Lloyds Bank Unveils PayMe Payments Service for Businesses

Lloyds Bank has debuted a service that lets businesses make one-off payments within minutes.

“Through Lloyds Bank PayMe, businesses do not have to gather or manage account information or register one-off suppliers,” the U.K. lender said in a Monday (April 17) news release.

“Once the payment is approved, companies can simply send a secure link to the beneficiary — via a range of ways including email, SMS or QR code — who then inputs their account information. After being reviewed and verified, the payment is sent directly to the beneficiary.”

According to the release, businesses can use PayMe for things like one-time vendor payments, goodwill gestures, paying compensation, issuing refunds and hardship payments, covering volunteer expenses, and grant payments.

Lloyds says the service lets payees avoid the three-day wait to get funds, while businesses can reduce their check issuance and manual processes, and the costs associated with them.

“We’ve developed this service to support our clients in driving efficiencies in their business while further enhancing the customer experience they’re providing,” said Stephen Everett, the bank’s managing director of cash management and payments.

“Payment solutions in the market today generally use Bacs for a three-day settlement or the need to send a physical check. Through Lloyds Bank PayMe, companies can send funds to customers, clients, or suppliers easily and within minutes, and no need to capture and store account details for one-off payments.”

The launch of PayMe comes as banks are grappling with the operational and technical challenges that come with instituting real-time payment systems, as Dave Scola, U.S. CEO for Form3, told PYMNTS in an interview earlier this month.

Banks have been realizing the limits of their proprietary solutions and legacy systems that have been constructed over decades, Scola said. These older technologies had been sufficient to handle payments functions until the last few years.

“But now bank clients are demanding more flexibility and higher levels of services,” he said. “The banks want to address those demands but are now looking at the hulking dinosaurs of their legacy platforms and trying to figure out how they can accommodate those demands.”

The rise of real-time payments — in which transactions are processed in a matter of seconds, 24/7 — has only underscored the urgency of the issue, Scola added.

The launch of PayMe comes a little less than two weeks after Lloyds formed a trade digitization partnership with document digitization firm Enigio.

The collaboration is designed to promote the use of digital documentation in trade finance via blockchain technology, expanding the use of Enigio’s “trace:original” tool.

“Existing industry-wide trade solutions are, comparably, much slower, more cumbersome and more environmentally intensive than their digital counterparts, involving upwards of 28 billion pieces of paper, globally every year,” said Gwynne Master, managing director for lending and working capital at Lloyds. “Digitization makes processes faster, cheaper and more secure.”

For all PYMNTS EMEA coverage, subscribe to the daily EMEA Newsletter.