Vsoft Teams with Pidign to Offer Real-Time Payments

Payment solutions firm VSoft says it has integrated its platform with real-time payments firm Pidgin.

That integration, the company announced Monday (Aug. 28), will allow VSoft’s core processing solution Wings to facilitate real-time transaction processing through multiple payment rails, including the Federal Reserve’s new FedNow Service and The Clearing House’s Real-Time Payments Network.

Meanwhile, VSoft’s Arya digital banking platform also integrates with Pidgin’s real-time payments solution, allowing financial institutions to deliver instant payment options via online and mobile banking channels.

“Enabling real-time transaction processing is more important than ever for today’s financial institutions, especially as instant payments go mainstream following the launch of the FedNow Service,” said Murthy Veeraghanta, Vsoft’s chairman and CEO. “To support a variety of faster payment options for their account holders, financial institutions need a modern, flexible core system that will make it easy to roll out new payment offerings.”

“Consumers and businesses alike have shown an appetite for real-time payment options from their financial institutions,” added Abhishek Veeraghanta, founder and CEO of Pidgin.

He cited data from PYMNTS showing that 80% of Americans are interested in faster payment options to pay for goods and services.

At the same time, that same report said that while real-time payments have hit unprecedented levels of demand in the past five years, they are still available to only a small number of businesses and consumers.

“Studies have found that instant payments make up 2% of corporate disbursements sent and just 1.3% of payments received,” PYMNTS wrote in March. “This is changing fast, however, as merchants and customers alike react to the growing demand for real-time payments.”

More recently, research by PYMNTS and The Clearing House has found that the real estate sector has been slow to adopt modernized payment methods wholesale. While nearly all sector businesses surveyed use digital payment methods such as ACH, hardly any real estate companies are sending or receiving real-time payments.

“This is particularly stark, given that nearly all manufacturing firms in our sample have made or received at least one real-time payment in the past year,” PYMNTS wrote last week. “Real estate firms hover around 1%, instead leading in cash use among the three industries.”

Among the reasons for avoiding real time were legacy IT challenges, cited by 62% of companies, and the cost involved, something mentioned by 56% of firms.