Fiserv has added application programming interfaces for businesses to send disbursements and paychecks to consumers via PayPal and Venmo.
As they age, millennials are the fastest-growing group of recipients of corporate disbursements for insurance claims, health care and gig work, according to Fiserv.
But urgent pandemic-related needs have also intensified millennials’ need to access funds from channels other than ACH and debit cards, said John Beisner, Fiserv’s vice president of global digital commerce.
“We added Venmo specifically because tens of millions of people are routinely using the app and its features are becoming more banklike,” Beisner said. He noted that users can store funds in PayPal and Venmo accounts, making it easier for consumers to immediately spend disbursement money.
PayPal has wide acceptance online, and a growing number of merchants now also accept PayPal and Venmo at the point of sale and through QR codes on mobile devices. Venmo has 76 million active consumer accounts. PayPal and Venmo together account for about 400 million active accounts, according to PayPal.
State Farm and Lyft are among corporations contemplating whether they too should add Venmo and PayPal as options for customers to receive disbursements, Beisner said.
Fiserv formed a partnership with State Farm earlier this year enabling the Bloomington, Illinois-based insurer to send payouts from claims directly to consumers’ bank accounts.
Several online gambling and gaming companies have also expressed interest in using Fiserv to deliver payouts via PayPal and Venmo, Beisner said.
“Many of our corporate clients want more ways to push payments out to their customers, but they don’t want to have to build a new payment stack to do it,” he said.
Fiserv, based in Brookfield, Wisconsin, has created an approach for corporations to add PayPal or Venmo as payout options within their mobile apps. Disbursement recipients would enter their mobile phone number — which typically serves as the PayPal or Venmo account number — to request funds, he said.
“With these digital payments, a consumer can complete an insurance claim and have their money inside of about a quarter of an hour, versus about two weeks to get a check,” Beisner said.
Fiserv is not yet offering Zelle as a corporate disbursement option, he said.
Fiserv’s range of corporate disbursement products is housed within Carat, a global commerce hub that the financial services technology firm unveiled in November 2020.
