Evolve Money
 

I'm glad to hear that the ability to schedule payments will be coming soon. Keep up the good work Alex et al.

Folks, just a reminder: don’t forget that Evolve is a for-profit organization. So don’t expect it to help you recycle the same chunk of money again and again just for racking up miles/points. Remember the GoogleWallet guy?

More bluntly, if you find some “loophole” in the system, keep silent. Case in point: 529s (post #268 http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/22302308-post268.html )

The limit has been $1000 for me. I made payments totaling $1000 on three consecutive days (two $500 cards each day), plus a payment under $200 on the fourth day, and WF combined them all for my monthly mortgage payment. So thankfully the mortgage option works great for me.

Alex,

Welcome to FT and thanks for your post. FT is glad to have someone like you coming forward and discussing things.

I have some questions many here may also want to know the answers to...

1) What is "churning" money according to you/Evolve and how do you determine someone is doing this?

2) What is "too many/too much/crossing the line" with regards to making payments through Evolve?

3) Why did your company remove the ability to pay certain Lines of Credit/Loans, such as Citi Equity over the last few days?

4) How does your company make money without charging a fee on our end (has been asked already here but not yet answered as far as I can see)

Thank you,

:)MM

Maybe it was the payee? I kept getting an error to enter a number between 1-999.

Could the issue be simply one single $1000 payment (not allowed) vs multiple payments totaling $1000 (allowed per stated limits) in a day? That seems to be the prevailing theme from the various anecdotes I've seen here.

Hi Alex,

Two questions for legitimate usage of your service:

1. Have you considered increasing the limit to >$1000 for mortgage payments? You could do this in two different ways. First, you could just lift the limit to $2K or $3K for mortgage-related payees. Second, you could change the limit to $2K every 2 days or $3K every 3 days, which at least allows for larger lump sum payments but keeps the overall payment volume limits the same. Can you speak to someone at the company about this? Many of us have mortgage payments over $1K and some lenders absolutely refuse to treat partial payments as anything but a principal repayment, which is frustrating.
2. How would I go about getting my generally "stuck in the 80s" building management company to connect with you and be added as a payee of your service? I have to pay them for monthly maintenance/taxes and I would like to pay using your service. It is a NYC thing.

Thanks.

Hi Alex,

Wondering if you could shed a light on this... Given an example of mortgage payment, normally I would setup an auto-payment with mortgage company to ACH pull directly from my personal checking. The other way here I am interested would be to buy Vanilla Gift/Debit card with 5% cash back Credit Card and then use EvolveMoney to pay mortgage with these VGCs. Late on, I would pay off my CC bill with ACH from the same personal checking. Do you think if this extra involvement with CC would be in your aspect considering as 'churning' money?

Thanks

Some have asked me to find out if Alex is an actual company rep. In FlyerTalk, actual company reps would have their names in green or another color other than the standard blue.

I have asked appropriate people. We can go on the assumptions we want until further notice.

Thanks to everyone for your thoughts, suggestions and comments regarding Evolve Money. I've looked at some of the questions following my last post and have a few answers below. Also, if you have any questions about payments or your account in general please don't hesitate to contact our customer service group. ****I don't review private messages often enough **** and most of the time my suggestion is to call customer service anyway since they have the resources and tools to look into your account and help you.

On to the questions...

$1,000 Limit
I mentioned it in my last post. We are working on increasing this for certain payments. Check back on our site (www.evolvemoney.com), @EvolveMoney on twitter or at www.facebook.com/EvolveMoney often. We'll let you know when its coming.

What we consider good and bad payments
A lot of questions are regarding what we consider good/bad behavior when paying bills. Instead of going into detail about where we set limits let me put it this way... Evolve Money was built so that everyone can pay their everyday bills with whatever payment source they have available. So stick to paying your regular bills like cable, mortgage, car loan, utilities, gas, electricity, wireless phone, insurance and others like those and there should be nothing to worry about. Regardless of whether you pay with your debit card, gift card or cash.

Adding and removing providers
We periodically add new service providers when we can (over 550 coming in the next few weeks). However, we sometimes have to deactivate other providers from our system for various operational reasons. That said, we work very hard to try and provide our customers access to as many providers as we can and often re-enable providers when possible. We hope to be able to re-enable some of the loan providers we deactivated in the last few weeks.

Providers not in our system
If you have a provider not in our system (property management company for example) just go to the Feedback form either on our website (look at the footer) or in the App and provide us with that information. We will be adding a new form on the search page in the next week which will allow you to do it directly from there. Once we know who, we can work to try and add them into our system. Once we do, we'll send you a note to let you know.

Evolve Money's business model
I know a lot of you are curious about our business model. I've mentioned a bit of this before but ultimately we have a "special sauce" that lets us do this a lot cheaper than anyone else (our company focuses on innovation and the bill pay space needs A LOT of it). Today Evolve Money makes money on the same-day Express payments offered. In the coming months we'll be adding a few additional services that will also be financially beneficial for us and our customers. If you like the service and want to help us out then choose an Express provider when setting up your next bill. The bottom line is that paying your standard (non-Express) bills with a debit card or cash will ALWAYS be FREE.

Company rep
I see Marathon Man's post above. Honestly, I'm new to Flyer Talk and just created a standard account. Not sure what needs to happen for me to be set up as a company rep but if one of the moderators can let me know I'll provide whatever information is needed.

We are just starting to build out our social media presence so you should see/hear more from me or my colleagues soon. In the meantime keep the questions and comments coming. And I REALLY want to know what you think of the mobile browser/Android app or desktop solution. What don't you like? How can we make it faster and easier? Don't pull any punches - we want it straight so we can work on making it even better.

Thanks for the thorough response Alex. Your participation here is most welcome.
I noticed that you did not include credit card bills as a "regular bill". Yet evolve will add billpay functionality for credit card companies in the near future?

Alex what constitutes churning? A lot of payments to the same thing? Or the type of payments to a thing? Please clarify.

Also, if you are the company rep, your name may need to be in Green. You may wish to talk to the FlyerTalk Community Director about this. Thank you

...Maybe use Chase Ink variants to buy EVOLVE Pay Bucks since all the locations that sell EVOLVE Pay Bucks are cell phone related (at least around here)...a fee for the EVOLVE Pay Bucks is $3...little bit cheaper than a VISA/MC GC/ReloadIt. Also, this way, you don't have to worry about "what constitutes", etc., etc.

I guess be creative instead of just do what's been given from a blog or whatever.

Went to a cell phone shop list on Evolve site as Evolve Pay Bucks provider. The CSR there had no idea what I was talking about :confused:

vagrants- thanks. can you share any more info on where Evolve Pay Bucks can be purchased, esp with bonused category spend? PM is fine if you prefer.

Other than this rather generic statement on Evolve Money website stating "Get EVOLVE Pay Bucks or a RELoadittm Pack at thousands of locations nationwide, including Safeway, Save Mart, Albertsons, Randalls, Tom Thumb and more" I have seen no info.