What’s New at PayNearMe: 2020 Product Wrap-Up

With 2020 in the books (and 50+ PayNearMe releases neatly wrapped up along with it), we’re looking back and some of the new and updated features we released last year.

Digital Disbursements

The first feature isn’t a way to accept payments, but a way to send them out. Disbursing funds via check for loan payouts, claim payments and more can be a painful and expensive process—for both businesses and consumers. With PayNearMe Disbursements, customers can receive money sent to their debit cards in under 30 minutes, increasing customer satisfaction and reducing effort and costs.

Disbursements can be initiated through API, an agent or an agent via consumer. In the latter example, the agent pushes a text or email to the consumer, who has the option to enter their own card or bank details. This moves the compliance burden away from the merchant.

Businesses can set user permissions for disbursements to specify which agents can send disbursements, as well as daily allowable limits per agent. This quarter (Q1 2021), we’re planning to add ACH disbursements to the mix.

Dynamic Mobile Wallets

Imagine what it would mean to give your customers the ability to make payments and view bills in one place, on a device that’s always within arm’s reach, with a native application they are already using today.

With our Digital Wallets feature, customers can view billing, schedule payments, make payments and more by simply clicking “Add to Wallet” in your payment flow. No more searching for due dates or calling you for information. They have everything they need to make or view payments in the palm of their hand.

This year, PayNearMe added the ability to fully customize Apple Pay Wallet cards with billing information you provide. (Google Wallet is also available, though not yet fully configurable). Customers can also save payment options and billing information to their wallet, including cash barcodes, to complete payments through Apple or Google Pay.

Apple Pay & Google Pay

Speaking of Apple and Google Pay, as the bill pay industry continues to innovate, customers expect a growing variety of payment types and channels to make the payment process as painless as possible.

During 2020, PayNearMe made Apple Pay and Google Pay available to our clients for one-time payments, along with support for recurring and future-dated payments for Apple Pay. Google Pay support for autopay and future-dated payments is planned for 2021.

Apple Pay & Google Pay are secure, easy ways for customers to make payments using their saved cards, removing the need to input payment information and saving them clicks. Additionally, Apple Pay and Google Pay use biometric information to confirm the identity of the payer, increasing security. 

SMS & Email Reporting

Another powerful addition to this year’s feature list sits with PayNearMe Engagement Engine. Engagement Engine gives businesses the power to configure what messaging they want to send, when they want to send it and how they want to send it across email, SMS and push notifications. Everything can be scheduled and automated. 

PayNearMe recently added the ability to report on these messages in a variety of ways. Organizations can see all communication attempts to the consumer and the status of those attempts (e.g. delivered, opened, bounced, etc.). This information is available in the PayNearMe Business Portal, the PayNearMe Agent Portal and through reports that can be delivered to the business each day. 

For each message sent, the “delivery status” is logged, allowingreporting/alerting based on the percent of messages successfully delivered.

Consumers may opt out of receiving any future messages from that toll-free number by sending back the “STOP” command or by unsubscribing from emails.

A field in the report shows whether the communication was an email or an SMS. For email and SMS, the account numbers will be shown, and the email address or phone number will be displayed. 

Message status reporting provides a clear view of how customers are interacting with your communications. You can use these insights to test and tailor messages to specific customers to encourage on-time payments, autopay sign-up and more. 

In addition, because  your agents have visibility to this information in the Agent Portal, they can quickly see past communications with customers and tailor their conversations to resolve any issues and improve customer service. 

More Configurable Options

In 2020, it became easier than ever to make PayNearMe your own, with configurable options like PayNearMe Business Rules and the ability to show or hide custom fields. There are now several standard business rules available in the PayNearMe platform. Custom rules and fields are also available.

By using these rules and custom fields, you can tailor the agent and customer experience to fit your business’ unique needs. Consider some of the ways you can use these features: 

Example Business Rules:

1. Remove the ACH option and force pay with cash or debit if the customer has too many prior NSFs.
2. Set minimum or maximum payment amounts based on account information.
3. Restrict how far in advance (# of days) autopay and future-dated, one-time payments can be set up.

Example Custom Fields:

1. For lenders, show customers exactly how a payment breaks down into components such as principal, interest, total balance and more. This provides the info consumers need so they don’t have to call the merchant with questions.
2. Show call center agents critical business information, such as late payment notifications, to enable appropriate customer communications. 
3. If a payment is a certain number of days overdue, show the customer a message requiring them to call in to complete the transaction.

These are only a few of the ways Business Rules and custom fields are being used by PayNearMe clients. The possibilities for configuration are numerous.

New Ways to Simplify Security & Compliance

New features are shiny, but compliance is always a top concern for discerning businesses. PayNearMe makes staying compliant a priority. Here are two of the areas where we’ve made improvements this year:

Chargebacks

We’ve added more accurate chargeback status reporting, which is shown directly in the payment reports. We also made new chargeback documentation available within the platform to make winning disputes easier. All recent chargebacks can be shown on one screen and are easy to track and manage.

User Permissions

To ensure the highest level of security and compliance, PayNearMe now offers new user configurations, such as setting the ability for specific agents to waive fees.

Flexible Autopay Options

The ability to schedule recurring, future-dated payments (autopay) is an important one for our clients –and their customers. This year, PayNearMe added autopay scheduling capabilities including:

• One-time
• Weekly
• Monthly
• Twice Monthly
• Every Other Week
• Custom Durations

We also made improvements around batch processing, authorization management and time zone scheduling.

For autopay-specific user permissions, we’ve added the ability to specify which users (agents) can cancel and create autopay schedules (Note: all agents can view active schedules). Additionally, we’ve added a feature to support canceling an autopay schedule when a payment is declined (or we believe it will be declined) for any reason.

UI Updates

Though we’ve spent a lot of time adding to or updating specific product features this year, the PayNearMe has also continually made ongoing improvements to our user experience. Some of these updates include:  

• Added a Dynamic Tool for Card and ACH Inputs: Our desktop Consumer Portal UI now features dynamic input for ACH and card details.
  • For ACH, the routing numbers and account numbers will dynamically show in a check illustration at the top of the screen as they are populated. For card, the card number, card holder name and expiration date will dynamically update in the card illustration as they get populated.
• Migrated to a New CSS Framework: We’ve made a new look and feel available for all clients, including more responsive interface, modern colors, prominent buttons, and more.
• Added New Alerts for Customers and Agents: We’ve added several new alerts for agents and customers to help them navigate the payment process, including late payment warnings, notices if a customer goes over the number of allowed payment accounts and notices about previously scheduled automatic payments.

Reliability 

Another area of focus for continuous improvements is reliability.We continue to maintain rigorous uptime standards and are always on the lookout for new ways to make our platform even more reliable so you can collect every payment, every time.

Schedule Your Demo

To see the latest updates and get a tour of the PayNearMe platform, schedule a demo, or reach out to your account manager today.