Payouts Without The Pain

Drew Edwards, CEO of Ingo Money, reflects on how 2020 required merchants to offer instant payment options to meet newly customers’ digital demands. In The Connected Economy’s Power Source – CEO Edition, Edwards shares his predictions for how payments transformation will accelerate in the future, including new business models that include monetizing speed for both payors and recipients.

As I reflect over the last year of instant disbursements, 2020 was defined by payors’ desire to pay recipients instantly and with choice, giving the customer many digital options for how to receive their money – direct to a debit or prepaid card, to a mobile wallet account, or to a bank account. As an integral part of their disbursements strategy, choice with instant options offers payors a competitive advantage that enables a frictionless payment experience and is critical to ongoing relationships with customers.

For companies that have digital-only relationships from the start, the ability to begin offering an instant payout option was a more manageable task, at least from an engagement standpoint – but adding choices by stitching together one-off integrations into a series of payout systems became impractical. However, through a disbursements marketplace platform like Ingo Money, companies could leverage a single integration, get up and running easily, and begin offering their customers choices of an unmatched number of endpoints.

Physical economy players looking to modernize and eliminate the cost of checks took action, too, while also realizing their need to compete with those who already had a leg up with digital customer relationships. However, their requirements to deliver instant payments and choice went beyond a simple API, extending to an omnichannel, configurable, event-driven platform that provided a branded, end-to-end, modern engagement and payment experience.

As we have experienced, the use cases for large physical economy payors extend beyond single-party payments and include multiple layers of complexity, such as multiparty payments, recurring payments and a variety of ad-hoc payments to smaller receivers. In some cases, parties to the payments are not even recipients, but merely approvers and interested parties requiring alerts. Every industry and use case has different rules, processes and workflows that must be handled. It’s these challenges that are being solved for in the next evolution of instant payouts, enabling payors to transform complex offline use cases into digital experiences that delight everyone in the chain.

This future, marked by fully digital payout experiences that solve for complicated business processes, sets the stage for new business models that include monetizing speed for both payors and recipients. Once these new business models start to emerge, we will see even further acceleration in the adoption cycle, as recipients become payors and economics begin to shift from cost reduction to revenue acceleration. When payors can influence the behaviors of recipients and, in turn, benefit from their choices, we will begin to see the second order of economic models in payouts. Transformation will accelerate.