VerityPay Debuts Pay-by-Text Offering for B2C Payments

B2B Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform VerityPay has launched with a new pay-by-text tool for businesses.

The new offering lets businesses make payments through text or SMS straight into customers’ digital wallets, such as PayPal and Venmo.

“With VerityPay, we’re making digital wallet transactions possible for the first time in a business-to-consumer format for any type of payment with just a cell phone number,” VerityPay CEO Robert Bowdon said in a Tuesday (Nov. 14) press release.

“This will be particularly important to consumer-facing businesses in the utilities, insurance, healthcare and telecommunications space, which process millions of payments via paper checks,” he added.

The release notes that VerityPay is launching at a moment when consumers are increasingly depending on digital wallets. The company says its patent-pending SMS integration lets businesses transfer funds and make payments with no need for app installations, QR codes, or payment cards.

And as PYMNTS wrote earlier this month, while consumers around the world enjoy a wide range of different shopping features — rewards, free shipping, buy now, pay later (BNPL) —payment choice has remained the most important for retail consumers for the three years we’ve conducted the Digital Shopping Index study.

“Adoption and preference of one payment method over another depends on the dynamics and singularities of each market,” that report said. “Credit and debit cards are still the most used payment methods globally, but digital wallets are gaining traction across geographies.”

VerityPay also notes the security measures in its payments tool, an important feature considering the prevalence of fraud tied to digital wallet use.

“Increasing Fraud Heightens Need for Newer, Better Technologies,” a collaboration between PYMNTS Intelligence and Hawk AI, found that 43% of financial institutions (FIs) said they witnessed an increase of fraud compared to last year.

“This growth applies to most of the payment methods used, and digital wallets such as Samsung Pay, Apple Pay or Google Pay showed among the highest increases,” PYMNTS wrote last month.

The survey showed that around 65% of FIs that accept Samsung Pay experienced increased fraud compared to 2022. Apple Pay and Google Pay were not far behind, with a respective 60% and 52% of FIs that accept those methods experiencing increased fraud.