Seamless Top-Ups with Virtual Accounts
One of the biggest hurdles to running a successful fintech — or any business that moves money, which is all of them! — is receiving funds from your customers to top-up their wallets, to fund international remittance, to settle a loan, or simply to pay for services.
After years of innovating in this space, we at MatchMove have found more than a few ways to collect funds. Spoiler: they are not all equal.
1. Collect Funds with Cards
When collecting funds, we usually start with cards. Prepaid, debit, charge, and credit cards are all simple to use and card adoption rate is growing rapidly. But we have found, especially in our home in South & Southeast Asia, that many customers do not have a card, and those that do are not comfortable using it online. Not to mention that cards can cost up to 3% or more of the transaction value.
Relying on cards means missing out on a big part of your potential customer base, and giving up a big part of your revenue to boot!
2. Collect Cash at Top-Up Points & Agents
Running your own network of top-up points and agents will help you reach a much wider customer base, and of course cash in hand is a great incentive. But as anyone with a thriving agent network knows, it is extensive, expensive, and elaborate to operate. Few realise that the average cost of handling cash is around 5%, and the effort to reconcile a cash payment to a customer can be daunting. For many, operating your own agent network is simply not part of the strategic roadmap.
Agent networks bring reach, but also huge headaches!
3. Collect Electronic Transfers in a Single Collection Account
A third option from cards and cash, an electronic transfer avoids much of the cost of cards and the worries of a cash network. Yet it carries an even bigger operational headache — matching a payment to a customer. With a single collection account, the only way to distinctly match a payment to a customer is through the reference memo, a free-form field offered by banks that is included with the payment.
We’ve all experienced the frustrations of electronic transfers like this, either as a business owner receiving payment or as a customer making a payment. For customers, it is easy to mistype or even miss out the payment memo. For the business, the manual effort to reconcile and apply payments is daunting, as well as the costs of returning unmatched funds. And from a compliance and legal view, this is full of needless risk.
There has to be a better way, right?
Yes, there is! At MatchMove, we have been making and collecting payments for our customers for years, and are now introducing a new payment collection option — Virtual Accounts!
4. Collect with Virtual Accounts
With Virtual Accounts, businesses can assign a unique account number to every customer, usable for receiving electronic fund transfers. This brings substantial and immediate benefits:
- Funds are immediately attributable to and reconciled with the customer — no more lengthy, manual, and risk-prone reconciliation processes.
- Virtual accounts are cost effective — save that 3% you would pay for cards, or 5% you would pay for cash handling.
- Payments to virtual accounts are safe — customers feel safer using the banking tools they already know and trust.
And right now, Virtual Accounts are available as an add-on feature to the MatchMove Spend. Send. Lend. solution.¹ For any business that needs to make or receive payments, we have a solution. Talk to our team to find our more.
Find out More
Get in touch with our team to find out more — success@matchmove.com. We are excited to see what you build next!
- Available in Singapore; other countries coming soon. Contact us to voice your interest.
