Paymentus Expands Bill-Pay as Consumers Embrace ‘Cash Stuffing’

Paymentus says it is making it easier for billers to accept cash payments.

The electronic bill-pay company has expanded the cash payment capabilities on its instant payment network, Paymentus said in a Thursday (Jan. 19) news release provided to PYMNTS. Powered by the Green Dot Network, billers connected to the Paymentus network can accept cash payments from customers at more than 90,000 locations.

“Every biller knows that cash payments account for a meaningful portion of revenue,” said Dushyant Sharma, Paymentus’ founder and CEO.

“Untethering cash payments from the customer service counter and into tens of thousands of community-based access points will make cash bill-pay as easy, convenient and secure as every other payment method for both consumers and billers alike.”

The company points to findings from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) that show that the U.S. has more than 18.7 million underbanked and 5.8 million unbanked households. These people often turn to money orders or prepaid cards to pay bills.

The release also notes that — per the Federal Reserve — cash payments account for a fifth of all transactions, while “cash stuffing” has become a popular budgeting trend for Gen Z consumers.

This last trend isn’t just confined to the U.S. PYMNTS reported earlier this week that the U.K. has seen its first increase in ATM withdrawals in more than a decade.

“While choosing to take money out of an interest-earning account to help save money may seem counterintuitive, many people find the tangible nature of cash easier to keep track of than purely electronic spending,” PYMNTS wrote.

The “cashstuffing” hashtag garnered well over 835 million views on TikTok, with users around the world sharing their cash-based budgeting practices that involve stuffing allotted amounts of their monthly budget into envelopes for different categories of spending.

As for people who want to pay digitally, speed tops the list of consumers’ expectations about payments, Marcell King, chief innovation officer, banking and FinTech at Paymentus, told PYMNTS last year.

“The speed of money movement has become much more critical,” he said.

At a high level, the main goal for financial institutions is to simplify consumers’ financial lives, which means streamlining and modernizing the movement of money. That, in turn, improves the continuum of bill payments, investing and savings.

King noted that real-time functionality has been in place for a long time, embedded within banks’ infrastructure. But financial institutions need to go beyond offering speed, he said, and offer consumers insight into their household finances to help them accomplish their financial goals.