The widely used ACCEL/Exchange debits payments network is now Accel, said its owner, Fiserv Inc.

Fiserv said the name change reflects the network’s growth in size and functionality across retail, biller and social person-to-person channels that provide access to demand deposit account funds at ATMs and the point of sale.

"Fiserv updated the network's name to reflect the 24x7-always-connected world we're living in," said David Keenan, general manager, Network Solutions, for Fiserv in Brookfield, Wis.

Accel now claims 55 million debit cardholders using 3,100 financial institutions, 340,000 ATMs and more than 3 million merchant locations.

"Our real-time payments platform, developed over the last 40 years, has expanded from ATM and retail payments to enabling social payments, as we demonstrated last year with the integration of Accel with our person-to-person payments service, Popmoney,” Keenan said Tuesday in a statement.

Fiserv landed Popmoney with its 2011 purchase of CashEdge and combined it last year with the Zashpay P2P service the company had launched in 2009.