Visa Gives Businesses New Way To Pay Gig Workers In Real Time

The gig economy is growing. The desire to get paid faster is also gaining traction — along with the companies satisfying that desire.

To that end, Visa announced Tuesday (April 2) that it has introduced Card Payouts, an app designed help mid- to large-sized businesses manage cash flow — and speed payments to gig economy workers, to boot.

(Call it killing the check — and you may remember our own research, where 85 percent of gig economy workers surveyed said they would work more if they could get paid faster.)

In terms of mechanics, Card Payouts is a card-based front end user experience that integrates with treasury banks’ existing infrastructure and, through a pilot program, complements the Oracle NetSuite Banking as a Service program.

The app is built to support card capture, tokenization and card-on-file transactions, Visa said on Tuesday.

The card giant said in a blog post Tuesday that the treasury banks participating in the pilot can enable their business clients to download the Card Payouts app from the NetSuite SuiteApp store.

Though the app, said Visa and NetSuite, the firms will leverage Visa Direct to improve small business and consumer disbursements. The creation of the “Built for NetSuite” app will enable real time disbursements to NetSuite customers’ independent suppliers and employees.

“A hundred forty-five years after money was first moved by wire transfer using the telegraph, money still travels relatively slowly — a surprise given all of the innovation that surrounds it. Waiting on a funds transfer or a check in the mail is hardly convenient in today’s ‘on-demand economy,’ where one in three workers is a solo entrepreneur or independent contractor,” said Visa in its post.

The firms cited data from the McKinsey Global Institute, which found that almost 30 percent of the working age population in the U.S. and Europe derive some or all of their income from independent work. In case you are wondering, that’s more than 160 million people or, put another way, more than the entire populations of the U.K. and Germany combined.

The new SuiteApp will help businesses automate back office functions, track and pay bills and manage cash flow through the integration of Visa Direct and will complement NetSuite’s banking as a service program.

The pilot, Visa added, is focused on treasury banks interested in  contractor payouts and out-of-pocket expense reimbursements that can be sent directly to a recipient’s eligible debit card, as transactions are done through Visa’s real-time push payments solution.

The pilot program is slated to debut in the Fall of 2019.