What are payouts and what are the most common uses cases? What segments benefit most of payouts?
Businesses need to pay money out to customers every day. This could be retailers issuing refunds, iGaming operators allowing customers to withdraw their winnings, wealth managers and online trading platforms allowing investors to access their earnings, or marketplaces paying out to sellers. There are lots of use cases for payouts but they all have one thing in common: customers expect instant payments.
What are the most common payout problems today?
The reality is that at the moment, customers are usually left waiting for their money. Systems for sending outgoing payments – for example through Bacs or card networks, are typically siloed and slow. The experience is fragmented, and funds can take days to settle — that’s if they don’t get lost completely.
It’s even worse when businesses, as part of their due diligence, need to verify a new customer’s payment details and identity before issuing a payout, stopping customers mid-flow and making the process even slower.
It can take up to 10 minutes for a customer to upload their bank statements for example and three more days for compliance teams to review and validate them. Other verification methods like micro-deposits can take a while to settle and cause extra work since businesses have to both make the transaction and refund or cancel it. Plus, micro-deposits can be cumbersome for customers to confirm. That’s not to mention what happens when IBAN or account details are entered incorrectly, and the customer has to start the whole process over again.
All of this has a negative impact on customer experience and loyalty. TrueLayer partnered with YouGov on some research in 2020 and we found that 2 in 3 online shoppers consider the time taken to receive a refund an important factor in their decision whether or not to shop with a merchant again.
There were similar findings in every industry we looked at: in the digital investing space, a third of investors would deposit more money if they could withdraw their money instantly. In iGaming: more than half (55%) of players would switch to a different iGaming provider if they were offered instant payouts.
So there is a real opportunity for businesses to drive customer loyalty and retention here, by improving the way they pay customers.
It can be very challenging for businesses and often involves managing multiple reports, scrolling through endless rows of data and manually tracking each payment. That leads to operational inefficiencies, input errors and plenty of complaints from customers whose payouts were never issued — or worse, lost. In our research with YouGov, we found that 1 in 3 online retailers we spoke to received frequent complaints about slow or lost refunds.
How is TrueLayer solving the payout issues?
Payouts from TrueLayer combines Open Banking account verification with the fastest payment rails. By verifying the account details before paying out, businesses can avoid failed or lost payments and reduce strain on customer support. By offering instant payouts, they can also build customer trust and encourage others to switch over to their service.
TrueLayer connects businesses to all major banks in the UK and across the EU through an API integration. With Open Banking based verification, we help businesses to carry out compliance checks more easily and monitor the status of payments for easy auditing.
Payouts serve any business that wants a scalable, automated payouts process that will improve their customer experience. In particular it’s been designed with the ecommerce, wealthtech and trading, and iGaming industries in mind. The most common use cases include real-time withdrawals, instant refunds, platform, and marketplace payouts.
Join the TrueLayer team and Cazoo Product Manager Sitong Wei to find out how to achieve automated payouts – and see them in action, with a demo from Cazoo (12 October, 3pm BST) Register now
Find out more and see how it works: https://truelayer.com/payouts
About Murtaza Bootwala
Murtaza Bootwala is Head of Product from TrueLayer, the global Open Banking platform that makes it easy for anyone to build better financial experiences. Murtaza is a product leader with over a decade of experience in product management, business development, operations and consulting, including five years with Amazon.
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