Ingo Powers Instant SMB Loan Payouts For Kabbage

Maybe think of it as instant Kabbage, pun intended – you know, the green stuff, as it’s known: money.

Speed may be the zeitgeist of today, a competitive advantage for businesses of all stripes and sizes. In commerce, we’ve seen accelerating speeds of information, of product launches, of new iterations of offerings to keep pace with consumer demand.

And yet none of that happens if money cannot grease the proverbial wheels. And so … in a world of instant everything, why not instant disbursements of loan proceeds that keep SMBs humming?

In an announcement Monday, Ingo Money and Kabbage said they will work together to bring real-time disbursement of commercial loan proceeds to SMBs’ corporate accounts.

Kabbage will leverage Ingo’s “push payments in a box” solution to push loan proceeds to any SMB debit card or wallet account.

Ingo has said that its Ingo Push offering is able to reach more than 4.5 billion accounts spanning credit and debit cards, online wallets such as PayPal and physical cash-out locations.

The setting is ripe for fast funds distribution, the two firms told PYMNTS. A recent Visa survey found that 70 percent of small business owners have debit cards – and of those who do not, 87 percent said they would want to get a card in order to receive real-time transfers. The movement for push-to-card activity is gaining interest and awareness, as spotlighted in a recent interview with Cecilia Frew, Visa’s head of push payments, conducted by PYMNTS’ Karen Webster.

In an interview with PYMNTS to discuss the partnership, Kathryn Petralia, president at Kabbage, stated that “at our heart really we are a payments company, since we’re constantly moving money to and from our customers as they use our service.”

She said the partnership adds an additional option for Kabbage customers, as they can choose among extant funding methods across ACH, PayPal or access to funds at the point of sale with Kabbage debit cards.

“We’ve known for a long time, ever since our first customer came onto our platform and took money via PayPal” that business owners want access to funds as soon as they can get them, Petralia noted.

“This makes it a little more transparent,” she said of the newest offering.

The companies plan on a summer launch, she said.

In a separate interview with PYMNTS, Lisa McFarland, chief product officer at Ingo Money, said that technology has transformed all manner of business activities, including lending. “You’ve got online lenders that have transformed the process for applying for and being awarded a loan from [one that was] week-long to one that is minutes long.”

And yet beyond the approval process, McFarland stated, the actual funding process has lagged to days or weeks, in the event that paper checks are issued. In an age where speed matters, then, small business owners’ experience in retail and eCommerce sectors has led them to expect streamlined processes from their own service providers, McFarland and Petralia said.

“Push payments extend that same customer experience from loan origination and underwriting to the actual disbursement of loan proceeds,” so that the entire end-to-end process is minutes long, said McFarland.

As she told PYMNTS, the “push payments in a box” functionality means there is no need for Kabbage to go out and find a sponsor in order for loan originating banks to support the money transfer transaction. Ingo also facilitates SMB authentication and account verification processes – critically important to the instant movement of money into a business account. McFarland, in a separate interview with Webster, said that consumer expectations are that money be made available with real speed.

The end result is that business owners can contend with unanticipated challenges – and opportunities – as they arise, even during off business and weekend hours. Among the possible use cases: A business owner might be expecting payment on an invoice for a large job that they need to pay for a shipment expected to arrive in a few days, and the payment has yet to materialize.

In those situations, McFarland said, getting proceeds from a working capital line of credit would instantly help that business execute the downstream payment transactions without interruption.