In Automated Payments, Banks Have a Natural Advantage: More Businesses Are Realizing That

Partner Content

Let’s start with the good news: the rapid growth of electronic payments and transaction processing in recent decades has made it easier than ever for businesses to streamline their operations. Complex processes that once took days or weeks to transact are increasingly conducted in an instant—allowing for faster, more accurate settlement and reconciliation for all parties involved.

While the faster payments revolution has ultimately been beneficial for businesses, it has led to a proliferation of tools and platforms that focus only on monetizing business payments but do little to help businesses build strong and trusted relationships with vendors, partners and payees. What’s more, the sheer number of available options has created confusion in the marketplace; businesses looking to streamline and simplify their payments process face a sea of options that require extensive set-up time, often promise more than they deliver in terms of return on investment (ROI) or create downstream negative impacts for payees.

Fortunately, the path to faster payments is easier than one might think. In most cases, a business needs to look no further than its bank to implement a faster, more efficient payments solution. For one thing, a business’ commercial bank already handles its transaction flows in and out of its accounts. It also has a deeper understanding of the underlying business than a third-party fintech vendor. 

Finally, having a single provider serve as both bank and payments provider is just ... simpler. The desire to work directly with their bank on payments processing is the strong preference among businesses. According to research from Datos Insights, 60% of businesses indicated a preference to work directly with their bank on payments as opposed to a fintech provider. In another related study, more than one-third (34%) of businesses believed that the bank better understood their payments needs than a fintech provider.

A Winning Formula: Easy Integration, Payee Choice, Fraud Protection

The novel idea of focusing on the payee side of the transaction elevates payment product functionality. The ideal platform enhances the payee experience with intuitive controls and self-servicing functionality via a convenient payee portal, which allows payees to choose how and when they prefer to be paid.  

Many inefficiencies in the payments process result from technological incompatibilities between payor and payee, which can contribute to costly bottlenecks on both sides of the transaction. By empowering payees with a more flexible range of payment options, key barriers and points of inertia are removed from the process, resulting in reduced friction and a smoother experience for all parties.

Another key issue in payments is the clunkiness associated with onboarding a new payments system and waiting days or weeks for the process to get up and running. Getting your payment platform primed for simple integration into a business' existing payments infrastructure helps to eliminate this friction. 

To become a payments provider of choice, banks should seek to make the experience as easy as clicking a button or flipping a switch. This allows businesses to move to electronic payments instantly, from day one, upping efficiency and reducing organizational risk without the need for costly, time-consuming payee enablement.

Payments infrastructure must recognize that trust is a two-way street—and protects businesses’ bottom lines with integrated safeguards, including fraud screening, payee validation and monitoring for electronic payments and built-in positive pay protection for check payments.

Eliminating costly and time-consuming manual processes related to producing and mailing check payments, complex reconcilements, and even delayed payments and late fees is crucial for businesses. Converting to all-digital business payments has never been easier with the breadth of payment options for clients’ payees to choose from. That said, not all solutions are created equal. A top-quality option takes a payee-first focus and has unmatched functionality that includes superior security, speed and ease of use. 

We recently launched Synovus AccelerateTM Pay, which offers a new take on payment processing, applying a unique, payee-centric approach to business payments. 

Regardless of size, the majority of businesses do not have the luxury of time or budget to undertake complex bank integrations. Accelerate Pay offers easy integration options whether a very simple payment origination file minimally containing payee address, payment amount and optional remittance data or an out-of-the-box pre-integration to QuickBooks Online with other industry-leading enterprise resource planning/accounting applications in the near future.

For more information or to schedule a demo of Accelerate Pay, please contact: synovus.com/AcceleratePayNow