Regalii, an unusually named SaaS platform developer that is attracting increased attention in the financial IT world, said Oct. 25 that it has updated its new-generation bill-paying platform to activate credit-card accounts on Day 1 of approval and provide banks with the bill data and logic necessary to build customized messaging bots.
Regalii unveiled the new version of the mobile platform Oct. 25 at the Money 20/20 conference in Las Vegas. The software is used by financial institutions to embed into their existing mobile applications to handle bill-paying, credit-card and money-transfer functions for users on their mobile devices.
The New York City-based company, whose name is a takeoff on the term “gift” in Spanish, claims to be the first mobile bill-paying system of its kind to work with multiple languages and currencies: 11 countries and eight currencies as of October 2016. At this time, the company works with 5,200 bill providers and enables more than 6 million transactions annually.
Bill-Paying Function as Profit Center
As unusual as it sounds, Regalii is designed to help banks change their bill-paying function from a cost center into a profit center. The two new product modules released Oct. 25 that help do this are:
Regalii xChange: This enables activation of credit card accounts and recurring payments on Day 1 of approval. The first opportunity for banks is to do this—without waiting for the cards to arrive in the mail—enables users to immediately begin linking to and paying their bills. With Regalii xChange, banks not only have the ability to activate and monetize credit accounts faster but also to provide their customers with a recurring service that persistently contributes to the top line. Bill-paying has the highest level of retention (“stickiness”) of any financial payment service.
Regalli xData: This function presents relevant, real-time data to messaging users, so they can interact with their banks using this channel. Messaging has emerged as clearly the No. 1 consumer activity on mobile devices, and it is also the primary mode of engagement on mobile apps.
Globally, the engagement rate between traditional mobile apps versus messaging apps is 21 percent versus 98 percent. In addition, popular messaging apps, such as China’s WeChat, have proven that consumers already are comfortable using messaging as a channel for payments—not only for communication.
To enable banks to deliver a high-level messaging experience to their customers—and to enable them to do this at scale—Regalii xData provides banks with the bill data and logic to easily build messaging bots. Using this platform, banks can now aggregate and automate the delivery of relevant, real-time data, such as account balances, due dates, line-of-credit changes and other information.
Started for Personal Reasons
CEO and co-founder Edrizio De La Cruz, 35 (pictured), is originally from the Dominican Republic. Regalii is a very personal project for him; when he emigrated to the United States to go to college and work, he sent money home to his grandmother every month and found aspects of it problematic.
“To send her money, then for her to have to go one place to pay a bill, then another place to pay another bill, and so on every month, was a problem for me, and for her as well,” De La Cruz told eWEEK. “So, four years ago, we decided to start Regalii.”
During the past year, the company—which launched in 2012 as a pioneer in the cross-border payments market—discovered that specific needs of its banking partners in domestic markets were not being met.
“What we discovered was that our platform, now used by dozens of financial institutions in 11 countries, was fundamentally changing the way all bills are paid by all people, immigrants and non-immigrants alike,” De La Cruz said. “In the U.S. alone, this is a $1.2 trillion market. We took this discovery as a mandate to not only expand our market focus, but to continue developing our platform on the innovation front.”
Customers and Partners
Regalli, which has a satellite office in Mexico City, also announced that it is partnering with a number of other banks and FinTech partners to bring the new platform to market.
“Millennials want more instant ways of managing their finances and bills,” said Michel Poignant, CEO at Paytoo Mobile Bank. “In addition, with the Regalii xChange API, we can make 100 percent of our new cards active and profitable from day one, with no wait time, even before the card arrives in the mail. And by enabling us to become the default form of payment in all of our users’ bills, the Regalii platform allows us to become top of wallet—instantly. That’s pretty powerful for a young bank, and Regalii is helping to make that happen.”
Regallli is funded by Andreesen Horowitz and Mitch Kapor, among others. For more information about the platform, go here.