Text Request and Authvia Debut Payments by Text

Business texting software provider Text Request on Tuesday (Jan. 18) announced it has partnered with conversational commerce platform Authvia to provide text-to-pay services through the Text Request platform through a new offering called Payments.

Payments is available on all Text Request plans in the U.S. and Canada and is geared toward service-based businesses to collect payments while reducing their workload.

Text Request customers connect merchant processing accounts securely through Authvia, then create text message-based payment requests inside the Text Request platform. The first time a contact receives a payment request, they click a link included in the request to enter their payment information securely.

The contact’s payment information is saved for future requests, which are paid by texting a four-digit confirmation code. Transactions are processed in real time.

“Particularly since the pandemic started, businesses have been looking for more and better ways to engage their audiences virtually, including through contactless payments,” Text Request CTO and Co-founder Rob Reagan said in the announcement.

“Authvia’s innovation around security and the ability to bring your own payment processor make them a clear leader in this space, and the perfect partner to bring this new feature to life,” he said.

Authvia connects more than 200 payment processors and gateways to messaging with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance through their conversational commerce APIs.

Text Request’s software as a service (SaaS) gives business teams the ability to text from their business phone numbers for one-to-one conversations and mass messaging.

“Eighty percent of customers who pay by text one time go on to pay by text every time,” said Authvia CEO and Co-founder Chris Brunner. “The brands we already provide payment services for are looking to expand their texting abilities.”

Related: Voice Tech Leans on AI to Humanize Customer Service and Experience

Raghu Ravinutala, CEO of customer experience automation firm yellow.ai, described the advances in conversational commerce in a recent conversation with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster that centered in dynamic artificial intelligence (AI) agents.

“The next [stage] of evolution is more cognitive understanding and doing cognitive tasks like negotiating [and] assuaging the customer,” he said. “That’s the next level of automation that we are seeing that gets closer to humans. I think the AI models are there, but the data about what kind of empathetic responses are delivered, what kind of outcomes, this data is still being collected.”