By Deborah Matthews Phillips
During times of crisis, such as today’s COVID-19 pandemic, small businesses rely on community banks for help in navigating the volatility and in executing the right measures to maintain fiscal health.
As new guidelines for containing COVID-19 are established to limit in-person contact, offering digital payments solutions to your small-business customers is an important way to reinforce your support while enabling their continued ability to process payments and to pay employees and bills.
Here is a checklist of tactics community bankers can deploy to support their small-business customers during the coronavirus pandemic:
Communication is vital.
- Contact your small-business customers to assure them of your steadfast support. It’s more important than ever to instill confidence and remind customers that the banking system is strong and resilient.
- If your bank is making changes to branch access or hours of operations, make sure you are communicating updated information via multiple channels, including email, your website and social media.
- Encourage them to reach out with questions by providing a direct contact name and contact information. Make sure the bank has updated contact information for companies, including email addresses and mobile phone number.
Help small-business customers leverage the power of self-service, digital solutions.
- Ensure corporate customers can pay their employees via direct deposit.
- Promote digital channels for account-to-account transfers, electronic bill payments, and e-invoicing capabilities.
- Assist companies in establishing ACH and wire capabilities. Make procedural training available for company employees, including processes for sending payment instructions and establishing remote, digital approval processes.
- Help companies set up positive pay—an automated fraud detection tool—to mitigate fraud.
- Suggest remote deposit capture functionality to process checks, eliminating a trip to a branch, and consider waiving transaction fees to encourage usage. Review velocity settings and dollar-limit thresholds for customers already set up on remote deposit capture to accommodate increased transaction volume.
- Ensure your ATM is well stocked with cash and accepts deposits. Sanitize ATMs in compliance with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) protocols, and consider providing disinfecting wipes by your ATM.
Credit and debit card payments:
- If your debit and credit cards are already certified for use with Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and Google Pay, congratulations! If not, take steps today to ensure all customers can use digital wallets. Provide incentives so your issued credentials are selected as the default payment method.
- Does your bank provide merchant acquiring services? If so, ensure your small-business customers are aware of these services to receive customer payments made with credit and debit cards.
- Check with your core processor or digital technology partner to ensure your bank is optimizing digital tools available for small businesses. Some small businesses may not need a complete shopping cart checkout system to offer ecommerce options; they may be well served with “lightweight” solutions, such as a hosted payment page that can be seamlessly linked to the company’s website.
- Offer virtual purchasing cards and prepaid cards for employees of small businesses that need to buy supplies and make purchases on behalf of their company.
Credit and liquidity issues:
- Maintaining a healthy cashflow is paramount for small-business viability. Review lines of credit and access to capital in the event your customer’s receivables are delayed, affecting liquidity.
- Consider forbearance of loan payments. Where appropriate, offer extensions of loan terms and consider allowing deferred interest to be rolled into the loan’s principal balance and waiving interest penalties for late payments for a few months.
Offer educational tools:
- Remind companies of safe cash-handling protocols.
- To help mitigate fraud, provide companies with information on business email compromise and corporate account takeover.
- Lack of adoption of digital payments solutions may be the result of lack of awareness. Communicate the value of new features, such as card controls.
- Small-business owners may be stressed about the future and need your help in steering through challenges presented by the pandemic. Providing virtual access to experienced staff for financial guidance reinforces the personal nature of community banking.
When this crisis has passed, your small business customers will remember the ways in which you prioritized their future viability. There is no better way to instill enduring loyalty than to serve your customers in their time of need.
Deborah Matthews Phillips is ICBA senior vice president of payments and technology policy and ICBA Bancard senior vice president of industry relations.
