Card Processor Revolution Lets Customers Pay by Text

Credit card processor Revolution Payments has made text payments available for its gateway customers in the U.S.

The text-to-pay solution supports credit cards and ACH payments, the Virginia-based company said in a news release this week.

“The integration of text-to-pay is in direct response to growing customer demand for these services,” said Revolution, whose customer base is primarily in the business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-government (B2G) sectors.

This is in part due to the rising popularity of businesses seeking alternative payments during the COVID pandemic. With text messages seeing a 98% open rate, companies will get paid faster and more frequently.

“Text-to-pay gives our clients different payment alternatives to meet the growing needs of its customers,” Revolution Payments President Sean Jones said in the release.

As a plus to customers accepting credit cards from businesses or government, Revolution said, all B2B and B2G transactions are instantly reclassified to Level II and Level III interchange rates AKA Level III processing, including text-to-pay. Level III processing can reduce the interchange cost of accepting commercial cards by as much as 40%.

Companies that want to qualify for Level III interchange rates must typically manually enter up to 11 data fields of information, a time-consuming — and in some cases impossible — process for merchants. Revolution’s gateway automates this process, letting merchants significantly lower the interchange cost for accepting commercial cards.

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Revolution introduced level III card processing capabilities last year, with the aim of helping to lower the cost of corporate card acceptance via Level III data capture.

Visa and Mastercard charge higher rates if commercial cards are processed with only level I data capture. But given the ability to gather greater transaction detail at point of sale (POS), merchants can enjoy a lower interchange rate.

“Given the current low profit margin derived by processors today, the focus should be to better manage the interchange cost of accepting credit cards,” Revolution said last year.