4 days ago
Pushpay targets church payment niche
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The payments company Pushpay has a clientele that makes it stand out from its industry peers. Rather than processing purchases for for-profit companies, the Redmond, Washington-based firm handles donations to faith-based non-profits.
Pushpay CEO Kenny Wyatt explained this month how the Redmond, Washington-based company moved to the U.S. and settled on this niche customer base after being founded by New Zealanders Chris Heaslip and Eliot Crowther in 2011. Wyatt joined the company last year and became CEO last month.
The vast majority of the company's customers are churches, he said. A Pushpay spokesperson declined to say what the company charges customers in monthly and transaction fees.
In a May 9 interview, Wyatt noted that processing donations is different from handling other kinds of transactions, such as credit card purchases.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
PAYMENTS DIVE: Tell me how Pushpay got started.
KENNY WYATT: We were founded primarily as a payments provider focused on faith-based organizations as well as nonprofits, and we've continued to grow and move into more pieces of that category. Our church management system pairs churches with donations. We've also moved into streaming content, streaming media. We work with some of the largest churches in the United States. We serve about 15,000 churches preliminary across the U.S.
Can you tell me a little bit about the history of your company?
Our U.S. headquarters is here [in Redmond, Washington]. We were founded in New Zealand. The founders both came from New Zealand, but since the vast majority of our customers are here in the U.S., we consider the Great Northwest our home.
Can you talk a bit more about the services you provide?
I'll start with the software side. If you're an executive pastor for a church, what you care deeply about is connection. Who is walking through your front door, or who is watching you on a livestream? How do you create a connection? Sunday services, Wednesday services, running child check-ins, the volunteer schedule, the people database — organizing those things, that's the software piece of it. But the church all started around the congregants who walk in the front door [and donate to the church], and that's where the payments piece picks up. As they are in the service, or even outside of the service, they use the payments platform to process credit card donations or ACH donations.
Do churches only see cash, credit card or ACH donations?
Congregants can process crypto as well as other non-cash gifts [such as stock in a company].
Are stock and crypto donations common?
It's a small total, but it does represent the largest gifts. We're seeing quite a few donations come through crypto. While it's a small percentage of total donation volume, it's multiples of cash or credit card gifts.
How do you make money?
The insights we can provide, people data, donation data, taking in the processes by which the church is operating and helping them do that better, that is worth something to them. [We charge] a monthly fee, and that gives them rich insights about their congregants. And then on the payments side, we are a payments business, so depending on the type of payment, we're collecting a very small fee. But it's making it much easier for the church to be able to collect donations and fund its ministry.
Is processing donations different from processing payments for for-profit companies?
The interface can be a bit different. If you're sitting at a service and there is a giving moment, there are multiple ways you can give. One is a recurring gift that you can set up on ACH or a credit card. One is a QR code, which is for new joiners or new congregants. Another is to be able to interact through a website or through a giving platform. We just launched Tap to Give [which lets congregants donate by tapping a button on a mobile app] a couple of weeks ago.
Apple Pay has been adopted pretty heavily by many of our churches because of the ease of giving through the phone. There are a multitude of ways that congregants will engage that are different from swiping a credit card
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