[This is just one of my series of posts from the NACHA Payments 2008 conference in Las Vegas.]

Getting to Know David Peterson of Goldleaf Financial [NACHA Payments]

Unlike the rest of my vendor conversations, David Peterson and I didn't talk about his company and its products (Goldleaf bought Alogent earlier this year). I reached out to him after seeing him speak at the TAWPI Conference last month and wanted to get better acquainted. We see eye-to-eye on the need to bring electronic payment functionality to small and mid-sized businesses in order to break B2B dependence on paper checks.

We also discussed the evolution of NACHA from a rules-based organization to its current product-focused strategy (I had just come from a small press gathering with the NACHA Leadership) and David shared his perspective. He voiced concern that the organization was less inclusive of vendors and the regional payment associations than it used to be. He is particularly unsettled by recent changes to the NACHA rules via the "administrative change" process that does not require approval or vetting by all of the stakeholders. Where they erred (in David's opinion) is that they used the administrative change rule option to change something that requires software changes.  This triggers two issues, one is that if a change requires a software coding change, by definition it is not an "administrative" rules change.  Secondly, the timeframe for an administrative change is short and asking all stakeholders to make software coding changes in the timeframe allowed for administrative changes is not reasonable.

I appreciate David's candor (although I imagine he is making the NACHA folks crazy) and look forward to more conversations in the future.

See also my notes from David's presentation on global deployment of remote deposit capture.

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