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volume 9 • fall 2016
rails and originate credits without the original debits. That’s where payments companies like Ingo Money come in. With a simple API integration to our proprietary payments gateway, we can help businesses push payments onto their customers’ debit and prepaid cards, credit cards or PayPal accounts or, at a customer’s re- quest, push the funds as a cash disbursement to any of thousands of money transfer locations. For companies that need a full-service solution, we provide customer noti cation services and a hosted, PCI-compliant Website or embed- ded widget to collect customer payment preference and card account details securely.
With our 2014 acquisition of
Fuze Network, we gained the ability to push payments onto more than1 billion prepaid,
debit and credit cards. For the past two years, we’ve continued to expand our network reach to o er consumers the ability to pay bills and add funds to their cards, accounts and mobile wallets immediately. Now we’re investing in payments to the consumer.
And while eventually that could include P2P payments—another area where card-to-card pay- ments are gaining ground through the likes of Venmo and Square Cash—we’re focusing on B2C payments rst.
Not a Big Shift for Consumers
One of the biggest advantages of push payments for businesses is that consumers already are used to
giving their payment card details to make payments. The only change in this scenario is that they would be giving their card details to get paid. For instance, if my insurance company owes me money for a claim, they could o er me the option of receiving funds immediately to my card or waiting for a check. My guess is that the vast majority of consumers are going to opt for immediacy and they might even be willing to pay for it.
It’s about building new routes on existing card rails, so companies can take advantage
of push payments directly to con- sumers’ cards. The payment network infra- structure is already built.
—Drew Edwards, Ingo Money
Many banks and payments com- panies, including Ingo Money, are working to enable this type of B2C and other payments via ACH and
are participating in the Fed’s Faster Payments Task Force, which is investigating ways to improve and speed up U.S. pay- ments. It’s not surprising, though, that bank-backed clearXchange, which enables bank-account-to- bank-account payments via ACH, announced deals with Mastercard and Visa in August to enable
P2P payments via debit cards. Consumers are comfortable giving their cardholder data to make online or mobile payments, so
it’s not a big leap of faith for them to give their cardholder data to receive payments. Even in the age of data breaches, consumers con- tinue to trust the card payment rails and their liability protection. Businesses can take advantage of that trust by o ering direct-to-card payments in lieu of the millions
of checks mailed to U.S. consumers last year. And we don’t have to stop with the U.S. because the
card networks operate globally.
The opportunity to displace cor- porate checks with electronic push payments is immense. For those
of us in payments, I believe our energy and investments would be well spent on helping businesses access the existing card network rails to bring faster payments to consumers now, rather than waiting until the industry builds new rails that could take years and millions of dollars to realize.
Drew Edwards is the founder and CEO of Ingo Money and a Pay Magazine Pay- ments Visionary. He can be reached
at drew@ingomoney.com.
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