Twilio and Stripe announces Twilio Pay for payments over the phone

Twilio partners with Stripe to release Twilio Pay – a product that allows secure payments to take place over telephone calls. Twilio’s existing programmable voice customers are required to add only a few lines of code to start using this new feature.

Phone payments are a common sight in multiple industries including retail, food, travel, and other sectors, and the payment details like the card details, security code and other sensitive details are still keyed in manually by a human operator. Twilio Pay puts an end to this error-prone process and shields companies from getting exposed to security and compliance risks.

Most importantly, the new product addresses two pain points of customers making payments over a phone call: reading credit card numbers aloud in a public place, and concern about the trustworthiness of the operator on the other end of the call.

With Twilio Pay, which is PCI compliant, businesses can now securely collect payment details with their interactive voice response systems – useful for automating payment experiences such as bill collection or donations. And for a more personalized experience, companies can have human agents walk customers through an order over the phone: when it is payment time, the agent activates Pay to let customers enter card details using their keypad. The sensitive data is then tokenized and securely processed and the human agent won’t see or hear any of it until the payment is initiated.

Twilio Pay, which is now in public beta, will become generally available in the first half of 2019.