Paymentus Holdings, Inc. provides cloud-based bill payment technology and solutions.
The company delivers its next-generation product suite through a modern technology stack to more than 2,500 biller business and financial institution clients. The company’s platform was used by approximately 46 million consumers and businesses globally in December 2024 to pay their bills, make money movements, and engage with its clients. The company serves billers of all sizes that primarily provide non-discre...
Paymentus Holdings, Inc. provides cloud-based bill payment technology and solutions.
The company delivers its next-generation product suite through a modern technology stack to more than 2,500 biller business and financial institution clients. The company’s platform was used by approximately 46 million consumers and businesses globally in December 2024 to pay their bills, make money movements, and engage with its clients. The company serves billers of all sizes that primarily provide non-discretionary services across a variety of industry verticals, including utilities, financial services, insurance, government, telecommunications, real estate management, education, consumer finance, healthcare, and small business. The company also serves financial institutions by providing them with a modern platform that their customers use for bill payment, account-to-account transfers, and person-to-person transfers.
The company’s platform provides its clients with easy-to-use, flexible, and secure electronic bill payment experiences powered by an omni-channel payment infrastructure that allows consumers to pay their bills using their preferred payment type and channel. Because the company’s biller platform is developed on a single code base and leverages a Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS, infrastructure, it can rapidly deploy new features and tools to its entire biller base simultaneously. Through a single point of integration to the company’s billers’ core financial and operating systems, its mission-critical solutions provide its billers with a payments operating system that helps them collect revenue faster and more profitably, and empower their consumers with the information and transparency needed to control their finances.
The company extends its platform’s reach through its Instant Payment Network, or IPN. This is a proprietary network, consisting of tens of thousands of billers, that connects its integrated and intelligent billing, payment, and reconciliation capabilities with its IPN partners’ platforms. The company’s IPN enables its partners, which include leading consumer technology providers, retailers, and financial institutions, to access its next-generation electronic bill payment technology using the same integrated platform it provides directly to its billers. By being connected to its IPN, its IPN partners provide their consumers and businesses with the full capabilities of its next-generation product suite, including the ability to engage with and make payments to its large and growing base of billers. Those partners, in turn, expand the company’s platform’s reach to millions of additional consumers in the United States and globally.
The company addresses these inefficiencies through its cloud-native, integrated single-vendor solution. The company’s platform supports omni-channel and multi-dimensional electronic billing and payments across multiple commerce channels, including online, mobile, interactive voice response, or IVR, call center, chatbot, retail, and voice-based assistants. Since the company generally does not charge fees to billers in its core business for standard development or implementation, there is typically no minimum investment necessary for billers to achieve efficiencies from the use of its platform to replace some or all of their legacy bill payment systems or biller-direct solutions. The company simplifies how bills are paid and helps billers collect revenue faster and more profitably because its platform is:
Scalable: The enterprise-grade platform is capable of supporting transaction growth for billers and financial institutions of all sizes across numerous industry verticals.
Innovative and Learning Platform: Artificial intelligence, or AI, and machine learning, or ML, algorithms power an omni-channel, end-to-end solution that adapts to new technologies and continuously learns from transaction activity.
Flexible: The platform is accessible through an array of application program interfaces, or APIs, software development kits, iFrames, and fully hosted solutions that provide complete control over the user experience and real-time customer engagement experiences.
Customizable: Leveraging an advanced No Code Low Code (NCLC) framework, the company is able to efficiently deploy business-specific workflows, user experiences, and tailored analytics.
Configurable: The reconfigurable business logic allows the company to quickly implement new functionality required by new and existing billers as it drives additional innovative solutions to its platform and beyond.
Integrated: The company’s significant and broad library of integrations to core accounting and billing software systems, including customer information systems, or CIS (which are software systems used to efficiently manage customer processes and data, and often include bill pay, customer service, and forecasting and analytics tools), and enterprise resource planning, or ERP, systems (which are software systems used to collect, store, manage, and interpret data from many business activities, typically including accounting systems), as well as core financial institution processing platforms and certain digital banking providers, helps connect disparate systems across the electronic bill payment value chain.
Extensible: The platform is adaptable to new technologies and emerging payment channels, such as pay-by-text, AI-based virtual assistants, and social media payments.
Secure: The multi-layer intrusion detection and prevention system, multi-factor authentication, and encryption and tokenization are designed for trust and security of transaction activity and information.
The company’s robust platform attracts billers, financial institutions, and partners seeking to build stronger relationships with their consumers. Adding more billers, financial institutions, and partners extends its platform’s reach to more consumers. These consumers drive more transactions to its platform, which strengthens biller, financial institution, and partner retention, and in turn accelerates its organic growth.
The company relies on a diversified go-to-market strategy, including direct sales, software and strategic partnerships, resellers, and referral partners across a number of industry verticals, and its IPN. While the direct sales channel is an important part of the company’s business, it also relies on its software and strategic partners and resellers to deliver its solutions to its billers and financial institutions. The company’s software partners, such as Oracle, integrate its platform into their software products enabling it to power their bill payment capabilities. The company’s strategic partners, such as JPMorgan Chase, the U.S. Bank, and a major payroll solutions provider, refer new billers to its platform, and in many cases, it jointly sells to prospective customers with its strategic partners. Some of its strategic partners, particularly banks, also integrate its solutions into their platforms to provide an integrated bill presentment and omni-channel bill payment solution to their customers, and as such, they are also IPN partners.
The company’s IPN promotes more rapid adoption of its platform through an extensive partnership ecosystem with leading business networks, including:
Banking Partners: The company modernizes the bill payment infrastructure of banks and credit unions of all sizes, empowering their digital banking consumers with fast, secure, and omni-channel payment technology by seamlessly integrating its solution into their digital platforms.
eCommerce Partners: The company powers electronic bill payments through the mobile app and AI-assistant voice service of a leading global eCommerce retailer, enabling millions of its users to retrieve information about, and pay, their bills for all billers on its network.
PayPal: The company enables PayPal’s U.S. consumers to pay their bills directly from PayPal apps.
Other Partners: Other partners benefit from the company’s IPN in a variety of ways, such as enabling bill payment for consumers across the U.S. For example, the company enables Walmart's consumers to pay their bills either in-store at retail locations or online via Walmart's retail websites or mobile apps, and enables in-person cash payments at more than 90,000 retail locations in the Green Dot network.
Platform and Solutions
The company’s biller platform is purpose-built to transform the way billers get paid and engage with their consumers. The company’s AI-driven SaaS platform provides a single-vendor solution that enhances the bill payment ecosystem with new functionality and added transparency. The company’s single code base architecture maximizes the inherent flexibility, extensibility, and configurability of its solutions, which allows it to rapidly deploy its solutions to its billers.
The company’s platform for financial institutions reconnects the financial institutions to their customers by providing a frictionless, real-time financial hub where consumers can consolidate their financial obligations, pay bills, move money in real time, and deepen their understanding of their own financial position. Customers get a centralized viewpoint over all their money movement needs, and the financial institutions get insights into their customers’ behavior that can inform a meaningful evolution of the customer experience.
Single Point of Access
APIs: The company’s easy-to-use APIs enable billers, financial institutions, and partners to seamlessly access the entirety of its network through a single connection.
iFrames: This enables the company’s billers, financial institutions, and partners to exercise more control over the user experience by customizing the business logic to meet their specific requirements. Many of the company’s billers who use iFrames have in-house IT resources but use its infrastructure for payment processing and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, or PCI-DSS compliance.
Fully Hosted: The company also provides a fully hosted alternative for its billers. In this option, its hosted platform provides its billers the full power of its platform without incurring the cost of using their own IT resources.
Technology Solutions
Engagement: The company’s smart notifications and messaging tools enable billers to provide billing details to their consumers, such as account status, and directly communicate with them over secure channels. The company’s engagement products help billers and financial institutions facilitate timely and secure bill payments, while driving digital adoption and reducing cost to serve.
Presentment: Consumers are increasingly demanding omni-channel access to their bills through their preferred engagement channels. The company’s solution offers electronic bill presentment across numerous channels, including web, mobile, text, secure PDF, email, IVR, chatbot, social media, and through its IPN partners. The company’s electronic bill presentment products help billers maximize their reach to accelerate revenue realization and engage consumers more efficiently.
Empowerment: The company’s comprehensive suite of solutions empowers consumers and billers to customize, control, and enhance the bill payment experience. Consumers can control communication preferences, multi-lingual capabilities, self-directed payment scheduling, multi-account management, and dispute management. Billers are able to use automated case management and configurable reporting to quickly and comprehensively provide high-quality customer service.
Payment: The company’s secure and comprehensive omni-channel payment platform supports traditional and emerging payment technologies across multiple currencies and languages. The company’s platform supports electronic bill payments using credit, debit, ACH, and digital wallets across a variety of payment channels, including web, mobile, IVR, text, secure PDF, chatbot, agent-assisted (call center), in-person, the AI-assistant voice service of a leading global eCommerce retailer, in Walmart, and locations in the Green Dot network, and through alternative payment rails, such as PayPal. The company supports one-time payments, as well as future-dated, recurring, and payment plan transactions.
Intelligence: Electronic bill payment transactions contain a rich volume of consumer and behavioral data that can improve the bill payment experience for billers and consumers. The company’s AI-powered analytics engine produces data-driven insights on consumer preferences, channel usage, bill lifecycles, messaging effectiveness, and paper suppression, and can be used by billers to improve the consumer experience. For example, the company’s analytics engine can analyze frequently asked questions to call centers and enable billers to quickly predict answers to those questions in the future, creating a better consumer experience with reduced cost to serve for the biller.
Technology Architecture
Single Code Base: The company’s extensible, cloud-based payments platform was built from the ground up on a single code base with no versioning, which enables rapid deployment of new features and tools in part because there is no need to manage and reconcile separate versions of its software code. This flexibility empowers billers, financial institutions, and partners across the company’s network to offer their consumers the strength of its platform without paying it development or implementation fees.
AI / ML: The company’s biller platform uses AI and ML algorithms to increase efficiency and extract data-driven insights from transactions and interactions between consumers, billers, partners, and its platform. These algorithms are embedded within, and enhance, each of its technology solutions to deliver a more intelligent and predictive consumer experience.
Platform Features
The electronic bill payment process involves more than just a payment. It requires an end-to-end engagement mechanism that facilitates communication and payment between billers, partners, and consumers to ensure timely and transparent payment through a frictionless consumer experience. Various features of the company’s platform support this:
Consumer Engagement: The company enables its billers to improve their consumer engagement with targeted communications, such as smart notifications, broadcast messaging, inbound and outbound communications, and campaign management, all of which are managed by its communications management tools. The company’s engagement modules allow billers to communicate with consumers based on desired characteristics, such as regional location, due date, account status (such as late payment), or custom logic. The company’s billers can also communicate new offerings, incentives for payment, and new and advanced payment types and methods. In 2024, the company’s billers sent hundreds of millions of emails and text messages and had millions of IVR calls using its communications modules.
Bill Presentment: Billers can present electronic bills and balance amounts through the biller’s own mobile app, text, secure PDFs, IVR, and chatbots, or via alternative channels, such as digital wallets, the AI-assistant voice service of a leading global eCommerce retailer, PayPal’s bill pay app, social media, and its other IPN partners.
Consumer and Biller Employee Empowerment: The company enables billers and financial institutions to empower both their consumers and employees, which significantly increases consumer satisfaction and on-time bill payment rates for many of its billers. Billers and financial institutions are able to empower consumers with an array of choices: communications preferences – consumers can choose email, text, phone, portal, or otherwise; language preferences – consumers can select their preferred language for receiving billing information and interact via IVR; payment scheduling and type – consumers can schedule payments at specific times and use specific payment types to best suit their needs; and multi-account management – consumers can manage multiple accounts with a single provider in one place.
The company offers complementary features to its biller’s employees, including tools for automated case management, configurable reporting, and ‘see what they see’ where the customer service employees can see exactly what the consumer sees to quickly resolve problems.
The company has also made significant investments in research and development, including in an automated, streamlined onboarding experience to help its billers and financial institutions go live faster, self-service features to help billers quickly adapt to consumer needs, and ongoing enhancements to improve privacy and security.
Payment Types: The company has significantly invested in innovative payment types to provide billers a seamless, omni-channel suite of tools.
These features are seamlessly integrated with the company’s engagement and empowerment tools to provide a superior consumer, biller, and financial institution experience. The company’s platform supports a variety of payment types, including ACH and eCheck, debit card, credit card, and emerging payment types.
Emerging payment types include PayPal, Venmo, PayPal Credit, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Amazon Pay. These payment types are gaining increasing traction with consumers, and as a result, are viewed as increasingly important by billers and financial institutions.
Payment Channels: The company’s platform offers an omni-channel payment infrastructure, which means that it enables bill payments through all the traditional payment channels that billers and consumers expect, as well as many emerging payment channels. These include web portal, mobile, IVR, text, secure PDF, chatbot, agent-assisted (call center), in-person, the AI-assistant voice service of a leading global eCommerce retailer, in Walmart stores, and other Green Dot network locations, and through alternative payment rails, such as PayPal. Key features and examples of several of these channels are described and illustrated.
Chatbot: The company enables billers to engage with consumers through an automated, AI-powered interface that constantly improves the customer service experience through data-driven insights.
PayPal App: Leveraging the company’s APIs, PayPal’s U.S. consumers can pay their bills directly from PayPal.
Secure Service: The company’s patented Secure Service feature enables billers to accept payments over the phone while minimizing PCI-DSS compliance risk. Many billers avoid accepting payment information over the phone by directing consumers to websites or automated phone systems, which creates poor experiences and results in abandoned payments. The company’s Secure Service allows the biller’s employee and the consumer to remain connected throughout the process while removing the biller’s employee from the PCI-DSS scope by concealing payment details. As a result, the transaction is able to be completed securely, and the consumer can be returned to the same employee directly on completion.
AI-assistant Voice Service: The company powers bill payments for the AI-assistant voice service of a leading global eCommerce retailer, enabling millions of its users to retrieve information about, and pay, their bills for all billers on its network using voice commands.
Text-based: Pay by text leverages the company’s text-based bill presentment technology for a text payment authorization, which then uses stored payment types in the consumer’s account.
IVR: Interactive voice response is a powerful tool to make payments and check balances, and is available in multi-lingual options.
Agent-assisted Call Center Payments: The company’s agent-assisted call center capability enables a biller to support and assist their consumers with bill payments and other related issues.
Portal: The company’s bill payment portal enables billers to provide advanced usage and consumption data to their consumers, such as power use by day.
In-person Payments: The company also powers in-person payments, which include payments at kiosks or a counter for point-of-sale transactions. This is particularly appealing for many billers who may have a local customer service center.
Payment Timing: The company supports an array of timing alternatives including one-time guest payments, recurring payments, future-dated payments, multiple payments, and payment plans.
Network
The company uses the power of this network to enhance the number of product features each biller uses to promote transaction growth. The company’s portfolio data shows that payment adoption is highly correlated to feature utilization.
Billers
The company’s innovative technology platform empowers billers to offer electronic bill payment acceptance across multiple payment types, engage with their consumers, and streamline their business operations efficiently and cost-effectively. The company attracts billers to its platform because its platform modernizes their payment infrastructure and helps them collect revenue faster and more profitably. The company’s platform is capable of posting payments directly to billers’ systems in real time, which simplifies revenue operations and strengthens the relationship it has with billers.
Partners
As the company’s biller base expands, it attracts market-leading software, strategic, and IPN partners that use its platform to power bill payment experiences within their ecosystems. The company’s innovative platform facilitates a modern bill presentment, consumer engagement, and bill payment experience for its partners’ customers, regardless of partner type.
Software Partners: The company’s software partners include large third-party technology providers, such as Oracle, which integrate its platform into their software suites to power bill payments for their customers and refer billers and financial institutions to it. For example, ERP providers integrate its platform into their own suite of solutions to offer a comprehensive solution set that enhances their ERP software with bill presentment, consumer engagement, and bill payment capabilities. In certain cases, the company has revenue sharing arrangements with its software partners based on its transaction fees. In other cases, rather than a revenue sharing arrangement, the company and its software partner mutually benefit from the partnership, as the software partner can offer a more comprehensive solution and stronger value proposition to their customers, and it receives broader reach to potential billers and consumers, an efficient biller acquisition channel, and stronger biller retention from an integrated solution.
Strategic Partners: Similar to the company’s software providers, its strategic partners refer billers to it and, in many cases, integrate its solutions into their platforms. The company’s strategic partners, including JPMorgan Chase, the U.S. Bank, and a major payroll solutions provider, work with it to offer bill presentment, consumer engagement, and bill payment capabilities to their customers, which are billers. For example, a large commercial bank has many business clients who seek to improve and streamline the bill presentment and bill payment experience for their consumers. In that case, the large commercial bank partners with the company to sell a joint solution. In other cases, the commercial bank may prefer to sell a white-labeled solution, which it obtains from the company. Both co-sale and white-label arrangements typically involve revenue sharing agreements with the strategic partner based on the transaction fees the company receives.
IPN Partners: The company’s IPN partners work with it to gain access to broader biller networks and provide their consumers with innovative technology to streamline bill payments. The company’s IPN partners include PayPal, for which it powers bill payment capabilities, a leading global eCommerce retailer, through which it offers electronic bill presentment and payment via its AI-assistant voice service and mobile app, Walmart, for which it enhances in-person bill payment capability at Walmart Money Centers, and Green Dot, to enable in-person cash payments at more than 90,000 retail locations in the Green Dot network. Unlike software and strategic partners, IPN partners typically have direct interactions with consumers and leverage its platform to connect to its biller network. Through this connection, consumers can initiate bill payments through its IPN partners, which the company routes to the billers. There are many types of IPN partners, including consumer networks, retailers, banks, and financial institutions. The company offers consumer networks and retailers increased engagement with consumers by enabling streamlined bill presentment and payment experiences for an array of billers through their networks. The company similarly offers banks and financial institutions increased engagement with their retail clients. For IPN partners, the company will typically receive a fee per transaction processed through its platform, and in some cases, it pays a referral fee to IPN partners.
Multiple Roles for Partners: Notably, partners may fit into multiple categories, particularly banks and financial institutions. For example, a bank can be a biller, a strategic partner, and an IPN partner. As a biller, the bank generates bills, such as mortgage and credit card statements. As a strategic partner, the same bank uses the company’s platform to power an omni-channel bill payment experience for a commercial customer of the bank. In this way, that commercial customer becomes a new biller for its network. Finally, as an IPN partner, the same bank leverages its IPN network to enable a more robust bill payment experience for its business customers and consumers by, for example, enabling its business customers and those businesses’ consumers to pay bills using alternative payment channels, such as PayPal. For clarity, financial institutions may also be customers where the financial institution uses the company’s platform to provide bill payment and other money movement services directly to consumers and businesses.
Growth Strategies
The company’s strategies are to continue to win new billers, financial institutions, and partners; grow with existing billers, financial institutions, and partners; expand into new channels and industry verticals; build new products; leverage its platform to expand internationally; and pursue selective strategic acquisitions.
Go-to-Market Strategy
The company employs a diversified go-to-market strategy that leverages targeted marketing efforts, a direct sales team, and relationships with technology partners and resellers as it seeks to acquire billers and financial institutions in an efficient manner. The company’s marketing strategy targets prospective billers and financial institutions through industry- and role-based marketing efforts at trade shows and industry events, direct marketing, and social media programs. The company also leverages partnerships and referral relationships of various types across a number of industry verticals.
The company’s direct sales team is responsible for outbound lead generation, driving new business, and helping to manage account relationships and renewals. The company’s sales team also maintains close relationships with existing billers and financial institutions and acts as an advisor to each biller to help identify and understand their specific needs, challenges, goals, and opportunities.
The company also leverages strong relationships with its partners to extend the reach of its platform and receive new biller referrals. The company’s software partners, including Oracle, integrate its platform into their software products, enabling it to power their bill payment capabilities for their consumers. The company’s strategic partners, including JPMorgan Chase, the U.S. Bank, and a major payroll solutions provider, also refer new billers to its platform. The company’s software is regularly integrated with its software partners’ offerings and with the software suites of other market-leading software providers commonly used by its billers, including SAP and Guidewire, in each case to power electronic bill payment functions for its billers and their consumers.
The company benefits from the significant reach of its IPN. Through partnerships with PayPal, a leading global eCommerce retailer, and financial institution partners, its platform reaches millions of consumers. Jointly delivering its platform with its software and strategic partners provides consistency of approach and a high-quality experience for billers, financial institutions, partners, and consumers.
Intellectual Property
As of December 31, 2024, the company held 29 issued U.S. patents and one issued Canadian patent related to its proprietary technologies. As of December 31, 2024, the company also had four published and two unpublished pending U.S. patent applications, and three pending patent applications in each of Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Europe, India, Japan, Mexico, and South Korea. If the company’s currently issued patents are maintained until the end of their terms, they will expire between 2025 and 2042. The expiration of these patents is not reasonably likely to have a material adverse effect on its business, financial condition, or results of operations. In addition, as of December 31, 2024, the company owned 15 registered U.S. trademarks and one registered trademark in each of the European Union, India, Japan, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. The company also held five allowed and four pending trademark applications in the U.S., and one pending trademark application in Canada.
Government Regulations
The company and its handling of data are subject to a variety of laws, rules, and regulations relating to privacy, data protection, and information security, including regulation by various governmental authorities, such as the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, and various state, local, and foreign agencies.
Because the company processes individually identifiable protected health information in certain cases, it is also subject to certain obligations under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, or HIPAA, as amended by the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act of 2009, or HITECH, as well as certain state laws and related contractual obligations.
The company is also subject to the rules and standards of Visa, Mastercard, American Express, the National Automated Clearinghouse Association, or NACHA, and INTERAC, a Canadian interbank network, and other payment networks and their participants.
Further, the company and its billers, financial institutions, and partners are subject to a variety of the U.S. state and federal laws, rules, and regulations related to telemarketing, recording, and monitoring of communications, such as the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, or TCPA, the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act, or CAN-SPAM Act, and others, because the company’s platform enables its billers and partners to communicate directly with their consumers, including via e-mail, text messages, and calls, and also enables recording and monitoring of calls between its billers, financial institutions, and partners and their consumers for training and quality assurance purposes.
The banks the company partners with are under growing pressure to increase scrutiny and oversight of their fintech customers, resulting in increasing pressure on it by its bank partners to enhance its AML/BSA compliance and sanctions screening controls.
In Canada, the company has determined it is subject to the Retail Payments Activity Act as a Payment Service Provider and has registered as such with the Bank of Canada, and as a Money Service Business with FINTRAC.
History
Paymentus Holdings, Inc. was founded in 2004. The company was incorporated in 2011.
