Consumers want payment experiences that aren’t disruptive. Where users were once redirected to slow-loading dedicated payment sites, they now expect payments to seamlessly flow through the interfaces they’re already using. This requires lenders and other financial services companies to embrace embedded payments — which integrate payment capabilities into pre-existing platforms.
Usio helps companies provide embedded payments across lending, SaaS, and fintech, and supports several use cases in each vertical. For example, in lending, Usio can facilitate personal and business loans, merchant cash advances, Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) capabilities, and financing at the point of sale.
Usio resonated with its target market and scaled quickly. This caused some challenges, and this is where TabaPay came in.
The Challenge: Scaling Lending and Debit While Managing Risk
As Usio expanded into new use cases, it faced a set of connected pressures:
- Customers wanted additional debit rails to support more types of cards.
- The risk of fraud grew, but visibility into potential risks and fraud was suboptimal.
- The company found its sponsor bank generated friction when onboarding customers.
- Clients needed to accelerate onboarding times while maintaining compliance.
- Usio’s customers required very high auth rates and uptime.
- The total cost of payments grew as Usio’s business grew.
To overcome these challenges, Usio needed a partner who could both solve immediate challenges and facilitate long-term innovation.
The Solution: TabaPay as Payment Processor
Usio’s industry partners recommended TabaPay to help the company scale its money movement. As Usio discovered, TabaPay had a reputation for reliable bi-directional money movement that would help them improve both payouts (such as loan disbursements) and pay-ins (like debt repayment).
With TabaPay, Usio strengthened its capabilities across several core areas:
- Leveraging alternative debit rails: Through TabaPay, Usio could leverage multiple debit paths, including Visa, Mastercard, and regional ATM debit networks. More rails meant more options for routing transactions, which helped Usio optimize costs and improve resiliency.
- Fraud mitigation and enhanced monitoring: TabaPay enabled real-time transaction monitoring, which allowed Usio to proactively detect and intercept fraud.
- Migrating to a new sponsor bank: With TabaPay’s help, Usio was able to migrate to a new sponsor bank who was able to better support their use cases without disrupting customer operations, which in turn helped with onboarding times.
- Support for more types of payments: Usio worked with TabaPay to expand its support for new payment models, including debit-only and debit-to-credit funding models, as well as real-time payments.
Behind-the-Scenes: Usio Gains a Reliable Partner
Particularly in use cases like lending, reliability is key. Customers need their money on time, and they need to be able to repay their debts on time. With TabaPay’s help, we can disburse loans and accept repayments with confidence — and that’s only scratching the surface of what we can do.
– Julie Villarreal, Vice President of Payment Acceptance at Usio.
Usio greatly values TabaPay’s day-to-day engagement with Usio’s questions and requests for help. Clear escalation paths and rapid response ensure that Usio gets help right when it’s needed.
“Tabapay’s communication is fast, transparent, and solution-oriented,” said Julie Villarreal, vice president of payment acceptance at Usio. “They make us feel much more confident that we can solve any issues or disruptions that arise.”
The relationship between TabaPay and Usio goes beyond just problem-solving. The two firms constantly discuss how best to future-proof Usio’s operations, ensuring that they can readily adapt to any change that affects the embedded payments industry.
The Results: Resiliency, Performance, and Scale Across Verticals
With TabaPay’s help, Usio serves a diverse customer base across lending, government, retail, and subscription services. While each client has unique volumes, risk profiles, funding requirements, and billing configurations, Usio offers each client a highly optimized implementation.
Since working with TabaPay, Usio has achieved:
- Cost optimization
- More options for consumers to pay
- Improved onboarding efficiency and faster time to market for new programs
- Increased network redundancy and routing flexibility
- Improved system availability and higher uptime
- Strong authorization performance across debit networks
- Reduced fraud rates
The Takeaway
When companies want to implement embedded finance, they look for flexibility (so they can meet the needs of as many customers as possible), and reliability (so they can build customer trust). With TabaPay’s help, Usio provided both.
