While paying via text is already widely available from several providers, PruPay’s technology lab was able to add a few simple tools that help both merchants and consumers with their real-world problems. Currently, PruPay is waiving its normal fees to help small/medium businesses during the global pandemic.

“COVID-19 has instilled a legitimate fear of sharing or touching anything, both person to person and latently on devices such as keypads, so text payments make even more sense today than just weeks ago,” said Bill Sedgwick, PruPay CEO. “We added security for merchants and optional add-on services like delivery fees, tipping, and a “Pay it Forward” option that are not provided on native text-to-pay platforms,” Sedgwick continued.

PruPay’s Touchless Payments (Built with PayPal) offers merchants:

● A control panel that allows employees to enter payment requests and see orders easily, but without access to merchant banking information.

● The ability to customize charges like convenience fees, delivery fees or other markups.

● A simple order management dashboard to see which orders have been paid for and which are pending.

● The ability to add delivery or pickup notes to the order.

PruPay’s Touchless (Built with PayPal) gives consumers:

● The ability to easily pay for purchases via text all major credit cards, PayPal, Venmo (U.S. only), and PayPal Credit1 (with six months special financing on purchases of $99 or more. See terms.)

● A secure way to pay and complete orders without having to provide credit card numbers or addresses over the phone.

● The ability to easily add an optional tip or a “Pay It Forward” amount to any order to help their favorite merchants during the crisis.

● An order payment confirmation to show to a delivery driver or curbside delivery person.

Giving Back:

PruPay is offering its touchless payment service, a patent-pending technology, to merchants for free during this challenging time. Normally, there will be a nominal fee of 10 cents per transaction, which merchants can either absorb or pass along, but for the first 90 days after a new merchant signs up through July 31, PruPay is waiving all charges to provide a respite during the global pandemic. PruPay will donate the net proceeds from Touchless Payments at least through the end of summer 2020. Standard PayPal processing fees still apply.

“We wanted to offer consumers a turnkey way to support their favorite local merchants and provide merchants with a way to allow contributions without marking up their menu prices or adding additional fees if they don’t want to. When payments are processed, there will be a prompt for the customer to add an amount of their choice to support the business voluntarily. Not everyone can contribute, but we have learned that those who can are often very generous to the merchants that they want to help. It’s a goodwill gesture, versus a requirement, and people appreciate that,” Bill Sedgwick said.