Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
Although the Covid-19 pandemic spurred many consumers to embrace digital payments, the need for cash acceptance— especially among merchants and lenders that service unbanked consumers—remains strong. To help fill that need, KyckGlobal Inc. on Tuesday announced a deal with Advanced Business Computers of America Inc. (ABCoA) to enable used-car dealers in ABCoA’s network to accept cash payments at more than 35,000 merchant locations in the United States through ABCoA’s Deal Pack platform.
Jacksonville, Fla.-based ABCoA is a provider of software for the subprime automotive and finance industries.
The deal was driven primarily by demand from dealerships looking to expand cash-payment endpoints without having to establish their own network for retail acceptance, says KyckGlobal chief executive and founder Ashish Bahl. Consumers can make cash payments toward their car loans at such merchants as Walmart, Kroger, Fred Meyer, CVS Pharmacy, and Ace Cash Express.
“While ABCoA had a need for this type of product, the dealers helped drive the need because it is a better model for them and alleviates the need for them to establish physical locations to accept payments by leveraging other merchants’ infrastructure,” Bahl says.
The deal with Atlanta-based KyckGlobal expands ABCoA’s number of cash- acceptance endpoints to more than 80,000 locations in the United States. “With customers in every state, we believe this partnership compliments Deal Pack’s omnichannel payment processing services—digital, physical, and contactless— ultimately improving collections and customer loyalty,” ABCoA president Jonathan Hedy says in a prepared statement.
For KyckGlobal, the deal builds off an earlier move to enable consumers to make rent payments in cash through a network of merchants. “Forty percent of rent payments in the U.S. are still paid in cash,” says Bahl. “We saw an opportunity for cash rent payments in which money can be collected at a merchant location and sent to the landlord via an aggregator, and from that we saw [a similar] opportunity for used-car loans.”
In addition to facilitating cash payments, KyckGlobal also supports automated clearing house payments and push-to-card and push-to-account payments through Visa Direct. Founded in 2018 with the intent of enabling payments to gig workers via the ACH and Visa Direct, the company pivoted to add cash payments once the pandemic hit.
“We saw an opportunity to help fill a niche for consumers that are not fully digital when it comes to paying cash-in and receiving cash-out through loans or other means,” says Bahl. “Between our relationship with Visa Direct and MoneyGram, we can reach 99% of banked an unbanked consumers worldwide.”
In 2020, KyckGlobal teamed with Cambridge Global Payments, a unit of business-to-business payments processor Fleetcor Technologies Inc., to support wire transfers and cross-border ACH payments from the United States to more than 200 countries.
