At a time when cash flow management has never been so integral for SME businesses, Mastercard and AptPay have come together for the integration of Mastercard Send into the AptPay platform.
The collaboration means that companies using the AptPay platform will be able to send digital payments seamlessly and securely in near real-time through bank accounts, prepaid cards or digital wallets.
Sue Hutchison, senior vice president of Product, Digital and New Payments at Mastercard in Canada commented: “COVID-19 has amplified the need for businesses to digitize and automate their payment processes, to free cash flow and eliminate the friction caused by handling cheques With Mastercard Send, businesses and consumers can expect to receive funds directly, securely and in near real-time.”
The partnership can also enhance the fight against fraud, increasing transparency of payment information.
Suganthan Vishnu Krisnarajah, CEO of AptPay added on the partnership: “Over the last few years, digital transformation and faster payments have been top priorities for many industries. COVID-19 has created the perfect storm, highlighting the problems caused by not having these priorities in place. AptPay’s Digital Payment Hub enables companies to execute on these priorities and weather the storm.
“Using our APIs, companies can easily implement Mastercard Send to process payouts where the end to end process is much faster than legacy payment types. Customers can also rely on AptPay’s compliance services to ensure transactions are safe and secure, and meet the compliance needs for their industry.”
As well as this, in Canada, more than 70% of small and medium enterprises and nearly 60% of large corporations still use cheques to pay for business expenses.
Using cheques, however, comes with costly hurdles and long timelines due to numerous manual processes, such as printing, mailing, reconciling information and visiting bank branches. Payments are also cleared in batches, which can take days to settle.
