In 2024, ACH overtook checks as the most common form of B2B payment in the U.S, but it took more than a century to get there. The Federal Reserve centralized check clearing around 1920. ACH came online in 1972 and spent 50 years catching up.
In the last decade alone, there’s been an exponential increase in payment modalities. Consumer payments gained Venmo, Zelle, Apple Pay, Cash App and tap-to-pay. B2B followed with its own set of new rails, each one adding a different set of fraud controls, settlement timing, remittance expectations and compliance rules.
A single B2B relationship today might involve ACH, virtual card and check, all routing to different payees through different systems. For complex industries like healthcare and property and casualty, that mix shows up every day: one claim payout can route to a provider as ACH, a member as a prepaid card, and a contractor as a check, all off the same adjudication decision.
The payment mix is modern. The infrastructure moving it wasn’t built for how businesses pay now.
The decision set has expanded. Legacy infrastructure hasn’t.
For most of the last century, the B2B payment decision was binary: check or ACH.
Today, the decision set is vastly wider. ACH, real-time payments, virtual card, cross-border, embedded. Each with different fraud profiles, settlement timing, remittance expectations and compliance frameworks. Legacy infrastructure wasn’t built for any of them.
“The paper check problem” only makes it worse. When a legacy infrastructure can’t handle a modern payment type natively, the workaround carries its own cost: a separate vendor, manual process and parallel system someone has to maintain. This combined processing, postage and labor push the true cost of a check to $4, compared to $0.26–$0.50 for an ACH transaction.
Fraud only compounds the problem further. In 2025, 76% of organizations were hit by payments fraud. Every new payment type an organization adds opens a new fraud vector that legacy controls weren’t built to catch.
Continuing to run modern payments on legacy infrastructure may seem like a cautious move, but it’s the riskier position, and it costs more the longer it stays.
Payments under pressure.
The shift from checks to ACH is more than a one-year headline. Between 2015 and 2024, ACH’s share of B2B payments climbed from 25% to 41%, while check share fell from 32% to 13%.
The pressure is mounting, and it comes from the highest levels. In March 2025, the White House ordered federal agencies to stop issuing paper checks. The Treasury made the case in one line: checks are 16 times more likely to be lost, stolen or altered than a digital payment, and the paper infrastructure cost the federal government $657 million in FY2024. If the federal government can’t justify keeping checks, why should anyone else?
Regulation is closing in on the digital side, too. NACHA’s new rules for risk management, effective March 20, 2026, require real-time fraud prevention and detection on all outbound ACH payments. This now makes fraud prevention and security a required capability for payment infrastructure.
Organizations face two infrastructure demands at once: meeting regulatory requirements for digital payments and responding to policy pressure to move away from paper. Legacy systems were not designed for those demands, making modernization harder to defer.
What legacy infrastructure can’t handle at scale
Legacy B2B infrastructure was built around point-to-point payment flows rather than the full lifecycle, and this fragmented reality shows up in operations. In AP, a supplier calls about an invoice stuck in approval for 45 days; a controller discovers three vendor records point to the same TIN. In healthcare claims, a provider calls because a check for a resolved claim never arrived; the exception queue holds 200 items of unapplied payments and unposted remittances.
Different industries, same breakdown: the people approving the payment and the people moving the money are working in different systems, with different vendors and the handoff between them is where cost accumulates.
That same handoff is where fraud finds its opening. BEC, vendor impersonation, bank account change attacks: each one targets the handoff between where a payment is decided and where the money moves. Legacy infrastructure wasn’t built to protect this blind spot, and modern fraud is sophisticated enough to exploit it.
What a modern B2B payment platform does differently
The scale of the fragmentation is already measurable. More than 90% of organizations use two or more payment vendors to run their payment lifecycle. 30% use four or more, and 55% say their systems don’t talk to each other. Proving that consolidation isn’t aspirational. It’s the obvious fix to a problem businesses are already quantifying.
A modern B2B payment platform does one thing legacy infrastructure can’t: it owns the payment from the moment it’s decided to the moment it’s reconciled. One system, every payment type, end-to-end.
Every modern payment option runs through the same integration, so adding real-time payments or virtual card doesn’t mean another vendor contract. The payment partner holds and controls the payee payment preference, so the payer’s workflow doesn’t change but the payee experience does. Remittance travels with the money instead of chasing it and fraud monitoring runs against the full transaction history. And because the platform integrates directly with the core systems where AP, treasury and claims operations teams already work, nothing gets re-entered and no one switches tools to move a payment forward.
ECHO built their core platform for this exact architecture: one integration, full lifecycle visibility, multi-layered fraud prevention and security, and direct integrations with the core systems where finance and claims operations teams already work.
Payments aren’t moving back to binary. That leaves one question: Is the infrastructure moving your payments built for where B2B is going, or where it’s been?
To see how ECHO is building B2B payment infrastructure for the modern payment set, visit https://www.echohealthinc.com/.
