Cross River Bank is one of the most forward thinking banks in the US. This is due to early embrace of fintech and their relationships with most of the major companies operating in fintech today. Today, they announced another significant partnership with Stripe, the popular online payments processor to better serve their customers.
This partnership is tackling the segment often referred to as the marketplace or gig economy, those who work in ridesharing, food delivery and other freelance occupations. Through Cross River’s API platform, workers will have access to their wages through push to card payments and most importantly the move will speed up the time in which they get access to their funds.
Gig economy companies like Uber have worked to providing a better experience to their drivers by delivering payments within hours instead of days. The main issue with issuing payments to debit card accounts is that there are 12 national debit networks and each bank isn’t on every network, slowing down the transaction time. Stripe has solved this problem allowing for transactions to post instantly no matter where the merchant or payment recipient is located.
Not only is Stripe’s network faster, but it also is more reliable as most payments systems rely on legacy infrastructure. According to PaymentsSource who interviewed Aite Group senior analyst Talie Baker, only 3% of freelance workers received payments via push-to-debit cards last year, so this is an area which has significant room for growth.
