A less-than-three-year-old Greater Cincinnati payments company is seeing sales soar after it has expanded its product to a broad variety of uses.
Blue Ash-based Payload has rebranded its key product to Keybox as it expanded its capabilities to enable digital payments every step of the way in a real estate transaction, Payload CEO and co-founder Ryan Rybolt told me.
“We’re delivering a secure portal for monetary movement in real estate transactons,” Rybolt said.
He and Ian Halpern co-founded Payload in 2019. The next year they introduced Earnestly, a product that provided digital payment capabilities for people paying earnest money as they were buying a house. Such technology built upon the technology real estate companies have used for some time for electronic signatures.
But they found there are typically 12 to 16 monetary transactions in a real estate deal, including paying commissions to brokers and closing payments. Brokers and title companies wanted to use Payload’s products for those transactions too, Rybolt said.
“The digital transformation of payments was left behind,” Rybolt said. “It was heavy on checks and wiring money.”
So Payload has added those other capabilities and rebranded the product to Keybox.
“It’s a massive vertical,” Rybolt said. “It makes brokers more efficient. They’re not chasing checks around. They can focus on the home-buying experience and not the courier experience.”
The results since it made the change about six months ago are also massive.
Payload’s revenue has grown 800% since the first quarter of 2020. Last year it processed more than $300 million in payments. Rybolt expects that figure to more than double this year. Last year, Payload added nearly 400 locations, such as brokerages and title companies, nationwide and in Canada using its product.
“I attribute the growth to how the software platforms in the real estate industry have integrated the Keybox platform,” he said. “We’re becoming the Venmo for business-to-business or consumer-to-business payments.”
The growth is causing Payload to expand its employee base. It doubled from three to six employees last year. It plans to add another 10 to 12 this year, Rybolt said. It’s mostly looking for software developers and people who can help it expand the business.
Payload works with e-signature platforms such as DocuSign, SkySlope and DotLoop (founded in Cincinnati) to integrate its products in those platforms. That way, real estate agents use its product as a part of the software they already use.
Carolina One, a real estate firm in Charleston, S.C., has been using Keybox. It has been “widely accepted” by its agents, Carolina One COO Dave Sansom told me.
“Rollout was a breeze and we've seen immediate adoption,” he said. “It’s a big step in our quest to eliminate checks.”
Payload mostly competes with the old-school way of paying with checks and wiring money, Rybolt said. While there are a few payments companies in the real estate world, they focus on a specific part of the transaction rather than each payment in the process. Payload, he said, is the only one that covers all of those payments with one solution.
Rybolt helped launch locally based Infintech in 2004 and was president for more than a decade. The company provides business-to-business payment processing and other payment services for companies. It merged with Nashville, Tenn.-based I3 Verticals in August 2015.
