Fiserv is taking on Stripe with a new ACH payments tool for businesses called Fiserv Payment SDK.
Fiserv announced its new SDK for ACH business payments today at FinDEVr.
Unusually for Fiserv, which has more than 10,000 FI clients, the service will be marketed direct to businesses to begin with, Tammi Shapiro, VP of product strategy and management in Fiserv’s digital banking group, told Bank Innovation.
The service has been in development for several months, and there is already interest from those that have seen the beta version, Shapiro said. The product focuses on ACH payments, which today are not realtime, but rather next-day, or even take two to three days. Realtime is in the works, both for ACH and Fiserv, which already offers realtime payments in services such as Popmoney. But Popmoney is for consumers, while this service is for businesses.
This summer, debit card payments and subscriptions will be added to the service. Realtime and P2P will follow that.
The service will target specific verticals to begin with, Shapiro said. These are industries with “recurring, high-value transactions,” she said, such as tuition and real estate payments.
Fiserv has the experience related to fraud and risk management, and the scale to offer low processing costs, Paul Diegelman, VP of electronic payments, said in the company’s presentation. Every transaction is scored for risk, Senior Product Manager Jon Zimmermann said.
Fiserv is the technology partner of INV Fintech, this site’s sister accelerator.
Down the road, Fiserv may leverage its thousands upon thousands of financial institutions and their many business clients, Shapiro said, but for now, Fiserv wants to focus on direct-to-business marketing. This puts it pretty squarely in the path of Stripe and the like, as Shapiro recognized.
The SDK would fit nicely on a bank’s developer portal, Shapiro added. Several banks, such as Capital One and Citigroup, referred to these environments in their FinDEVr presentations.
Fiserv processes more than 30 billion payment transactions annually.
The SDK will be officially released in April.