Overview
In the B2C space, businesses have multiple end-customers to whom they make regular or one-off payments,– typical examples being a refund resulting from an overcharge, credit for a delayed or cancelled flight, shipping/postal mail rebates, or a dividend/pension/insurance payment. The current process often requires the beneficiary to contact the corporate, explain the situation, provide their full account details, and ultimately wait for, in most instances, a check to be dispatched. This procedure is fraught with variables and involves exchanging account information over the phone or by some other unsecure channel, introducing privacy concerns and security risks. In addition, there are the costs and inherent risks of the manual aspects of the process.
Key Features
Using Volante’s VolPay Channel, the corporate simply has to provide an email ID / mobile phone number together with the amount to be paid directly to the beneficiary. The channel’s workflow is configured to communicate with the beneficiary and gather the relevant data via the beneficiary portal, while handling key aspects such as security, legal implications, and two- factor authentications to bind the processing, legal and risk aspects of the specific use case.
Investing in self-service technology, without operational overheads, allows the bank to transform its payment process and offer an improved end-user experience while benefiting from a new revenue stream. In turn, the technology has allowed the corporate to hand-over a traditionally time- consuming and resource-hungry process and deliver more control to the end-beneficiary.
Key Benefits
Main advantages for the corporate
●Liquidity and cash management – the system acts like a virtual check i.e. funds stay with the corporate until the beneficiary cashes it (logs in online to claim it).
●The self-service process is outsourced to the bank, freeing up elements of the corporate treasury’s payments process and saving man-hours from a previously manually-intensive process to get and maintain the data.
●The corporate does not have to handle the beneficiary’s sensitive financial (banking) details thereby reducing security risk.
●The corporate can automate its payments/refund process.
Main advantages for the bank
●The bank now has a new service it can offer its corporate customers and increase its service revenue
●The bank can now offer additional products to the beneficiary. The bank can ensure that it received the right data that its systems needed for payment processing, thereby ensuring that STP rates are improved. Since the process is managed by the beneficiary, this would be achieved without adding operational overheads.
●Creation of a new revenue stream - the solution opens a host of new use cases by providing a core framework to connect the necessary sources (systems or parties) together to gather any data needed for payment processing. For example, the accessing of a central government tax system to retrieve or validate tax codes and handle tax payments appropriately.
●The implementation of the VolPay Channel solution takes a giant step towards achieving what the trade association Payments UK propose as a solution in their recent report ‘Confirmation of Payee – A Vision for world class payments in the UK’.
Main Advantages for the beneficiary (the corporate’s customer)
●Personal banking data only needs to be provided to the bank and not the corporate.
●The beneficiary benefits from a choice of being able to claim the funds in different countries and alternative currencies.
