How A Top 20 Bank Transformed Payments into a Strategic Advantage
Introduction
A top 20 bank is one of the nation’s largest auto finance companies, serving more than three million customers across the full credit spectrum.
As a full-scale lender, their business model is straightforward: lend money, and make it easy—and reliable—for borrowers to pay it back.
But behind that simplicity lies an operational reality shared by many large financial institutions: payments infrastructure is complex, high-risk, and deeply tied to customer experience, operational costs and agent effectiveness.
The next step was to rethink how payments worked across the organization.
The Challenge: Reliability, Scale and the True Cost of Payments
What motivated this top 20 bank to explore a new payments platform?
Their legacy payments solution had become a constraint rather than an enabler. As the organization scaled, the need to rethink payments only grew.
Top pain points identified during discovery included:
- Payment reliability and uptime: Outages and service disruptions created immediate customer impact and downstream operational burden
- Agent productivity: Too many payments required manual intervention, pulling agents into low-value tasks instead of higher-impact work
- Borrower experience: Limited self-service options and fragmented payment flows increased abandonment, late payments and call center volume
- Rising total cost of acceptance: Returns, chargebacks, exceptions and manual reconciliation were driving up costs well beyond transaction fees
Why PayNearMe: A Platform for Payment Experience Management
What factors made PayNearMe stand out?
This top 20 evaluated multiple options, but PayNearMe differentiated itself by aligning technology with business outcomes.
Key buying criteria included:
- Smart Link™ technology to enable personalized, one-click, self-service payments without a login
- Broad tender support including ACH, debit, Cash App Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, Venmo, and cash
- Agent tools that reduce friction and surface better payment context
- Proven reliability and uptime
- Configurability and extensibility to support future use cases
Like any major payments transformation, the project came with risk. Their initial concerns centered on change management across teams and channels, as well as implementation complexity and cutover risk.
The turning point came when the client aligned stakeholders around a shared set of goals: reducing exceptions, increasing self-service and lowering the total cost of payment acceptance—without sacrificing customer experience.
Performance: Measurable Gains Across Cost, Experience, and Efficiency
Within months of launch, they began seeing meaningful results—not just in customer adoption, but in operational impact.
Self-Service and Digital Adoption
- 96% of payments processed through PayNearMe are completed via self-service
- +2% increase in self-service adoption, driving $1.85M in savings
- +5% increase in AutoPay enrollment within the first six months
- AutoPay growth contributed to $800K in annualized savings
Reduced Exceptions and Payment Failures
- ACH return rate decreased by 1%
- Chargeback rate decreased by 0.02%
Combined impact was nearly $850K in savings.
Tender Mix Optimization
- ACH: 60%
- Debit Card: 30%
- Apple Pay: 9%
- Google Pay / Venmo / PayPal / Cash: 1%
This intentional shift toward lower-cost, higher-reliability tenders helped them reduce risk while meeting borrower preferences.
Elevating Agents by Removing Low-Value Work
One of the most impactful outcomes wasn’t just customer-facing—it was internal.
Rethinking the Total Cost of Acceptance
The bank approached modernization through a broader lens: total cost of acceptance and Payment Experience Management.
Rather than focusing solely on transaction fees, they evaluated:
- Manual exception handling
- Call center labor
- Returns and chargebacks
- Reconciliation and reporting effort
- Late and missed payments
- Training and system overhead
By reducing exceptions and increasing straight-through processing, PayNearMe helped them systematically drive these costs down.
Customer and Team Feedback
The bank drove awareness to customers through targeted SMS campaigns with Smart Links, helping them transition to the new payment experience.
The banks teams report improved ease of use across both consumer and agent experiences.
Borrowers
Borrowers respond positively to one-click Smart Links and expanded payment choice
Agents
Agents benefit from fewer system handoffs and clearer payment context
Operations
Operations teams see faster reconciliation and fewer support tickets
A Model for Modern Payment Experience Management
This top 20 bank’s partnership with PayNearMe demonstrates what’s possible when payments are treated as a core business capability.
By prioritizing reliability, self-service and agent effectiveness, they have turned payments from a cost center into a competitive advantage—delivering better experiences for borrowers, agents and their back-office operations team.
