How Helcim Is Accelerating Merchant Funding

Canadian payments provider Helcim Inc. is bringing next-business-day funding of digital payment receipts to small and medium businesses in the United States and Canada free of charge. The service, called Faster Deposits, will significantly speed up merchant access to digital payment receipts by days, the processor says.

Most deposits take up to three business days and merchants are often charged 1% to 2% of the transaction total for expedited access to those funds, Helcim says.    

Helcim will route the funds through the FedNow and RTP networks in the U.S. and the Interac Instant network in Canada. Helcim expects to have the service fully rolled out by summer.

Launched in 2021 by the Interac POS network, Interac Instant is a real-time payment network that enables businesses to make payments to other businesses.

Bringing next-business-day payment capabilities to merchants is a step toward breaking down the “outdated vestiges of the one-size-fits-all card-payment paradigm,” Steve Mott, principal of consultancy BetterBuyDesign, says by email. The reason merchants have to wait days to access their funds from digital payment receipts is that processors hold back those funds to cover chargebacks, returns, reversals and fraud, according to Mott.

“That makes some sense—even today—for some high-risk merchants, which enable processors to make big fees on that business, despite the risks, but [less so] for mainstream merchants,” Mott says. “Why should tee-shirt merchants cross-subsidize porn and gaming merchants, as they do in the card ecosystem.” 

Mott says Helcim appears to realize good merchants deserve much bigger breaks that real-time payment networks can now provide, while the card networks “continue to work to keep all of their legacy ecosystem participants on their rails thriving no matter what.”

“That, once again, is why meaningful legal relief is necessary to help companies like Helcim make long-overdue innovations in stultified, archaic, and inequitable card payments.” Mott adds

For his part, Helcim chief executive and founder Nic Beique says in a statement the new service is not an add-on, but rather “a core part of Helcim’s mission to make running a business easier and more affordable.”