Introducing Natural Direct

Direct rail access for agents

Agents differentiate from traditional software in their ability to make on-the-spot decisions, informed by novel context.

As agents proliferate, and make more of these decisions in the real world, they need options at runtime—including in the financial primitives they use to transact with people, businesses, and other agents. It won’t always be known, or programmable in advance, who the agent will need to transact with to accomplish a goal. The counterparty’s preferred payment rail, due date, and banking information may only become available at agent runtime.

Natural is built to give your agents every option in payments and banking¹, which is why we’re excited to bring Direct into general availability.

Your agent can now programmatically choose between ACH, Wire, and Realtime (powered by RTP and FedNow) with mailed paper checks, international wire, and more coming soon. It can originate these payments from the same Natural wallet out of which it’s already sending instant payments, making requests, issuing cards, and accepting cards at checkout. The controls and limits you set up in Natural continue to apply.

This flexibility lets your agents handle a wide variety of counterparties and scenarios, without you having to build around each one in advance.

Choosing a rail

It’s worth exploring why your agents would choose one rail over another.

ACH

ACH is how Americans typically receive payroll, how vendors and suppliers are paid for invoices, and how rent or card account payments are pulled. It’s ubiquitous.

It settles in batches. Several go out every business day; they settle at a predictable time generally next-day, and under the hood are netted by way of highly-efficient clearinghouses like FedACH.

The institution on the receiving end can also “return” your ACH, making it reversible. If you pushed funds via ACH credit, it can send the funds back, for a standardized set of valid reasons.

Consequently, ACHs are:

• Lower-cost. Because your payment is settled in batches and takes some time, it can be processed more cheaply by banks and clearinghouses.
• Asynchronous (can take a few days). The trade-off for low-cost is transit time. It generally takes 1 business day when you’re pushing the funds. Deposits you make into Natural over ACH can take 3 business days (ACH transfers are processed in batches, so they aren’t instant and can take a few business days to complete).
• At risk of failing even after funds originally land. Even if the funds appear to have settled, the institution on the other side can issue a “return”, causing the movement to reverse. Settlement is not finality.

ACH is ultimately a good choice when you’re making lots of payments, want to do so cheaply, and the payments aren’t so time-sensitive that a day or a few days of transit would negatively impact anything.

RealtimeRTP and FedNow^®

Realtime payments, as a bank-native rail, are newer in American banking history. RTP (Real-time Payments) is operated by TCH, a privately-run clearinghouse. FedNow^® Service is a comparable rail operated by the Federal Reserve.

Both offer instant, 24/7 account-to-account payments. They’re limited to lower amounts than wires ($10M at the network level, typically lower at any given bank), and are intended for everyday, “lower-value” payments. Unlike ACHs, they’re irreversible.

Think of them as an instant, 24/7 alternative to ACHs, or even to the sorts of apps that Americans are accustomed to for peer-to-peer payments.

The difference is that funds settle instantly into your counterparty’s bank account.

Fedwire

Wires are the backbone of “large-value” payments in the US: closing a real estate deal, transferring corporate funds, wiring an investment, etc. These are also irreversible, which is often a feature from the recipient’s POV (no risk of reversal following settlement), but can introduce a higher degree of risk for the sender.

Wires are logical to use when amounts are too large for ACH or Realtime or in scenarios where the counterparty only accepts wires.

Paper checksSoon

Paper checks are non-obvious as a tool for AI agents, transactional actors that exist entirely as software. But checks remain a robust staple of the American payments system for reasons that will persist even in a world with agents—and they’re coming soon to Direct.

Checks let you pay someone with just their name and their mailing address. Other rails often introduce operational work at scale: the collection (or amendment of) banking details, handling returns, payment failures, and so on. With checks, that work becomes the remit of external infrastructure as opposed to your operational burden as the payer.

USPS and FedEx take care of delivery. The recipient’s bank underwrites the recipient’s identity before allowing a check in their name to be deposited into their account. Natural ensures, via positive pay, that only checks presented with the expected recipient and amount details are actually depositable, mitigating check fraud.

Checks are a great payment method when you have limited information about the counterparty (i.e. only their name and address), are making an institutional payment where an actual paper trail is required, or you need to get settled up without the administrative overhead of an EFT all for the incremental cost of print & mail, handled by your agent and Natural.

On the horizon

Agents are increasingly operating as real participants in the economy: managing errands, negotiating, procuring, and paying on behalf of individuals and businesses alike. In order to fully execute judgment to optimize payment rail selection, agents need the same range of payments and banking options any person or company would find useful.

That’s what Direct is for. Your agent can use Natural, and now Direct, over API, MCP, CLI, or SDK to make any kind of payment at runtime, in service of whatever goal it’s pursuing, whether it’s operating your business or helping you personally. A vendor that only takes wires, a contractor you only have a mailing address for, a refund that needs to land in seconds: your agent can handle all of these without you having to pre-configure the counterparty scenarios it may face.

More rails are on the way soon:

• International wire (via SWIFT): A large-value payment rail to transfer USD and other currencies cross-border.
• Stablecoins: 1:1 USD-backed, regulated tokens that are transferable globally, instantly, and 24/7: convertible at their destination, at the speed of the internet.
• Local payments outside of the US: SEPA (EU), Bacs (UK), and more.

Direct sits alongside Natural’s existing offerings across Pay / Request, upcoming ones like Accept for checkout, Issuing for cards, and more. At Natural, our goal is to cover every payment and banking need your agent will ever have, so the limits you set are the only limits on what your agent can do.

Reach out to hi@natural.com if there’s anything you’re looking to learn more about and/or request…agents welcome!