Payments remain an essentially manual process despite the move toward automation, Steve Kramer, vice president of product at billing and payments platform PayNearMe, explains in this week’s episode of “The Buzz.”    

In this podcast, Kramer sits down with Bank Automation News to discuss how banks can automate payments to reduce customer friction, including options for digitizing cash and digital wallets.  

“One of the things we've seen has been a serious growth in the use of wallets,” Kramer tells BAN. But while customers use digital wallets to pay for goods, what lags behind is bill payment. At a time when everyone lives on smartphones, bills still arrive via paper or, at best, email, he says. 

“We need to meet these consumers where they are now living, and taking that transaction — whether it was paper, whether it was a reminder, whether it was an email — and converting it to … a digital wallet interaction,” Kramer notes. 

Both Visa and Mastercard offer disbursement rails, but banks and merchants need to wholly embrace digital technology for this to happen, he tells BAN.  

Find out why so many fintechs are entering the payments space and how FedNow’s real-time payments will fit into the big picture of automated payments in today’s podcast.