9 Clicks Stand Between Businesses and Their Money

Watch more: Summer School | SBT | Shawn Curtis

Businesses can move money faster than ever. Their customers, however, may still need to navigate a maze of messages, portals, passwords and payments pages before that money starts moving. The disconnect is creating a largely invisible revenue leak for consumer lenders, utilities and other companies that depend on recurring customer payments.

“Payments is not the point. Conversion is,” Shawn Curtis, general manager of payments at SBT, told PYMNTS during a conversation for the 2026 PYMNTS original series “Summer School.”

The problem is not necessarily that customers are unwilling to pay, unaware of what they owe or unable to receive another reminder. It is that the path from deciding to pay to completing the transaction remains unnecessarily difficult.

“If it’s a pain in the neck to pay you back for this loan, I’m going to remember that the next time I need another loan,” Curtis said. “App fatigue is a real thing.”

More Reminders Cannot Repair a Broken Payment Journey

When payment rates disappoint, many organizations respond by increasing the volume of emails, calls, letters and text messages. The strategy treats collections as an awareness problem. Remind customers often enough, and eventually they will pay.

“More volume is just more noise,” Curtis said. “It doesn’t actually remove friction.”

The practical fix is more straightforward. Keep customers in the same flow and let them pay the moment they decide to act.

“The biggest breakdown happens between intent and action,” he said. When customers are forced “to switch channels, to log in, to take a bunch of extra steps, each one of those actions leads to some natural drop-off in the payment funnel.”

That is the hidden weakness in many collection strategies. The notification may work perfectly. It may reach the right customer at the right moment with the correct balance, yet if the next step requires five minutes, a password reset or a separate application, the business has created a new opportunity for abandonment.

“They can send me all the reminders they want,” Curtis said, but when companies repeatedly direct customers into poor workflows, especially ones they already know will be inconvenient, the reminders face diminishing returns.

“Payments are not just a back-end function anymore,” Curtis said. “They’re part of the user experience.”

Text Messaging Captures the Moment of Intent

A smooth payment will not necessarily create a memorable customer interaction. A bad one almost certainly will. Text-based payments are gaining traction because SMS can collapse that distance. Instead of using a message merely to tell customers that a payment is due, businesses can turn the message itself into the beginning of the transaction.

“Texting is so effective because it meets the consumer in the moment of intent,” Curtis said. “It’s quick, it’s easy, it’s confidential, it’s more discreet.”

Phone calls do not simply introduce more friction, Curtis said. They can become “a type of social blocker” when customers do not want colleagues or others around them to hear the conversation.

But text messaging only improves conversion when it allows the customer to act without being pushed into another cumbersome channel. A text that leads to an app download, account registration or lengthy portal experience may capture attention while still losing the transaction. The opportunity is therefore not text-to-remind. It is text-to-complete.

Wallets Cannot Fix a Nine-Click Funnel

Apple Pay and Google Pay can strengthen that experience by eliminating the need to find a card and manually enter payments credentials.

Yet Curtis cautioned against treating wallet acceptance as a substitute for redesigning the underlying journey.

“Digital wallets themselves are a great accelerator, but they are not a strategy,” he said.

He described a utility whose customers must make nine clicks between receiving a payment reminder and reaching the point where they can use Apple Pay. The wallet may make the ninth step easier. It does nothing to remove the first eight.

The example illustrates a broader mistake in digital transformation. Businesses often add a modern payment option to an old operating process and call the result innovation. But the customer still experiences the entire journey, not just the payment button at the end.

Trust Starts Before the Link Arrives

Reducing clicks creates another challenge. A direct payments link may be convenient, but consumers have also been trained to treat unexpected links with suspicion.

“Trust starts upstream from where the request is actually made,” Curtis said.

Companies can use richer messages with branding, logos and contextual information, but Curtis said credibility should be established even earlier. When customers sign up, businesses can explain which number will contact them, provide a digital contact card and tell them future messages may include payments requests.

That makes trust more than a compliance issue. It becomes part of conversion design. Customers must recognize the sender and believe the request is legitimate before transaction speed matters.

Watch the full PYMNTS interview with SBT General Manager of Payments Shawn Curtis to hear more about:

Why payments friction is a hidden revenue leak. Curtis said every login, channel switch and extra click between a customer’s intent to pay and the completed transaction increases abandonment.

How text-to-pay can turn attention into faster cash flow. More reminders cannot fix a broken payments journey, and enabling customers to pay directly from a trusted message can improve completion rates.

Why payments have become part of the customer experience. Wallets alone cannot repair a cumbersome funnel, and simple, recognizable payments interactions can strengthen trust, retention and customer lifetime value.