Pay-by-Text: Payments Made Easier

With roughly 26 billion text messages sent every day, a new frontier is opening up. And the brave companies are going to begin taking advantage of it. We want you to be one of those companies and we want to help you do it. With our Pay-by-Text feature, we can help your customers make payments via text. That’s right, payments made in the palms of their hands. It’s pretty cool.

But why would you want to offer the ability to pay via text? Here are just a few reasons:

• The average person sends 15 texts per day (State of Texting Report, 2019).
• At least 97% of smartphone owners text regularly (Pew Research Center).
• The average response time for a text message is only 90 seconds…90 seconds! The response time for an email is 90 minutes, which is 60 times longer (CTIA, HubSpot, GSMA).
• 95% of texts from businesses are read within 3 minutes of being sent (Forbes).
• 67% of US smartphone owners said they would like to receive service-based messages from banks/financial institutions (Transactional Messaging Consumer Report).
• Finance and Banking have a 57% SMS response rate during the first 15 minutes (DSIM).

To sum up, most people text, most people prefer receiving texts over other forms of communications from financial institutions, and most people respond to a financial text during the first 15 minutes. When you look at it that way, receiving payments via text is a no-brainer. Enter Pay-by-Text.

Pay-by-Text Highlights

Pay-by-Text is a convenient way to allow your business to accept payments via text messaging. Plus, it improves customer satisfaction by providing a convenient way to pay. It’s a win-win. And, because Pay-by-Text is so easy to use, it can improve on-time payments. In addition, you don’t need any extra employees to implement it because it is completely automatic. Wow, why wouldn’t you use Pay-by-Text?

How it Works

So, let’s dive into the details of how this works. Here is the basic process:

1. Your institution, via Solutions by Text, sends a customer a text reminding them that they have an upcoming payment due and asks them if they want to pay right now by responding with "PAY."
2. The customer texts "PAY" back. Note: If the customer texts, “STOP,” the system will automatically opt the number out of receiving texts.
3. When the “PAY” text is received, the program looks to see if a default payment account is set up.
4. The system can respond in a couple of ways, based on whether a default account is found:
   • If a default account is found, the process continues as follows:
     1. A text is sent that includes the last four digits of the account, the type of account (bank, VISA, Mastercard, etc.), and the amount of the payment.
     2. This text also asks the customer to confirm the payment by texting, “CONFIRM.”
     3. The customer texts “CONFIRM.”
     4. The system uses the default payment method to process the payment.
     5. If a “PAY” text is received but a “CONFIRM” text is not received within the specified number of hours (see the Options section below), a follow-up text is sent asking the customer to confirm.
   • If a default account is not found:
     • A text is sent giving the customer the opportunity to:
       1. Go online to make a payment directly,
       2. Set up a default payment method (this can be done through GOLDAccount Center), or
       3. Select a default payment method from a list of stored payment methods.

And, voila! It’s as easy as that. For your customers, it will seem even easier. For the system, it’s a little more complicated.

But let’s not talk about that.

Options

There are three options available for Pay-by-Text that can be set up for you by GOLDPoint Systems:

1. Use Default Payment Profile: This option allows you to set up the default payment account for users that will be the account used for Pay-by-Text payments.
2. Wait Time to Send Confirmation: This option enables you to specify how many hours the system will wait after receiving a payment request text before sending the customer a confirmation request text.
3. Confirmation Expires After (Hours): This option is used to indicate how many hours the confirmation request text will be available and active for the customer to respond to. After this time runs out, the system sends one more follow-up text asking the customer to confirm the payment again. If a confirmation text isn’t received, the payment isn’t processed.

Templates

You can set up the templates that you want Pay-by-Text to use with Solutions by Text and then our system uses the templates and maps those to the template IDs we have set up for the Pay-by-Text process. We have the following template IDs set up to use:

Default Payment Profiles

There are also a few different ways to set up the default payment account that is used by Pay-by-Text: 

1. You can set up the account in CIM GOLD on the Card Profiles screen (see below).
2. You can set up the account in CIM GOLD on the External Accounts screen (see below).
3. The user can set up the account in GOLDAccount Center.

TORCs & Descriptor Codes

In addition, we have the following TORC and Descriptor codes for Pay-by-Text payments:

• TORC 9: SMS Payment by Credit Card / Descriptor Code 6: SMS CC Payment
• TORC 10: SMS Payment by Online Check / Descriptor Code 7: MS OC Payment

After a customer makes a payment via text, our system records that payment using the TORC 9 or 10 codes. These codes are shown in the loan history on the Detailed History tab on the Loans > History screen (see below). The EZPay log also shows what payments were made via text (SMS). Plus, the new TORCs can be added to GOLDMiner reports to enable you to track when Pay-by-Text payments are processed, which is pretty sweet if you ask me.

Final Thoughts

That was a lot of information. Good thing it was all really cool. If you are still on the fence about using Pay-by-Text, consider the fact that over 60% of consumers complete financial transactions using their mobile phones… 60%! Why wouldn’t you want to make making payments easier for the majority of your customers? Besides, most people prefer texting, and that number is growing rapidly. It’s time to jump on board.

Contact GOLDPoint Systems today to get on board with Pay-by-Text!