PayNearMe

Happy Labor Day! Wishing our clients, partners, team members, families and friends a relaxing and well-deserved holiday.

Whether you're unplugging completely or squeezing in one last summer adventure, we'd love to hear: How are you spending your long weekend?

The transaction fee may be the easiest payment cost to see, but it’s far from the only one.

Our research found that for every $1.20 spent processing a payment, another $6.02 can be spent on the customer support, operational effort and payment friction required to actually complete it.

That’s the Payment Experience Gap, and across the U.S. bill-pay market, it represents more than $100 billion in costs beyond transaction fees.

Thank you to Finopotamus for taking a closer look at our research and helping bring greater visibility to the true cost of payment acceptance.

Read the full story to see what’s driving the gap—and why looking beyond the transaction is so important. 👇

Quantifying The True Cost Of Payment Acceptance PayNearMe, 06/29/26

We've been measuring payment costs all wrong. For years, businesses have focused on lowering transaction fees.

But our research found transaction fees account for just 17% of the total cost of payment acceptance.

The remaining 83% comes from everything else:
• A poor customer experience
• Support costs
• Operational inefficiencies

When you only optimize for the cheapest transaction, you may be missing the biggest opportunity to reduce costs.

It's time to look beyond the transaction fee. Read The Payment Experience Gap report: https://na2.hubs.ly/H071Vv-0

Leading organizations like Consumer Portfolio Services, are rethinking the payment experience. Not just adding more payment methods, but making it easier for customers to complete payments independently.

Auto lenders focus heavily on transaction fees, but the real cost driver is often hidden in payment exceptions.

In this article for Auto Remarketing, PayNearMe's Dawn Fretwell breaks down why failed payments, manual workarounds and borrower friction quietly drive servicing costs, and how Payment Experience Management can significantly reduce them.

Read the full article: https://na2.hubs.ly/H07x6V90

Great teams are built on open communication, and that starts at the top.

We’re proud to foster a culture where curiosity is encouraged and transparency helps everyone do their best work.

Gen Z makes up just 4% of credit union membership today.

That’s more than a generational gap. It’s a signal that the experiences that built loyalty with previous generations may not be enough to win the next one.

For younger members, the payment experience is part of the member experience. They expect to pay from their phones, use the digital wallets already part of their daily lives and complete a payment without unnecessary logins, steps or support calls. In fact, 61% of Gen Z consumers are open to making loan payments through digital wallets.

Payment Experience Management helps credit unions turn those expectations into an advantage—combining payment choice, effortless self-service and personalization to remove friction across the payment journey.

Because winning the next generation won’t come from simply offering more ways to pay. It will come from making every payment experience feel like it was designed for the member.

Read more about what credit unions can do to compete for the next generation. Link in comments.

Most organizations spend hours negotiating payment processing fees. But what if the biggest cost isn't the transaction fee?

Our latest research found that 82% of operational payment costs are driven by payment failures and disputes—things such as ACH returns, chargebacks and manual reconcilliation.

Reducing payment exceptions upstream can dramatically lower operational costs downstream.

It's time to start measuring the total cost of payment acceptance, not just the cost of processing a transaction.

Read The Payment Experience Gap report to learn more. Link in comments.

When you offer your borrowers numerous self-service payments options, it can have a "silencing effect" on your phone lines - just ask You Drive Auto!

What does it really cost a credit union to collect a loan payment?

The transaction fee might be $1.20, but the total cost could be closer to $7.22.

Our latest research reveals that more than 80% of the total cost of accepting payments happens outside the transaction itself, spread across member support, payment failures, operational work and payment friction.

Thank you to CU Today and Ray Birch for digging into our Payment Experience Gap report and what it means for credit unions.

Read the full article to learn why looking beyond transaction fees could uncover a much bigger opportunity to reduce costs and improve the member payment experience:

https://na2.hubs.ly/H07nLjG0