Fundtech Unveils Small Business Payment Portal

The conventional wisdom that small businesses are lost in a technology wilderness where no suitable cash management software can be found has been turned on its head. There's now a parade of tech firms vying for the attention of small businesses, all hoping to reach either banks or the businesses themselves with digital processing capabilities the tech firms claim are tailor made for the needs of entrepreneurs.

In the latest example of this trend, Fundtech is taking newly acquired payments processing technology from BankServ out for a spin and launching a new portal called TotalTransact. The portal supports electronic checks, card processing, remote deposit capture and mobile payments. There are also educational materials on the website on how the can be used by companies in specific verticals such as healthcare, debt collection, government, home services and non-profits.

"I would describe it as a funnel, you can give small businesses a picture of what their payments are and where they are coming from," says George Ravich, chief marketing officer and executive vice president at Fundtech.

The product combines processing, aggregation and accounts payable/receivable, accessible in a visual format that's designed to give users a way to track and execute payments. "Small businesses have different streams of payments coming in and don't know where they're coming from," Ravich says. "It can be a real mess to keep track of."

Fundtech was consolidated with BankServ, a provider of SaaS banking and payment systems, in the fall of 2011, after GTCR (BankServ's private equity owner) acquired Fundtech, following Fundtech's flirtation with S1. The combined BankServ/Fundtech offers software that facilitates wire transfers, SWIFT messaging, remote deposit capture, international payments, mobile pay and merchant services.

The new portal is being offered directly to small businesses and to banks as a value add to treasury management or small business banking technology suites. Fundtech, whose existing clients include Capital One (COF), HSBC (HBC) and Citigroup (C), didn't disclose bank users for the new product.

As a use case, Ravich describes a remote contractor who presents his bill at the point of sale, then takes payments via a smartphone or other mobile device. Another example might be a business that wants to set up recurring payments with clients. Ravich says Fundtech provides the software behind mobile readers that attach to smartphones and enables card payments via a swipe, with an option to print a paper receipt at the point of sale. The receipt can also be send electronically.

There are a number of firms targeting the payments space, making it a crowded market that includes mobile payments firms such as Square and Verifone. Square is pursuing the mobile contractor market, and Verifone (PAY) is also targeting the market through its Payware mobile product. Other participants include Intuit, which ships card reader hardware that attaches to the audio jack of a phone and provides a dashboard that lets businesses monitor transactions, receive data from remote payment collectors and set permission levels for employees in the field.

There are also other tech firms active on the aggregation front. Bill.com has built a command center that lets users send invoices and receive electronic payments. The Bill.com product also includes a dashboard that allows businesses to track incoming and outgoing payments over time, with links to make adjustments in payments and schedules to protect the business' cash position.

All of these firms — as well as the large core vendors such as Fiserv (FISV), FIS (FIS) and Jack Henry (JKHY), are using payments to attract small business clients, which have traditionally lagged in use of technology. In an upcoming report on small business payments technology in May's Bank Technology News, Andy Schmidt, a research director at TowerGroup, notes that mobile remote deposit capture and payments have become the gateway to larger financial services relationships between small businesses and banks.