Paytech vs. Fintech: Why Healthcare and Pharmaceutical Markets Need Both

In this era of digital innovation, technology is evolving faster than ever. This is particularly true in the healthcare and financial sectors, where businesses are constantly finding new ways to streamline processes and provide services to growing numbers of customers or patients. While money transfer services have been around for decades, paytech is a relatively new development. However, as the growth of disruptive technology accelerates, once state-of-the-art paytech systems are rapidly evolving to meet new experience standards. This article reveals the differences between paytech and fintech and ways that paytech companies are transforming themselves with fintech capabilities and offerings.

Paytech vs. Fintech: What's the Difference?

For business owners, the distinction between paytech and fintech is crucial. Paytech refers to payment technology that’s used to perform business transactions in near real-time. By itself, the introduction of paytech was a revolutionary change. It allowed businesses to streamline financial transactions, increase payment velocity, and drive economic growth. Paytech is just one component of fintech, which encompasses a fuller range of financial services, from online loans to blockchain-based open banking and smart contracts. The ultimate goal of paytech is to move from one-on-one payments to systems that facilitate multiple payments between groups. Rather than a series of payments from the customer to the retailer, retailer to the distributor, and distributor to the manufacturer, the customer's payment triggers the distribution of payments to everyone in the supply line. Fintech provides a much wider collection of services and solutions for businesses and consumers.

The Benefits of Expanding from Paytech to Fintech

When you implement a paytech solution, you gain the benefits of real-time payments and streamlined supply lines. But with fintech, you can manage your company's financial operations from a broader base. As mobile banking, data analytics, information-sharing, and automation become increasingly intertwined, businesses and consumers benefit from the ability to utilize fintech in new ways. Since fintech largely depends on automated systems, tasks that were once handled by individuals in banking institutions can now be completed on consumer mobile devices, reducing overhead costs and increasing customer satisfaction simultaneously. Overall, the fintech approach is more versatile, agile, and better positioned to address underserved markets, particularly healthcare.

How the Healthcare and Pharmaceutical Markets Benefit from Fintech Solutions

While fintech largely began as a means to support back-end systems at banks and financial institutions, the model has evolved to incorporate more customer-facing services. Far from being limited to the financial sector, fintech is incorporated into a wide variety of industries, especially complex markets like healthcare and pharmaceutical.

The pharmaceutical industry has already been using disruptive fintech technology to develop and support vital patient affordability programs. Leveraging paytech solutions, industry players are developing innovative solutions to streamline coverage and insurance claims management systems. With affordability and access issues commonplace even among those with healthcare insurance, fintech has the opportunity to play a key role in helping patients get and stay on vital medications. Coupling digital payment and reimbursement methods with improved treatment cost transparency helps patients better manage both planned and unplanned medical expenses. In addition, allowing for payments over time, providers can ensure their patients have the tools to manage unreimbursed charges and patients can focus on their care.

What do these changes mean? While paytech is essential for near real-time payments, growing into a fintech allows for a broader strategy that diversifies and automates a wider range of services. To compete in today's ever-changing markets, agility is crucial — and fintech is leading the way.

How FirstView Can Help

As an industry-leading fintech company, the cornerstone of our services suite is ProXe360®, our state-of-the-art omni-channel fintech platform. With ProXe360’s four key components, we make sending and receiving payments simple for companies in markets with challenging and complex payment needs.

1. Omni-Channel Payments with ProXepay^TM
Omni-channel payments create flexibility by enabling our clients to deliver payments through the right channel, at the right time to the right account. Our unique and proprietary capability provides on-demand payments via debit card, ACH, direct push pay, and check. Also, as a Visa and Mastercard program manager and processor, our passive and stored value debit card solutions can be delivered in a variety of ways including traditional plastic cards, virtual SMS/mobile cards, virtual email/web cards and alternative payment methods.

2. Customer and Patient Engagement Through ProXeview^TM
Our world-class portal, ProXeview^TM, provides the ability to manage your base of providers and patients, including enrollment, onboarding, screening and ongoing engagement. The portal also centralizes all account and funding information and simplifies payment reconciliation.

3. Pharmacy Claims Adjudication Through ProXeclaim^®
Unique to the specialty pharmaceutical market, ProXeclaim is a one-stop solution for creating and managing highly configurable programs that enable pharma manufacturers to provide a comprehensive offering that meets the needs of both pharmacies and patients. ProXeclaim capabilities enable dynamic pricing to the pharmacy, and when combined with copay offset rules, ProXeclaim provides the only solution that overcomes both pharmacy and patient cost barriers. The end result is increased prescription fill and refill rates and enhanced patient therapy adherence.

4. Seamless Platform Integration Using our API Suite
Our API library provides a comprehensive suite of capabilities and enables our clients to seamlessly implement and control the entire program – or just selected features. As a fintech-as-a-service platform, ProXe360 can provide fintech capabilities to other B2B and B2C platforms, through both API suite and custom integration.

Visit FirstViewFinancial.com to learn more, schedule a demo of our ProXe360 platform or connect with one of our fintech experts.