Bill payments have come a long way. What took days with paper checks now happens in seconds, thanks to the emergence of digital payments, mobile wallets, and true real-time money movement.
This shift is being embraced at every level, including by the federal government. A recent executive order to modernize US federal payments is a clear sign.1 By September 30, 2025, all federal agencies must transition from paper checks to digital alternatives. It’s a move designed to eliminate delays, cut costs, and reduce fraud. This will impact nearly every consumer.
Across the country, bill pay transformations like this are supported by modern infrastructure built for speed, security, and reliability. ACI Speedpay is enabling immediate bill payments with just a few clicks, delivering a seamless experience that helps both consumers and billers avoid missed payments.
But this transition didn’t happen overnight. It took years of innovation and careful integration to transform outdated payment systems into the modern, scalable, secure, and resilient platforms we use today. And behind this payments infrastructure transformation is the story of ACI Speedpay. Its evolution from a product to a mission-driven business has transformed bill pay for thousands of organizations and millions of US consumers each day.
The ACI Speedpay journey began with a simple but bold idea: simplify bill payments for everyone. Over the years, that vision was realized through a series of strategic acquisitions, each bringing specialized technology, payments expertise, and deep roots in their respective industries. These consolidations weren’t just about expanding capability; they were about reimagining bill payments in the widest context.
What started as a group of independent products and systems evolved into a unified platform designed to meet the complex payment needs of various industries, including consumer finance, utilities, insurance, higher education, and government, among others.
Having established a strong foundation in nearly every sector, ACI Speedpay has grown into one of the most advanced and far-reaching leaders in providing bill pay solutions in the US, serving more than 3,000 organizations, and processing more than $200 billion in payments annually.
Today, ACI Speedpay‘s next era bill pay platform is designed around three tiers of resiliency. These are at the core of our mission to be the leader in enabling payments for billers and form the heart of our highly efficient, modern, scalable payments platform:
All three tiers ensure the platform is in a “never-down” state for both consumers and billers. This is a critical differentiator in a world where missed payments can mean lost revenue, increased operational costs, and compromised customer trust.
Combined with the support of ACI Worldwide’s global scale and more than 50 years of payments experience, the ACI Speedpay business offers a highly efficient payments engine featuring a series of innovations, including expanded payment options, support for stablecoin cryptocurrency, new advancements in fraud protection, real-time payments, automated collections solutions, voice payment capabilities, and digital wallet enhancements.
It is essential to emphasize that the success of ACI Speedpay is attributable to a team of skilled professionals who possess both a strong commitment to the payments industry and advanced technical expertise.
Our team of hundreds of payment experts, many with more than 15 years of experience, provides daily support to our clients. Our team has focused on offering the widest range of bill pay options in the industry, across web, mobile, IVR, digital wallets, and expanding alternative payment methods. Additionally, patented technologies and fraud detection tools use AI to analyze payment patterns and help safeguard bill pay transactions.
Our goal remains simple: We envision a world where all people can pay bills quickly, easily, and securely, so that they never miss a payment. New advancements have made this possible.
For instance, real-time payments (RTP) enable customers to pay and receive confirmation in seconds, directly from the biller’s portal. Additionally, a new “pay by link” feature will make it even easier, enabling billers to send secure payment links via text. Our platform is also expanding into cross-border payments and cryptocurrency.
AI-driven IVR systems are streamlining voice-guided payments and making services faster and smoother. Underpinning all of this is security. Advanced fraud tools, including biometrics, wallet ID verification, and real-time transaction validation, are being added to the platform to protect every transaction at every endpoint. AI-driven risk and fraud management, with the ability to analyze transaction patterns, adds another layer, stopping fraud before it starts and saving billers millions.
The focus for billers is on meeting consumers where they are, across channels, devices, and payment preferences.
As we look ahead, automation is playing a growing role in collections and customer service and driving much-needed efficiency across workflows.
AI is influencing debt collection by increasing the speed and efficiency of the process while aiming to make it more accommodating for customers. With tools such as chatbots and predictive analytics, organizations can optimize recovery efforts, reduce costs, and enhance customer interactions. Within ACI Speedpay, we are implementing AI-powered chatbots that are so advanced, most users don’t realize they’re not speaking with a live agent. It supports recurring payments and splitting transactions across funding sources. Yet human connection still matters.
According to the 2025 ACI Speedpay Pulse Report, 82% of consumers still prefer speaking to a live person when resolving a billing issue. That’s why our solutions blend both worlds, offering automation for convenience and real humans when and where it matters most.
Our biller clients are collaborating with us to address rising interchange fees and introduce digital wallets and alternative payment methods such as PayPal and Apple Pay, expanding consumer payment choices.
Importantly, we also help clients respond to the evolving expectations of younger consumers. According to the 2025 ACI Speedpay Pulse Report, 46.6% of Gen Z and 37.4% of Millennials made an “urgent” or same-day payment digitally last year.2 We’re providing tools like digital wallets and real-time payments to meet their need for speed and convenience.
As our business continues to grow, we strive to maintain a collaborative approach and foster positive relationships across the payments ecosystem. This has earned us the trust of our clients, the market, and our employees. We are recognized by US News & World Report as one of the Best Companies to Work For (2024–2025)3 and named Best in Class for Payments Orchestration by Datos Insights (2024).4
Today, we are part of a network processing billions of transactions per day, equating to trillions of dollars globally, offering all the payment platforms, tools, and support our bill pay clients need to stay ahead. ACI Speedpay has evolved intentionally, transforming fragmented payment systems into a modern, scalable, and reliable engine. It’s a story about paper checks moving to real-time rails, all with a well-trained eye for seeing around corners.
Chuck Easum, Controller at Ohio Mutual Insurance Group and a longtime ACI Speedpay customer, summed it up best: “The most important thing is making sure we stay contemporary with the billing and payment options we deliver. We’ve done that.”
Want to learn more?
Download the 2025 ACI Speedpay Pulse Report to explore full insights and discover how to optimize your customer experience.
Additional resources
The ACI interactive data exploration tool, designed to quickly view the billing and payment preferences of thousands of consumers over several years. Drill down to specific industries to uncover insights in ways that matter most to you.
Sources:
Ron Shultz is the general manager of ACI Speedpay, the largest biller direct business in the U.S. Mr. Shultz leads all aspects of the ACI Speedpay business including sales, customer success, product management, operations, and marketing. Mr. Shultz has more than two decades of experience in bill pay and the broader payments industry. He most recently served as executive vice president of global bill pay at Mastercard, as CEO of two acquired bill pay companies. While at Mastercard, he also led the New Payment Flows business in North America, which included bill pay, cross-border payments, real-time payments, and commercial payments. Before this, Mr. Shultz co-founded Billbridge, an electronic billing and payments company. Mr. Shultz previously held senior positions at American Express, worked as a management consultant at A.T. Kearney, and was an auditor at Price Waterhouse.
ACI Speedpay 
