NACHA Issues Guidelines for Using QR Codes in Bill Pay Services and ACH Payments

NACHA’s Council for Electronic Billing and Payment recently released a guide on the use of “quick response” codes (or “QR codes”) to facilitate bill pay services, including initiating ACH payments and reviewing accounts. QR codes have been used for a variety of applications, including marketing and advertising, product information and even on-screen payments on television home shopping networks. QR codes have also been used in mobile apps and POS systems, as recently explained by the Boston Federal Reserve paper on mobile payment security. The Starbucks mobile payments app – the most popular mobile payment app in market – uses QR codes, and the merchant mobile payments coalition MCX recently announced it too will use QR codes for its new mobile payments network. The NACHA guide examines the flexibility and mobility of QR codes, and the technical parameters of using QR codes, in the bill payment environment.

Although the NACHA guide is only available by contacting NACHA (here), NACHA has provided some helpful background material on QR codes, including an introduction to QR codes and a brief deck on QR code use cases.