BNY Mellon Targets Disbursement Desire With Payment Platform Vaia

BNY Mellon

Banking giant BNY Mellon has debuted Vaia, an aggregated payment platform that lets institutions in the U.S. meet a growing demand for faster digital disbursement payment options.

By integrating with BNY Mellon, institutions can provide payees with access to a range of payment choices, including real-time payments via RTP, same-day ACH, tokenized payments with Zelle, and debit cards, the bank said in a Monday (Oct. 24) news release.

BNY Mellon says Vaia can reduce the time and resources required for businesses to link up with all available payment rails.

“End customers want greater choice in how they are paid, but with so many digital payment options emerging, businesses are struggling to stay up to date with, and connected to, the latest capabilities,” says Jennifer Barker, CEO of Treasury Services at BNY Mellon.

The new platform was built in collaboration with Verituity, a cloud-based payments solution that became part of the BNY Mellon accelerator program earlier this year.

Learn more: 170 Million US Consumers Received At Least One Disbursement in Past Year

As PYMNTS noted last month in the Disbursements Satisfaction report, instant payouts have a greenfield opportunity to help transform and speed up disbursements.

The report — done in collaboration with Ingo Money — found that 170 million American consumers received at least one disbursement in the past year. Those disbursements span Social Security payments, insurance claim payments, and other transactions.

Getting those funds to consumers more speedily can be a valuable method of battling inflation (while also increasing savings). The awareness of instant payments is high as well. About half of U.S. consumers who receive disbursements would opt to receive them through instant payment rails if they could.

Yet only 17% of the consumers who received disbursements last year did so across instant rails, which means there is significant room for a wider embrace of those options.

Get the report: Disbursements Satisfaction Report 2022

The desire for instant disbursements spans all demographics, and overall, the number of consumers who wish to receive those disbursements has been on the upswing, from under 40% two years ago to a recent reading of more than 47%. The interest is felt most sharply by millennials and bridge millennials, at upwards of 65% across those groups.