Payveris Looks To Take On P2P Heavyweights With A Real-time P2P Payment Option

The hotly competitive peer-to-peer payments market got even more crowded Tuesday with the entry of Payveris LLC, a digital money-movement platform provider.

The new service, which Cromwell, Conn.-based Payveris expects will compete with the P2P stalwarts Zelle, Venmo, and Cash App, will enable real-time P2P payments over the debit card rails, which gives the new service access to about 90% of the financial institutions in the United States, the company says. 

A customer of a financial institution using Payveris’s MoveMoney Platform can send a P2P payment to anyone in the United States with a bank or credit union account by entering the recipient’s mobile-phone number or email address.

Financial institutions can offer the service as a standalone payment option or integrate Payveris’ P2P option into their online and mobile-banking and bill-payment applications using the company’s application programming interface, software developer kit widget, or single sign-on authentication integration. The latter allows users to log in with a single ID and password to multiple, related, yet independent, software applications. 

In addition to P2P payments, consumers can also use the service to pay businesses, such as landlords or tradesmen. 

With Zelle, which is operated by Early Warning Services LLC, garnering support from large financial institutions, including those that own Early Warning, Payveris is targeting its P2P service at small and mid-size banks and credit unions. To make its service attractive, Payveris is pricing it 30% to 40% under what Zelle charges financial institutions, says Marcell King, chief innovation officer for Payveris, without going into details. 

“P2P is now table stakes for financial institutions, but what we’ve found is that P2P recipients don’t care what P2P service they receive funds through, so we are making our P2P service a more affordable option for financial institutions than Zelle,” King says. “By using the debit card rails, we have also created a lighter-weight connection [to the service].”

KeyPoint Credit Union, a client of 10-year-old Payveris since 2017 and one of the first financial institutions to roll out Payveris’s real-time P2P service, says it opted for the service because it was not a heavy lift to install. 

“We have [Payveris’s] software already installed and this was just an addition to our existing relationship,” Victor Smilgys, vice president of Digital Services at KeyPoint Credit Union says by email.  

P2P adoption is accelerating across consumer demographics, with 70% of U.S. consumers using the service in 2020, up from 57% in 2017, according to Mercator Advisory Group.