting for all payment methods
• Payment status viewable via Components, API, and the Platform Portal
• One daily deposit for all payment methods (and a penny-perfect deposit report to go with it)

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