Payments technology company PruPay has teamed up with Paypal to develop a text-based payments system, allowing merchants to request one-time payments from customers.

Announced on Thursday, the two payments companies are adding some tools for both merchants and consumers to overcome the challenges of such payments, thus standing out in the crowded market of text-based payments.

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Commenting on the importance of such payments, Bill Sedgwick, CEO at PruPay, said: “COVID-19 has instilled a legitimate fear of sharing or touching anything, both person to person and latently on devices such as keypads, so text payments make even more sense today than just weeks ago.”

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The Denver-based company is also waving its normal fees to help small/medium businesses during the global pandemic. The usual fee for using the platform is a flat 10 cents per transaction, which is now being waived off for three months.

“We added security for merchants and optional add-on services like delivery fees, tipping, and a “Pay it Forward” option that are not provided on native text-to-pay platforms,” Sedgwick added.

All the touchless payments services of the platform are built with PayPal’s payment processing infrastructure.

“We wanted to offer consumers a turnkey way to support their favorite local merchants and provide merchants with a way to allow contributions without marking up their menu prices or adding additional fees if they don’t want to,” the CEO added.

“When payments are processed, there will be a prompt for the customer to add an amount of their choice to support the business voluntarily. Not everyone can contribute, but we have learned that those who are often very generous to the merchants that they want to help. It’s a goodwill gesture versus a requirement, and people appreciate that.”