The Horse Race To Help Financial Institutions Innovate

Banks — especially the smaller community banks — have developed a reputation for not being very innovative, despite putting forward a lot of innovation over the years. Witness — online and mobile banking.

But just because they may have a bad rap for being innovative, that doesn’t mean these community banks don’t have ambitions to leverage technology and deliver innovation in an increasingly digital payments world.

Payveris is trying to lend these banks a helping hand. The Connecticut-based company founded in 2011 is bringing its SaaS-based digital payment solutions to community-based financial institutions. This single digital payments platform enables electronic bill pay, as well as account-to-account and person-to-person money movement services — across a multi-channel experience. To learn more about Payveris and its ambitions to help banks innovate, PYMNTS caught up with President Jeff Weikert and SVP of Marketing Mickey Goldwasser.

“We’re trying to innovate on behalf of the FIs in our space. We’re trying to give them the tools so that they can compete. A lot of innovation in the space has come from outside the industry. We’re trying to innovate from within the banking industry,” explained Goldwasser.

Or, as Weikert explained, Payveris is trying to disrupt the market in a way that banks and nonbanks simply haven’t been able to do. And a lot of that has to do with all the noise in the market.

“It’s a very busy page because there’s a lot of nonbanks that are trying to come in and take advantage of the perceived lack of innovation that has been out in the market — and the slowness of this category of banks to move forward … But that’s great for us because we are bank-friendly and bank-centric, but we’re also modern and agile and we have the solutions they are looking for. At least, from what we’re getting validation on the market from.”

And that’s what community banks need, he said, now more than ever.

As Weikert explained in a brief Q&A with PYMNTS recently, “[Banks have] got to fix that digital payment experience, or you are going to be behind the eight ball,” he said.

Here’s more of our conversation.

PYMNTS: How do you pitch your solution to financial institutions, and what would you say your “X factor” is in the market?

WEIKERT: For [financial institutions], there are three things [they] are looking for. Control, consolidation and innovation. For control, we basically give these banks access to our entire digital payment platform through an open API so that they can create the customer experience of their choosing.

Consolidation is the other. They are dealing with many different solutions and vendors, all from different genres … Over time, they were compiled onto a platform. So, a [financial institution] wants to consolidate. [They] want something that is based on one platform and works the same way in terms of the funding mechanism. Works the same way in terms of the remittance. And something that’s extensible … And, as a cloud-based solution, we have an open API that allows community banks to innovate.

PYMNTS: How do you feel you are innovating the payments market?

WEIKERT: We are helping these community banks deliver omnichannel — a single platform that supports what we call “agnostic money movement.” That’s very innovative and disruptive and is possible given the API environment that we have created. We don’t have legacy infrastructure to deal with. We can scale and can add scale with the push of a button, and we can do it very efficiently.

PYMNTS: What does the next year look like for Payveris?

WEIKERT: We’re working on a number of things. We’re constantly enhancing our platform and our solutions. We’re coming out for some new solutions this quarter around fraud and around other ways to use payments using the new devices that we are all really focused on. Certainly, we’re clued into faster payments. We think we have a better mouse trap there as well. There’s a lot of buzz about the apparent need for faster payments, and we’ve got a front-row seat in terms of what’s happening in that arena. We’re working on a solution that will really provide an optimal solution for an FI. So, banks don’t necessarily pick a horse in a race. You have the benefit of leveraging all the horses in the race. So, faster payments will be pretty important.

The nonbanks are typically one-trick ponies. They aren’t really offering a full range of solutions. That’s one thing that gives us an advantage.