PayNearMe Augments its Offering With Prism Money Acquisition

Being able to use an app to make payments is great, but it can also make budgeting difficult. When people lose that psychological connection with money and make it little more than numbers on a screen, it can become easier for some people to unintentionally spend more than they normally would. PayNearMe’s recently acquisition of Prism Money may help on that front.

Prism Money is a financial management app geared toward the consumer. With Prism Money in its fold, PayNearMe will be able to offer in-app bill presentment to businesses and financial operations.

Which, in turn, can allow regular users to pay from the app itself using clearing houses, debit or credit cards, and even prepaid cards.

Prism Money can also help users keep track of bank balances, billing amounts, due dates, paycheck deposits, and more—including the ability to make payments—all from the same app.

Tony Chang, Vice President of prepaid product at Visa, commented “Visa prepaid card providers can now easily integrate bill presentment and same-day bill payment into their existing apps, making it easier than ever for Visa prepaid cardholders to pay bills immediately when they receive wages onto their prepaid cards. PayNearMe will provide new functionality for Visa prepaid cardholders, giving them access to new features that will save them time.”

With so many mobile payments systems already in play, and a slate of others following in close order, it’s not surprising that some forward-thinking apps like PayNearMe are looking to the future and seeking to distinguish themselves from the rest of the market.

It’s hard to get interest from users when you’re doing the same thing as everyone else, and when mobile device makers are building their own mobile payment systems right into phones, an independent maker must be sufficiently distinct to break the inertia of “I’ll just use the one that came with the phone.” Tall order, of course, and throwing in financial management tools could be just the thing to break open a new market.

This has the makings of a fine idea for PayNearMe, and though we’ll have to wait a bit to see how it works, it’s likely to do the job and then some.