The Clearing House intends to maintain and operate all of core ECCHO business functions

June 15, 2017 – The Clearing House Payments Company L.L.C. (“The Clearing House”) and the Electronic Clearing House Organization (“ECCHO”) today announced that they have agreed to pursue a strategic opportunity that would transfer the business and operations of ECCHO to The Clearing House.  Once the ECCHO business is acquired, The Clearing House intends to maintain and operate all of the core ECCHO business functions and the NCP Program within The Clearing House and to continue to support every ECCHO member and sponsoring organization. 

ECCHO, a nationwide bank check clearing house with almost 3,000 depository institution members, announced in 2016 that it was exploring possible strategic opportunities to ensure that it continues to be best positioned to support check image exchange and to facilitate the upcoming faster payments innovations. 

David Walker, President and CEO of ECCHO said, “The ECCHO Board of Directors is delighted that the process initiated in 2016 has culminated with a decision to transfer ECCHO’s business and operations to The Clearing House.  We are looking forward to seamlessly transitioning the ECCHO core functionalities, including our rules, advocacy, check education and check knowledge resources, to The Clearing House in a manner that preserves and enhances the benefits of ECCHO for our respective members, customers and users of the nation’s payment systems.  We also very much appreciate and want to thank all of the organizations who worked with ECCHO throughout our strategic opportunity process to help us develop and refine our options.” 

Russ Waterhouse, Executive Vice President, Product Development and Strategy for The Clearing House said, ”ECCHO is a respected industry leader with a strong reputation of meeting their customers’ needs and ECCHO’s core functions align well with existing functions at The Clearing House which not only licenses the ECCHO Rules, but maintain its own system rules and operates the underlying check image exchange infrastructure.. We are committed to continuing to fulfill the important role ECCHO plays in providing services to every ECCHO financial institution member and we look forward to incorporating their business lines into The Clearing House’s existing infrastructure.”   

Consummation of this transaction is dependent upon execution of a definitive agreement and the closing of the transaction, which is expected to occur by year-end 2017.

About ECCHO. ECCHO is a not-for-profit national check clearing house owned by its almost 3,000 member financial institutions dedicated to promoting electronic check collection and related payment system improvements.  ECCHO is recognized across the U.S. as the national provider of private sector check image exchange rules.  During 2015, ECCHO member financial institutions used check images to exchange under the ECCHO check clearing house rules approximately 7.3 billion transactions totaling $18.4 trillion.  See ECCHO’s web page at www.eccho.org for more information.

About The Clearing House. The Clearing House is a banking association and payments company that is owned by commercial banks and dates back to 1853.  The Clearing House Payments Company L.L.C. owns and operates core payments system infrastructure in the United States and is currently working to modernize that infrastructure by building a new, ubiquitous, real-time payment system.  The Payments Company is the only private-sector ACH and wire operator in the United States, clearing and settling nearly $2 trillion in U.S. dollar payments each day, representing half of all commercial ACH and wire volume.  Its affiliate, The Clearing House Association L.L.C., is a nonpartisan organization that engages in research, analysis, advocacy and litigation focused on financial regulation that supports a safe, sound and competitive banking system.  See The Clearing House’s web page at www.theclearinghouse.org for more information.

Media Inquiries: 

ECCHO
David Walker                       
(214) 273-3201

The Clearing House
Sean Oblack
(202) 649-4629