Ingo Money and Visa push B2C push payments
Ingo Money is teaming up with Visa again, this time to enable corporations, merchants, financial institutions and governments to make payments directly to more than 4 billion consumer prepaid, debit and credit cards, and mobile wallet accounts. The longtime partners, which previously rolled out mobile deposit capture capabilities for Visa prepaid cards, on Oct. 21 announced that they’ll be offering Atlanta-based Ingo’s white-label Instant Payments Platform to Visa partners.
The Ingo Instant Payments service is a bank-sponsored, push payments processing platform and gateway, supporting transactions from origination through settlement across multiple payment networks via a single API, according to the company. Funds can be accessed immediately by the recipient to make purchases, pay bills or withdraw at an ATM, Ingo said.
“Ingo Money has made it as easy to disburse funds to customers and employees digitally as it is to mail them a check and at far lower cost,” Ingo Money CEO Drew Edwards says. “And it is a faster more flexible way to pay consumers than ACH because it doesn’t require a bank account or ready knowledge of your bank account and routing number. Now consumers can get paid the same way they pay, using any card in their wallet.”
Several implementations are underway with Visa clients and Ingo Money anticipates announcing launches by Q1 2017, Edwards says.
The push for real-time payments is global. Swift reported in 2015 that 18 countries were live with real-time payments platforms, while another 12 were in the research phase, including the US, where the Federal Reserve’s Faster Payments Task Force has been at work since 2015 on a plan to enhance the speed, safety and efficiency of U.S. payments.
Edwards is a proponent of using existing networks to enable real-time push payments rather than building new rails.
