TodayPay Teams With Visa to Bolster ‘Refunds as a Service’

Refunds-focused payments firm TodayPay joined Visa’s Fintech Fast Track Program.

The move lets TodayPay speed the process of integrating with Visa and access the company’s global payment network, VisaNet, according to a Monday (Oct. 30) press release.

“TodayPay is the world’s first faster payment solution helping merchants offer their customers a better refund alternative to the status quo because it’s a refund that’s personalized, instant and available in multiple payment choices,” TodayPay founder and CEO Jeremy Balkin said in the release.

The Visa program gives startups access to Visa’s partner network and lets them work with experts who can offer guidance to help companies launch quickly, per the release.

Monday’s announcement comes as TodayPay is emerging from stealth mode with Refunds as a Service, which allows merchants to offer customers instant refunds across multiple payment methods, and via a TodayPay wallet, if they so choose.

Refunds as a Service is a feature that the company has tagged “my money, my choice.” It is designed to work with merchants, marketplaces, logistics firms and insurers, connected via application programming interfaces (APIs) to their transaction flows.

Through that connectivity, Balkin told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster, TodayPay can access shipping label data and keep track of the flow of the return itself, while the consumer receives a pending value in their wallet, issued at the point of scan.

Twenty percent of everything bought in the U.S. is returned every year, which equates to $1.4 trillion in sales refunded.

However, as Balkin described it, the back end has been sorely neglected, which places undue pressure on merchants, as a frustrating wait for refunds could endanger customer loyalty.

“Refunds are a massively inflexible, broken part of the payments ecosystem,” he said in an interview with PYMNTS. “And I want to see if we can fix this.”

Past inductees into the Visa Fintech Fast Track Program include Skyscend, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform provider for supply chain finance, which joined in December.

Entry into the program allowed Skyscend to automate B2B payments by introducing virtual card payments, thus lowering the risk and workload involved in transferring funds from the firm’s finance arm, Skyscend Capital, to customers.