Five Star Bank Teams With Autobooks to Offer Tap to Pay

Five Star Bank has begun offering contactless payments acceptance to its small business customers.

The new offering, announced Monday (Aug. 21), is part of an expansion of the bank’s partnership with payment and accounting platform Autobooks.

“The same way our customers need to be able to do business with us when, where and how they prefer, we know that the small businesses we serve need to offer the same convenience to their own clients,” Jeanne Stegmeier, vice president and small business leader with Five Star Bank, said in a news release.

“Offering Tap to Pay on iPhone empowers Five Star customers to accept payments on the go, right from our mobile banking app,” Stegmeier said.

According to the release, the bank’s small business customers can use Tap to Pay on iPhone to accept all forms of contactless payments, using just an iPhone and the Five Star’s digital banking mobile app.

In addition to the tap-to-pay offering, Five Star says its collaboration with Autobooks lets small business customers access free professional invoicing with customized branding options and receive payments from customers directly into their business checking account.

As PYMNTS wrote earlier this year, merchants may have been forced to accelerate payment modernization and digitization efforts like contactless payments due to the pandemic, but this evolution will continue into the future.

“Not only will companies need to adopt digital solutions to keep up with customer demand; the implementation of such solutions can significantly benefit merchants in a variety of ways,” that report said.

Payments digitization can help remove the pain points often found in legacy payment-based B2B transactions. According to one PYMNTS survey, small- to medium-sized business (SMB) payers pointed to an average of five issues they usually run into when making B2B payments, a show of just how frustrating the B2B payment process can be.

Among the top concerns were the need for manual review and time-consuming procedures — issues that modern payment systems can address, especially since that technology can promote efficiency. This explains why 92% of financial institutions are say they innovating or planning to innovate new digital solutions to designed to cut back on B2B payment frictions.

Earlier this month, Autobooks formed a partnership with NCR that adds integrated digital invoicing, payment acceptance and accounting features to NCR’s Digital Banking offering.