Companies can move money faster than ever before. However, your customers may still have to navigate a maze of messages, portals, passwords and payment pages before the money starts moving. The disconnect results in a largely invisible loss of revenue for consumer lenders, utilities and other businesses that rely on recurring customer payments.
“Payments are not the point. Conversion is the point,” Shawn Curtis, general manager of payments for SBT, told PYMNTS during a conversation for the 2026 PYMNTS Original Series “Summer School.”
The problem isn’t necessarily that customers don’t want to pay, don’t know what they owe, or can’t get another reminder. The path from the decision to pay to the completion of the transaction remains unnecessarily difficult.
“If it’s a hassle for me to pay you back for this loan, I’ll remember that the next time I need another loan,” Curtis said. “App fatigue is a real thing.”
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Further reminders cannot repair an interrupted payment journey
When payment rates disappoint, many companies respond by increasing the volume of emails, calls, letters and text messages. The strategy treats collections as a consciousness problem. Remind customers often enough and they will eventually pay.
“More volume just means more noise,” Curtis said. “It doesn’t really eliminate the friction.”
The practical solution is simpler. Keep your customers informed and let them pay as soon as they decide to act.
“The biggest difference is between intention and action,” he said. When customers are forced to “switch channels, log in, or take a series of additional steps, each of these actions creates a natural drop in the payment funnel.”
This is the hidden weakness of many debt collection strategies. The notification may work fine. It may reach the right customer at the right time with the right credit. However, if the next step requires five minutes, a password reset, or a separate application, the company has created a new way to cancel.
“You can send me all the reminders you want,” Curtis said, but when companies repeatedly point out poor workflows to their customers, especially ones they already know are inconvenient, the return on the reminders is diminished.
“Payments are no longer just a back-end function,” Curtis said. “They are part of the user experience.”
Text messages capture the moment of intent
A seamless payment doesn’t necessarily result in a memorable customer interaction. A bad one almost certainly will. Text-based payments are becoming increasingly popular because SMS can reduce this distance. Instead of using a message simply to inform customers that a payment is due, businesses can make the message itself the start of the transaction.
“SMS is so effective because it meets the consumer at the moment of their intent,” Curtis said. “It’s fast, it’s easy, it’s confidential, it’s more discreet.”
Phone calls don’t simply create more friction, Curtis said. They can become “a kind of social block” when customers don’t want colleagues or other people around them to overhear the conversation.
But text messaging only improves conversion if it allows the customer to take action without being pushed into another cumbersome channel. A text that leads to an app download, account registration, or extended portal experience can grab attention and still lose the transaction. The option therefore does not exist in a text-to-memory format. It is text-to-completion.
Wallets can’t fix a nine-click funnel
Apple Pay and Google Pay can improve this experience by eliminating the need to search for a card and manually enter payment information.
Still, Curtis cautioned against viewing wallet adoption as a replacement for redesigning the underlying journey.
“Digital wallets in themselves are a great accelerator, but they are not a strategy,” he said.
He described a utility company whose customers have to travel nine clicks between receiving a payment reminder and reaching the point where they can use Apple Pay. The wallet could make the ninth step easier. Removing the top eight has no effect.
The example illustrates a major mistake in digital transformation. Companies often add a modern payment option to an old operational process and describe the result as an innovation. But the customer still experiences the entire journey and not just the payment button at the end.
Trust begins before the link arrives
Reducing clicks presents another challenge. A direct payment link may be convenient, but consumers have also been trained to treat unexpected links with suspicion.
“Trust begins where the request is actually made,” Curtis said.
Companies can use broader messaging with branding, logos and contextual information, but Curtis said credibility should be established even earlier. When customers sign up, businesses can explain what number they will be contacted on, provide a digital contact card, and let them know that future messages may contain payment requests.
This makes trust more than just a compliance problem. It becomes part of the conversion design. Customers must recognize the sender and believe the request is legitimate before transaction speed matters.
Watch the full PYMNTS interview with Shawn Curtis, General Manager of Payments at SBT, to learn more about:
- Why frictional losses in payment transactions are a hidden loss of income. Curtis said that every login, every channel change and every additional click between a customer’s intent to pay and the completed transaction results in abandonment.
- How text-to-pay can turn attention into faster cash flow. More reminders won’t fix a broken payment process, and allowing customers to pay directly through a trusted message can improve completion rates.
- Why payments have become part of the customer experience. Wallets alone can’t fix a cumbersome funnel, and simple, recognizable payment interactions can increase trust, loyalty and customer lifetime value.
https://www.pymnts.com/digital-payments/2026/9-clicks-stand-between-businesses-and-their-money/
