In 2027, a U.S. business sending a large payment will be able to use Same Day ACH or RTP, and both will accept up to $10 million. My view is that this ends payment size as the thing that decides the rail, and that the company that picks the rail for each payment becomes the product a buyer pays for.
The size limit stops sorting payments
Nacha’s second-quarter release said Same Day ACH’s dollar limit rises in 2027. Jane Larimer, Nacha’s president and CEO, said: “In 2027, the dollar limit will increase to $10 million, further strengthening Same Day ACH’s position in the market as a compelling faster payment method.” The Clearing House’s RTP page says that network already accepts payments of up to $10 million, around the clock.
Until now a treasury team could sort large payments by amount, because the rails differed on how much they would carry. With both at $10 million, the remaining differences are availability and reach. The Clearing House says RTP runs around the clock and lists over 1,378 participants as of September 2026. Nacha describes the ACH Network, which carries Same Day ACH, as able to reach all U.S. bank and credit union accounts. Those traits do not change from one payment to the next, but which one matters does. A payment due on a Saturday morning and one due the following Monday are different jobs for different rails.
Advertisement
Both rails already move real money at scale. Our report on Nacha’s third-quarter figures covers 470.4 million Same Day ACH payments worth $1.3 trillion. The Clearing House lists 150 million RTP transactions worth $621 billion for the same quarter. A business that needs both is no longer an edge case.
Who decides the rail
Someone has to make the choice payment by payment, and a person cannot do it at volume. Software does it, and a vendor that sells that software sells a decision. This is where I think the value moves.
Evidence of the direction is in a deal announced on 19 October. KORT Payments said it entered a definitive agreement to acquire AptPay, a Toronto payments company whose platform gives businesses a single integration for moving money across Mastercard Send, Visa Original Credit Transaction, Interac e-Transfer, EFT, ACH, RTP, FedNow and cross-border rails, according to the KORT release. The release says the deal extends KORT beyond card acceptance into account-to-account payments and disbursements, and that it is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026. Terms were not disclosed.
Danny Chazonoff, President and Chief Operating Officer of KORT Payments, said: “AptPay’s real-time payout and orchestration capabilities are highly complementary to our platform, and together we can offer customers a complete money movement solution across North America.” I read one deal as one data point. It shows a provider whose release describes its business as card acceptance agreeing to buy rail choice, which is the capability I am arguing becomes the product.
The strongest objection
The best argument against me is that a company’s bank already does this. Banks sell treasury services over these rails, and Bank of America said its clients grew RTP volume 48% from January through July, as we reported in Corporate RTP Volume at BofA Jumps 48% on Treasury Use. If the bank routes between rails, a separate vendor has nothing to sell.
That holds for a company whose payments all start and end inside one bank’s reach. A bank routes among the rails it has joined. A merchant that pays cardholders, Canadian bank accounts and U.S. accounts in one day needs rails from several operators, and the AptPay description above is built on that spread.
What would prove me wrong
Three things would. Nacha could move the 2027 limit date, which keeps ACH’s size ceiling below RTP’s. The KORT deal could fail to close in the fourth quarter. Or buyers could keep choosing a single rail and a single bank for everything, which would show up as orchestration vendors failing to win accounts from banks. I will watch the close date and the next two Nacha quarterly releases.
A finance team does not have to wait to find out. List last month’s outgoing payments by amount, deadline and recipient country, then count how many were sent on a rail picked by a person. That count sizes the market for rail choice.
