Visa and SKUx Team to Promote Digital Consumer Payments

Visa has launched a collaboration with digital payments company SKUx.

“The agreement will accelerate digital transformation for select merchants and consumer packaged goods companies that leverage SKUx’s payment-based offer solutions — supporting a variety of client use cases; from customer acquisition, to loyalty, to consumer care and recovery, while ensuring a seamless, end-to-end consumer experience,” the companies said in a news release Thursday (May 16) news release.

According to the release, the SKUx platform is used by several top consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands as the company to end the “outdated physical to digital process of checks, coupons, rebates, and promotional offers.”

The platform is designed to allow companies to “engage directly with their customers by delivering a client branded real-time, Visa digital payment to a mobile device.”

With this collaboration, Visa clients can engage directly with SKUx, “driving value creation among B2B and B2C payment flows for merchants and manufacturers.”

This, the companies said, will help merchants “drive customer acquisition, digitize customer care and recovery, and target product-level spend.”

The partnership comes at a time when — as PYMNTS wrote earlier this week — consumers and businesses “are pivoting toward faster and digital payment options.”

That could be seen in two recent reports by Federal Reserve Financial Services that show last year saw a 31% rise in digital wallet use by businesses, and a more or less commensurate 32% increase in usage among consumers.

“These changes, particularly consumers’ use of digital wallets and online banking, are leading to increases in instant and faster payment use cases such as bill payment, mobile wallet funding and defunding, account-to-account transfers, and immediate payroll for employees,” the Federal Reserve said.

The research showed that as many as 86% of businesses and 74% of consumers said they used faster or instant payments in 2023, with a quarter of consumers saying they’d prefer to use instant payments to help manage their finances.

On the commercial side of things, 92% of companies that have been using instant payments said they have been beneficial for business-to-business (B2B) payments, and account-to-account payments, at 40% of the Fed’s respondents.

Meanwhile, the Fed’s Consumer Research Brief found that 57% of consumers say they plan to use faster payment options more extensively for things like online shopping and last-minute bill payments.

The Fed linked to the “2024 Global Digital Shopping Index: U.S. Edition,” pointing to the joint efforts by Visa Acceptance Solutions and PYMNTS as “highlight[ing] the growing incidence of digital payments and the breaking down of boundaries between online and in-store shopping experiences.”