Press
NACHA Announces 2013 Payments System Awards Recipients
SAN DIEGO, CA (April 23, 2013) – NACHA — The Electronic Payments Association today announced the recipients of its 2013 Payments System Awards. The winners will be recognized during the Payments System Awards Luncheon, sponsored by TD Bank, at PAYMENTS 2013. PAYMENTS 2013, the annual conference for the payments industry, is being held now through April 24th at the San Diego Convention Center.
NACHA’s Payments System Awards recognize outstanding individuals and organizations for their superior leadership, innovation, and excellence in the development, implementation, or advancement of electronic payments. This year’s awards recipients include:
- The 2013 NACHA PayItGreen Award
General Electric
- The 2013 Kevin O’Brien ACH Quality Award
ProfitStars
- The 2013 George Mitchell Payments System Excellence Award
Apex Information Technologies
Richard Gregg, fiscal assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury
“NACHA is thrilled to recognize the recipients of the 2013 Payments System Awards,” said Janet O. Estep, NACHA president and CEO. “These outstanding organizations and individuals are leading the charge in furthering the use of electronic payments, and their initiatives showcase the innovative ways in which the industry can leverage the ACH Network. We commend this year’s recipients for their leadership, vision and commitment to promoting the use of electronic payments and ensuring the quality of electronic transactions.”
NACHA celebrates the achievements of these award winners for outstanding contributions to the industry.
The 2013 NACHA PayItGreen Award:
General Electric
The NACHA PayItGreen Award honors individual or organizational leadership, vision, and innovation in the education and promotion of electronic payments, statements, and billing to reduce paper’s impact on the environment.
General Electric is this year’s award recipient for its initiative to reduce the company’s carbon footprint by eliminating the printing, transportation and storage of paper through an eStatements program. To date, GE’s going green program, including the eStatements project, has eliminated the need for more than 1,470,000 tons of paper. The lack of storage and shipping of those documents has also decreased GE’s carbon emissions by 2.8 million tons.
The 2013 Kevin O’Brien ACH Quality Award:
ProfitStars
The Kevin O’Brien ACH Quality Award, named in honor of the late Kevin O’Brien, NACHA’s chairperson from 1999 to 2000, recognizes best practices in ACH participants’ efforts to maintain or improve the quality of ACH services and/or the integrity and reliability of the ACH Network.
This year’s award goes to ProfitStars for developing and implementing SmartSight, a unique cross-channel payment risk management and market intelligence tool for financial institutions. SmartSight provides financial institutions with critical decision making information through a convenient, intuitive dashboard. It delivers actionable insights for analysis of cross-channel activity trends while helping users mitigate risk, maintain compliance requirements, and enhance customer relationships.
The 2013 George Mitchell Payments System Excellence Award:
Apex Information Technologies
Richard Gregg, fiscal assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury
The George Mitchell Award, named after former vice-chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, George Mitchell, an early proponent of electronic payments, honors an individual or organization that has shown superior leadership in the development, implementation, or advancement of electronic payments.
For the first time in NACHA’s history, this year’s award goes to two recipients: Apex Information Technologies and Richard Gregg, fiscal assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
Apex Information Technologies has shown true technology leadership in the healthcare industry. Through its efforts, Apex Information Technologies is helping promote ACH payments in an industry with some of the most complex billing requirements of any consumer-facing industry, including privacy regulations, complex service descriptions, insurance splits, and coding conventions.
Richard Gregg’s notable contributions span the course of his 40-year career with the U.S. Department of the Treasury. They include numerous operational and regulatory changes to convert hundreds of millions of paper payments originated or received by the U.S. Treasury to ACH, including creating and implementing the Go Direct campaign.
About PAYMENTS 2013
PAYMENTS 2013, taking place April 21 – 24 at the San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, Calif., features more than 130 educational sessions and workshops with renowned speakers from financial institutions, companies, government agencies, legal and regulatory bodies, consulting and research firms, service providers, and more. Sessions are organized along eight tracks — Automated Clearing House (ACH), card solutions, corporate payment solutions, global focus, healthcare opportunities, mobile banking and payments, risk & compliance, and payments biz – to address the topics of pivotal importance to payments professionals. Conference threads weave hot topics across tracks and emphasize the most significant developments in legal/regulatory, corporate account takeover, remote deposit capture/remotely created checks, community banks/small business/local government opportunities, and NACHA Operating Rules and initiatives. In addition, a dynamic exhibit of nearly 100 industry leaders features today’s top products and services.
To learn more about PAYMENTS 2013 sessions, workshops, speakers, sponsors, and exhibitors, or to register, visit https://payments.nacha.org.
NACHA — The Electronic Payments Association
NACHA manages the development, administration, and governance of the ACH Network, the backbone for the electronic movement of money and data. The ACH Network provides a safe, secure, and reliable network for direct account-to-account consumer, business, and government payments. Annually, it facilitates billions of Direct Deposit via ACH and Direct Payment via ACH transactions. Used by all types of financial institutions, the ACH Network is governed by the fair and equitable NACHA Operating Rules, which guide risk management and create payment certainty for all participants. As a not-for-profit association, NACHA represents more than 10,000 financial institutions via 17 regional payments associations and direct membership. Through its industry councils and forums, NACHA brings together payments system stakeholders to foster dialogue and innovation to strengthen the ACH Network. To learn more, please visit www.nacha.org, www.electronicpayments.org, www.payitgreen.org, and http://direct.nacha.org.