Out of the Shadows: The Overlooked Stories While AI Dominates Headlines (part 1)
AI may control the narrative, but quieter stories in fraud liability, payment accessibility, and ACH infrastructure are reshaping how money actually moves.
Amid the surge of AI headlines, these three stories in payments warrant a closer look:
Fraud Liability Is Redefining the Bank–Corporate Relationship in 2026
By Jessica Cheney, VP Product Management and Strategic Solutions of Digital Banking, Bottomline
Payments modernization headlines often focus on new rails and real-time capabilities. But one of the most consequential shifts heading into 2026 is not about speed. It is about responsibility.
NACHA’s 2026 ACH rule updates formalize expectations that corporates must implement risk-based monitoring and detect fraud before payments are sent. Similar regulatory trends globally are reinforcing the same principle: fraud prevention must happen upstream, not after funds are instructed to move.
Corporate liability for fraud losses is not new; it is typically embedded in payment origination agreements between corporates and banks. Many companies have long overlooked these terms and conditions. For years, banks absorbed a significant share of fraud losses, often to preserve strong client relationships. However, as fraud exposure has grown, losses have accumulated, and real-time payments have narrowed recovery windows, that model is becoming harder to sustain. The result is a more explicit reminder that corporate originators are responsible for fraud prevention measures even before payment origination. This means corporates must embed stronger controls directly into their workflows.
The stakes are operational, not theoretical. Many corporate payment processes still rely on downstream review, static vendor validation, or manual exception handling. Under new expectations, those approaches may fall short. Journalists often focus on fraud technology, but the larger issue is process design: who reviews vendor changes, how approvals are structured, and whether risk signals are integrated before release.
Banks face their own challenge. If they shift their approach in response to the NACHA operating rule change without providing education and embedded tools, they risk damaging long-standing treasury relationships.
What to watch in 2026 is not just enforcement, but adaptation. How quickly corporates redesign workflows, how clearly banks communicate expectations, and whether payment modernization investments translate into better upstream controls will determine who is positioned to manage risk in a faster payments environment.
--
Payment Accessibility Is the Missing Layer in Digital Payment Modernization
By Kevin O’Brien, CEO at InvoiceCloud
More organizations are turning to AI to improve outcomes, such as faster customer support and stronger on-time payment rates. As investment flows toward automation, it’s equally important that foundational conversations about payment accessibility remain central to modernization efforts.
Payment accessibility means ensuring every payer—regardless of income, disability, age, or technology access—can complete essential transactions without friction. As mobile becomes the preferred method for essential bill payment, governments and service providers who don’t support mobile-first experiences are creating barriers for the populations they serve.
InvoiceCloud’s 2026 State of Online Payments report found mobile bill payment preference jumped from 29% to 45% in one year—the largest increase in the study’s six-year history. Lower-income households lead in mobile adoption at 72%, versus 59% for higher-income groups. Research shows 98% of Americans, even the unbanked, have access to smartphones. For many households, mobile payments are the primary way they manage essential bills. A payment experience not optimized for mobile limits access to critical services.
Fintech innovation starts with getting the basics right: responsive design for phones, payment flows built for touchscreens, and systems that don’t require multiple logins. When systems default to desktop-first design, the consequences are more abandoned transactions, higher customer service call volumes, and late payments tied to navigation challenges and friction in the process.
For the fintech industry, building accessible, mobile-first payment experiences strengthens the impact of AI and automation investments. Intelligent tools can streamline processes and boost efficiency, but they deliver the strongest results when layered onto payment experiences that are inclusive and easy to use.
--
The Great ACH Cloud Migration
By Booshan Rengachari, CEO of Finzly
For decades, ACH processing has been one of the most locked-in corners of banking technology. Banks chose their processor and never looked back. The switching costs were too high, the risk too uncomfortable, and frankly, the systems worked well enough.
That’s changing fast.
Right now, dozens of banks are actively migrating their ACH processing to cloud-native platforms. Some are running parallel systems, others are in the process of decommissioning their legacy mainframes entirely. This is a significant wave of payment modernization, one that deserves attention from those not yet closely following it.
A few things converging at once broke the logjam. ACH volume hit 35.2 billion payments in 2025, up nearly 5% year over year, and the value of those payments reached $93 trillion. The rail is growing, not shrinking — and Nacha is proposing to raise the same-day ACH limit from $1 million to $10 million, which would push even more volume through systems that are already straining. Meanwhile, Nacha’s 2026 fraud monitoring rules require real-time capabilities that legacy batch-based processors on mainframe architectures cannot deliver.
The legacy providers’ grip on this market is finally loosening. For years, banks felt they had no alternative as the incumbents controlled the relationships, the certifications, the institutional knowledge. Now there are proven cloud-native platforms processing ACH (and other rails) at scale for institutions ranging from community banks to some of the largest in the country. The migration path now exists.
ACH moves more money than any other payment rail in the United States. It touches every payroll, every mortgage payment, every direct deposit. Banks cannot take the status quo for granted - they need to focus on preparing for what their customers want. The massive wave of modernization under way, re-platforming core bank infrastructure bank by bank, demands far more attention than it’s currently getting.
