How streamlined payments processes and comprehensive data analytics helped REPAY offer best-in-class products

Long gone are the days when a payment could only be cash passing from hand to hand, a check arriving on your doorstep, or a wire transfer appearing in your bank account. Today there are many more ways to pay and receive payment––faster, safer, more efficient, and more trackable means for businesses and individuals alike. ABC News recently reported that companies that facilitate peer-to-peer payment services now handle an estimated $1 trillion in payments annually. Unfortunately, alongside this expansion of payments methodology, frauds and scams have proliferated as usage climbs. Payment technology companies like REPAY are looking for ways to mitigate fraud for their customers. Read on to learn what REPAY has done to address these evolving market forces.

About financial technology company REPAY

REPAY is a financial technology company providing vendor payment automation and payment security tools to its vendors. The REPAY client base includes companies from a wide range of industries. These businesses have complex sets of needs. REPAY’s client base includes companies from the following industries:

• Automotive
• Business to business (B2B)
• Education
• Field services
• Financial institutions
• Government/municipalities
• Healthcare
• HOA management
• Hospitality
• Media and political ad agencies

“Our clients typically have multiple systems that they need to interact with just to do their job on a daily basis,” says Darin Horrocks, EVP of Business Payments for REPAY. REPAY provides companies with payment tools through their integrated vendor payment automation solution. This allows companies to access REPAY payment services within the ERP or accounting system with which they’re familiar. “One of the things WEX has helped us to accomplish is providing virtual cards to our clients as part of our AP payment offering.” WEX provided application programming interfaces (APIs) to REPAY, allowing them to offer an embedded financial solution to their clients.

Common challenges fintech companies face today

In today’s payments world, fraud is one of the major bogeymen with which fintech companies have to contend. Horrocks describes the widespread fraud crisis that has struck the industry recently: “One of the market forces that we’re facing today in our industry is the explosion of payment fraud. As systems have become more complex, as technology has advanced, the bad actors have also advanced. They’re becoming more sophisticated in their attacks, and it’s been increasingly important and a significant concern of our clients to have greater protection of their data.” 

Horrocks explains how WEX helped REPAY mitigate fraud through WEX’s virtual card services. “The virtual card provides greater protections when compared with other payment methods.”

Expanding need for digital payments in the marketplace

Predictably, there has been an increased demand for digital payments in recent years. “I’ve been in this industry for 27 years, and I’ve never seen the demand for digital payments as it is now. And that requires us to be very creative and innovative in our solutions.” Horrocks describes this demand as coming both from REPAY’s vendors as well as from their clients. As Horrocks made business decisions to address this increase in demand, he turned to WEX to help REPAY rise to the occasion. “WEX has helped us respond to that demand by providing us with the necessary technology and tools to add digital and virtual credit card solutions to the package we’re providing to our clients.” The partnership WEX and REPAY have formed over the years has given Horrocks the wherewithal to make this transition with ease. “WEX is a trusted partner. We are truly coming together with market solutions to meet this demand.” 

Fintech solutions that bring results

When REPAY partnered with WEX it was important for them to be able to show that the investment they’d made led to positive financial results. “With REPAY being a publicly traded company, there’s a huge demand for financial results, and those demands can be grueling. WEX has been the partner that’s helped us the most as we’ve progressed towards achieving the financial results that we’ve been able to do over the last year,” Horrocks says.

The value in building a seamless partnership with your payments technology provider 

In today’s complicated financial technology environment, finding a trusted and attentive payments technology partner who can cover all your payments technology needs can be the difference between sinking or swimming. Horrocks found that partnership with WEX. “Solving problems is a key part of my relationship with WEX, and I really look at WEX as an extension of who we are as REPAY. I work with the team at WEX as if they are REPAY.”

Find a partner offering comprehensive customer onboarding solutions 

One of the points of friction Horrocks experienced in the industry was the time it took to ensure a customer’s payments systems were fully integrated with REPAY’s. He wanted a payments provider who could help REPAY overhaul and modernize their onboarding program. 

Finding a trusted partner who will sit down with you, analyze your process, and help you innovate to build efficiencies is key when looking to upgrade how you onboard your customers. “Working with WEX and outlining all the steps that we need to take for underwriting, onboarding, and everything we must do to engage with a customer, we’ve been able to achieve that goal of onboarding clients quickly and getting them started quickly. For example, we will talk to a client on a Monday and we can say ‘By Thursday we can be processing payments for you.’ And as you can imagine, that is difficult to achieve.” Part of what WEX offers to its payments customers is a comprehensive supplier onboarding program from soup to nuts at no additional cost to WEX customers. REPAY’s partnership with WEX allowed them to offer fast, effective onboarding for their clients.

Providing a turnkey total pay system through APIs

In this era of rapid technological transformation, clients expect businesses to offer perfect operating systems with zero clunky overlaps and virtually no duplication of manpower. REPAY must rise to meet this expectation. Horrocks says, “I’ve been in the corporate payments industry since the mid-nineties, and one of the things that I had heard from literally hundreds of customers was that it was great that we were able to solve for a portion of their payments, but they really wanted a turnkey payment solution for all of their payments.” This was when Horrocks began his search for the perfect partner.

“In order to solve this knotty problem, I needed a virtual card provider. And so I sought out what I knew to be a leader in that industry, and subsequently partnered with WEX to issue our virtual card services as part of our vendor payment automation platform. WEX has helped us solve for this through the use of their APIs.”

APIs allow virtual card technology to connect with a variety of methods of payment seamlessly. They accommodate whatever particular form of payment customers and vendors are expecting to be able to use. “REPAY uses WEX as our primary issuer of virtual credit card services. We now connect to both the TI check as well as the WEX Encompass APIs to deliver those virtual card services as part of our platform. The WEX virtual card that we issue as part of that total pay services offers fast, secure payment. This payment method is more secure than Automated Clearing House (ACH) or check. WEX virtual cards provide safe, secure payments to vendors with similar speed, with more security, and with greater peace of mind than ACH.”

Through a partnership with a trusted payments technology partner, REPAY was able to solve for market forces and meet the financial demands placed on it by virtue of its public company status. 

Learn more about how WEX payment solutions can be tailored to your business, so you can accelerate and streamline operations while creating lasting growth and success for your organization.

For more insights and updates on the corporate payments, check out:

• Your guide to virtual card rebates
• Current trends in finance
• Accounts payables: Terms you need to know

Resources:
ABC News