Today, businesses engage with several stakeholders: customers, vendors, and employees. Payouts are an important aspect of stakeholder engagement. Hence, thriving, ambitious businesses must ensure secure, instant, and timely payments to all stakeholders.
As companies accelerate growth, they must also be able to scale payouts. Outbound payments can be segregated into four main payout types. By adopting cloud-based payment solutions such as a payment gateway, businesses can ensure that all payouts are secure, instant, and cost-effective.
A brief guide to four payout types
Payments made by businesses typically fall into four payout types, as follows:
1. Customer Payouts
Customer payouts comprise business payments to customers via refunds, cashback, rewards, and refunds. Businesses must be able to make timely, secure payouts at scale, which has emerged as an important practice for any sustainable business.
2. Vendor Payouts
Vendor payouts comprise payments made by businesses to their chain of suppliers. Making instant, timely payments to vendors across geographies enables businesses to maintain high-trust relationships. With the support of an efficient payout strategy, businesses can protect their supply chain and expand it quickly, as per their needs.
3. Employee Payouts
Payouts from firms to employees are referred to as employee payouts. They fall into several categories, including bonuses, salaries, and reimbursements, to mention a few. A key component of any long-term, profitable company is accurately and punctually paying wages and other obligations.
4. Partner Payouts
Partner payouts are sums of money that companies give to their network partners. A company might, for instance, establish a network of cross-sellers who advertise its goods. Building these relationships and making compensation payments on schedule is crucial for increasing reach and boosting sales.
How businesses can automate all payout types
To keep pace with the rising demand for secure payouts to multiple stakeholders simultaneously, businesses must reimagine their entire payment operations. They can no longer depend on net banking to scale payments. Instead, cloud-based enterprise solutions can help them effectively address challenges across all payout types.
For instance, integrating an automated payment gateway helps businesses streamline payments to all payout accounts efficiently and transparently. An automated solution translates to fewer errors and quicker and more secure payouts to all stakeholders.
Superior payout software also comes equipped with development-friendly plug-and-play APIs. Thus, businesses can integrate it quickly and expedite payouts.
The top seven features of automated instant payouts
A superior enterprise-friendly payout solution offers seven key features that benefit businesses of all sizes and scales:
1. Facilitate instant payments
With the introduction of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) system, internet users have become used to instant payments. Traditionally, businesses leveraged Instant money transfers from their banks to facilitate instant payments. However, this is an expensive and cumbersome process.
By adopting a solution such as Plural by Pine Labs, businesses can automate adding beneficiaries and making real-time payouts to all stakeholders.
2. Enables bulk payouts
As the volume of payout accounts increases, businesses can switch to making bulk payments. A payment gateway allows businesses to simultaneously make bulk payouts to several customers, vendors, and other stakeholders. Businesses can also schedule advance which ensures timely payouts.
3. Multiple payout modes
Today, users have multiple preferences when it comes to being paid. For instance, customers may prefer refunds via credit card or an eCommerce wallet. Vendors may prefer UPI transfers.
Per preferences, needs, and limitations, a superior payment gateway facilitates payouts via bank accounts, digital wallets, debit cards, credit cards, payment links, or UPI. Thus, the payout process is more inclusive.
4. Instant verifications
Retrieving funds credited to the wrong account is challenging, expensive, and time-consuming.
However, using a superior payoutsolution, businesses can automate the verification process for bank accounts or Virtual Payment Addresses (VPA) (a unique identifier used to send and receive money without sharing bank accounts). This key step helps businesses reduce financial risks.
5. Automated reconciliation process
In the case of invalid or failed payouts, businesses can reap the benefits of automated reconciliation support. The payout reconciliation report is an effective tool for helping businesses verify that the payout has been successful.
6. Access to data insights
Businesses have access to large volumes of data that can be analyzed in-depth to help them understand payout trends, stakeholder behaviors, and experiences. They can leverage in-built data analytics, customize dashboards to zero in on specific data, and make superior decisions.
7. Secure transactions
High transaction security is one of the most important features of a superior payment gateway. Businesses can rest assured that payouts are done securely by reducing the potential for fraud and vulnerability to cyberattacks.
Payment gateways are also compliant with important financial regulation guidelines. For instance, the confidentiality of financial data is a top priority.
Impact of automated payouts
Here’s a snapshot of the key benefits of automated, instant payouts:
- Ensures transparency in the payout process with notifications and quick reconciliation, thus nurturing stakeholder trust in the business
- Expedites payouts across all areas of the business
- Facilitates bulk payments, which allows businesses to scale up quickly
- Eliminate human interventions and cut down on labor costs by automating all systems
- Reduce the potential for errors, omissions, and payout fraud
- Build a data-driven work culture that helps businesses make accurate, timely decisions
The Conclusion
As digital payments become the norm, businesses can stay relevant and efficient with automation across all payout types. They can leverage solutions depending on their real-time needs, expand the business quickly, and bring more transparency to the entire payment cycle. Plural Gateway provides a range of solutions for all payout types, including vendor payout solutions, instant customer refunds, cashback and rewards, employee and partner payouts. Contact us or simply click below to request a call back!
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has granted Plural by Pine Labs permission to function as a Payment Aggregator in principle.
