Protocol | Fintechs are at the mercy of 3-day bank transfers. Astra could change that.

Electronic payments in the U.S. are hobbled by the ACH system, which is only slowly being updated. A startup says it can make bank-to-bank transfer better, faster, and cheaper.

Fintech startups need to move money quickly and safely in order to make consumer-friendly features like rent-splitting or shared savings work.

But to do that, they need help navigating the world of ACH bank transfers, which can be slow and complex.

Startup Astra provides companies with automated transfers from one bank account to another and says it does them faster. That's important for startups with features such as automatic savings when you work out or buy a latte or splitting rent payments or sharing savings — or even if neobanks want to make it easy for new customers to transfer money into new accounts.

Astra specializes in faster ACH transfers, which can be sent in one day from one institution to another. This is made possible by technology that does risk assessment to make sure that a settlement will not fail. It also has a system that can set up triggers to automatically make transfers.

NACHA, the organization that operates the ACH network, has been developing same-day ACH transfers, which it says grew quickly in the second quarter of this year. But those faster transfers only accounted for 1.3% of total ACH payment volume in the quarter.

We caught up with Gil Akos, co-founder and CEO of Astra, to find out more about Astra's work and the future of payments.

Read the full article from Tomio Geron at Protocol.