1 min read

Process Cards with Stripe + Twilio

Stripe just announced support for Twilio Pay:

Phone payments are especially common in industries like food, travel, healthcare, retail, and nonprofits, but payment details are often keyed in manually by a human agent. This flow can be riddled with errors and expose companies to security and compliance risks. That’s why we’re partnering with Twilio to help companies integrate phone payments quickly while ensuring the checkout flow remains secure and PCI compliant.

With Twilio <Pay>, businesses can now securely collect payment details with an interactive voice response flow, which is useful for automating payment experiences such as bill collection or donations. For a more personalized experience, employees can also walk customers through an order over the phone: when it’s time to collect the payment, the agent activates Twilio <Pay> to let the customer enter payment info using their keypad—agents can follow the customer’s progress, but won’t see or hear the card details.

This will be huge for anyone that handles phone sales or customers that struggle with online forms. It reminded of an interaction I recently had with a live chat agent where I wanted to switch a subscription to a new plan. For whatever reason, they said that they would need to cancel my current order and then have me resubscribe and re-enter my payment info. They were able to push a new popup to me that included all the forms and outside the agent’s eyes. I thought it was clever.