Pocketbook and Bond Help Small Businesses Deploy Digital Wallets

Pocketbook and Bond have partnered to help small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) deploy digital wallets.

By adding Bond’s embedded finance platform to Pocketbook’s white-label solution that provides branded banking options to SMBs, Pocketbook will be able to allows its customers to accept payments directly from their own branded digital wallet, according to a Thursday (March 9) press release.

“After many years in banking at BBVA and at SMB neobank Azlo, I was able to see the needs and desires of SMB owners and operators firsthand,” Pocketbook Co-founder and CEO Bryan Crumpler said in the release. “Coming out of those experiences we knew that we needed to build a platform that not only addresses affordable and expedited payment processing but also provides the tools and integrations necessary for today’s small businesses.”

PYMNTS research has found that consumers broke out the smartphone more often at the checkout to use a digital wallet in the fourth quarter of 2022.

While credit cards and debit cards remain the preferred payment methods for most consumers, the impact of digital wallets is becoming more apparent, according to “Digital Economy Payments: The Ascent of Digital Wallets.”

The report said that while “38% of consumers used debit cards for their last in-store purchase, just 23% used them online. Digital wallets are responsible for this gap, as they collectively represent a much higher share of online spending than in-store spending.”

With digital wallets now being used more after a years-long ramp-up, there’s a new battle brewing over which wallets consumers both know and trust with their payment credentials.

Merchants are on the front lines regarding the purchase itself, so adding digital wallets as an alternative payment method (APM) to online checkouts is increasingly a no-brainer, Bank of America Head of Product and Merchant Services Wally Mlynarski told PYMNTS in an interview posted Feb. 13.

In the new partnership, Pocketbook’s digital wallets will use Bond’s Accounts and ACH application programming interfaces (APIs) to enable SMBs to send and receive payments from any account, lower transaction costs and provide an alternative to card payments that take a portion of every transaction, according to the press release.

“We are excited to partner with such an experienced team at Pocketbook and see their digital wallets power transactions across a wide variety of industries,” Bond General Counsel Jonathan Grayson said in the release.