Payments and financial services technology company Fiserv announced Wednesday it is partnering its omnichannel commerce platform Carat to include digital payout options to personal PayPal and Venmo accounts.
Companies that deliver mass payouts can now use the Carat channel to directly pay consumer’s digital accounts and wallets through the two key payments players. As digital wallets become more popular, the deal between the two fintech companies is focused on giving consumers faster access to their money and businesses new marketing opportunities on the Venmo platform.
“With the addition of payouts to PayPal and Venmo accounts via our Carat ecosystem, businesses can benefit from enhanced visibility of their brand via a logo, tagline or customized message in Venmo’s social payments platform,” said Nandan Sheth, head of Carat and digital commerce at Fiserv. “This provides our clients with a unique opportunity to drive next generation customer experiences, with the simplicity of doing so at scale through a single API.”
Google, Microsoft, Lyft, State Farm and FanDuel have all worked with Fiserv in some capacity to securely deliver pay-in and payout opportunities. The tech uses API access for clients to connect with the pre-integrated solutions. While the Venmo and Paypal avenues are a new feature, Carat is already able to disburse digital payments via consumer’s credit or debit cards, ACH, prepaid cards and even digital checks.
According to a release, Carat is currently executing nearly $1 billion in digital payouts a month via exclusive payout options and direct bank connections.
With more than 400 million active accounts on the PayPal and Venmo platforms, we are able to provide companies with a fast, easy and cost-effective way to send money in situations such as insurance payouts or other disbursements,” said Dan Leberman, senior vice president of partnerships, PayPal.
In April, Fiserv launched a similar pay-out option (minus the Venmo and Paypal partnership) using its Money Network prepaid payroll cards through capabilities from Instant Financial. The electronic delivery services enabled businesses to let their employees access their wages early.
Carrie Blankenship, director of product management at Finserv, told FinLedger in April that an era of real-time payments ramping up was on its way.
“The fact that that is brand new and the instant payments and instant settlement nature of instant payments is now less than four years old — we’re still in the infancy of that,” said Blankenship. “When you think about situations where money can be, should be, needs to be sped up, the use cases are really limitless in the ability to deliver funds instantly.”