Jack Henry & Associates, Inc., a provider of core technology solutions and payment processing services, announced yesterday an agreement with The Clearing House to advance faster payments.

This deal potentially adds the 6,300 financial institutions that use Jack Henry payment solutions, many of them community banks and credit unions, to the rapidly growing faster payments movement. Jack Henry has 1,300 core banking customers.

The partnership, operating through the core processor’s JHA Payment Solutions group, aims to increase the number of U.S. financial institutions capable of sending and receiving realtime transactions, one of the payments world’s hot button issues. Witness even the venerable ACH network’s progression toward same-day settlement.

The Clearing House announced its intention to build a realtime payments system in Oct. 2014, and says it will achieve this goal. Ubiquity is a major goal for the Federal Reserve, which initiated the call for faster payments in 2014 and has held a number of meetings with bank partners since.

The Clearing House network also includes its partnership with another core provider, FIS.

Steve Ledford, The Clearing House’s SVP of product and strategy, said of the collaboration:

This new partnership with Jack Henry is a significant step in meeting our goal of ubiquity for real-time payments. JHA Payment Solutions has a proven track record of delivering cutting edge innovative solutions to its vast network of bank and credit union clients, so we are excited that they chose to team up with us to support our real-time payment system.

In October of 2015, TCH teamed up with FIS for the same purpose — to accelerate the speed of transactions in the U.S. market throughout FIS’s network of more than 3,000 financial institutions. Of that deal, the CEO of TCH Jim Aramanda said:

We are excited to include FIS in our effort and I have no doubt that this partnership will benefit customers across the country […] In leveraging FIS’ existing relationships and key components of its payments technologies, customers will benefit from real-time payments that will be more accessible, innovative, and convenient.  From day one building a ubiquitous system has been a top priority, and with FIS’s thousands of touchpoints [sic] across the financial services industry we are a step closer to delivering ubiquitous real-time payments to customers.

The Clearing House confirmed to Bank Innovation that it does not have a formal relationship with the other large core provider, Fiserv.

We’ve come a long way from the old days of mailing checks across the country, only to wait weeks for the money to land in — or leave — our account. The encouraging news that core providers are joining in the faster payments efforts ensures community financial institutions and their customers have no reason to be left behind in the brave new realtime world.

The number of institutions added by Jack Henry was updated from 1,300 (core customers) to 6,300 (payment product customers).