Earlier this year, Birmingham-based Regions Bank partnered with two specialty firms to provide additional services to its business customers.
In January, Regions announced a partnership with payment technology and software company Worldpay, a Global Payments company, headquartered in Atlanta. The new collaboration, Regions Merchant Services by Worldpay, provides the latest in payment acceptance technology for in-person and electronic transactions for a range of industries, including restaurants, retail, healthcare, professional services and hospitality. The service offers leading-edge and multi-layered fraud protection, intelligent authentication, disputes and chargeback management along with compliance management and other services to ensure payment safety.
The Regions-Worldpay collaboration also complements Regions360, a team-based banking model that brings together experts from consumer banking, commercial banking, mortgage banking and wealth management to meet the financial needs of individual customers and businesses.
Small businesses benefit as well due to added in-branch support and access to dedicated branch bankers who are well-versed in small business management.
Worldpay is available at all of Regions’ approximately 1,250 branch locations across the South, Midwest and Texas.
More recently, in April Regions announced the launch of Regions ReimbursePro, a new digital treasury management tool backed by Dash Solutions, a payments and engagement technology company also headquartered in Birmingham. ReimbursePro offers Regions’ treasury management clients a secure digital platform to process and expedite their refund operations.
“Money is moving more quickly than ever, so when we think about our treasury management strategy here at Regions, it’s really [about] investing in digital technologies and capabilities that are going to help our clients automate their cash flow, improve their visibility and ultimately support their growth where they are and where they want to go,” says Bryan Ford, head of Treasury Management for Regions Bank.
ReimbursePro is part of a suite of treasury management services available through Regions that are designed to improve cash flow, streamline payables, manage liquidity and mitigate risk. The goal, says Ford, is to help commercial clients understand where their money is and give them confidence in how they manage it.
“We do a lot to develop solutions in house here at Regions, but we also work closely with third-party providers and fintech solutions like Dash Solutions that really allow us to take advantage of where they are investing and gives us the ability to accelerate our speed to market for new treasury capabilities. It gives us a chance to bring best-in-class solutions to our clients without having to worry about what is inevitably a long development cycle. So, we’re really very excited about the opportunity to work with Dash Solutions.”
Dash Solutions was founded in 1998 and has evolved from a prepaid payroll card provider into a comprehensive payments and engagement platform that serves enterprise and middle-market organizations across a wide range of industries, including healthcare and clinical research, restaurants and hospitality, construction and manufacturing, automotive, government and regulated industries, higher education and utilities. The company’s platform supports payroll, expense management, rewards and incentives and corporate disbursements by replacing manual and paper-based processes with digital payment solutions.
“A real trigger point in our business was COVID,” explains Dash Solutions CEO Stephen Faust.
Companies were suddenly struggling to maintain their day-to-day operations, and a big part of that challenge was processing payments, especially in the healthcare sector, which handles a massive volume of payment activity.
“We took that as an opportunity to accelerate our development and technology and really build something that was state of the art to solve [those problems], to allow companies to make that transition easily and add value back to the business, drive efficiency and then meet the customers and recipients where they wanted to be met in the market. That’s what we’ve been doing here in Birmingham for a long time and having a lot of fun with it.”
“One of the major pain points that we kept hearing from our client base really had to do with patient refunds. It’s a very clunky process, but an important one for our clients, and a lot of it has been paper-based,” says Ford.
A major challenge of that paper-based reimbursement system was tracking down patients who were due refunds. Regions began looking for a fintech company to partner with to address those needs and ultimately landed on Dash Solutions.
“The money that moves through healthcare is phenomenal, and there are so many different applications,” says Faust. “We were in a great spot because our technology is very flexible and we can adapt that technology and move quickly to meet the needs of these customers that are looking to modernize.”
With ReimbursePro, Regions business clients can send one-time payments to customers via a secure portal and have access to detailed reporting to support reconciliation. Once a reimbursement is initiated, recipients can spend funds immediately via their digital wallet or elect to have them sent to a preferred checking or savings account or digital payments platform. The process helps reduce unclaimed refunds and escheatment and significantly lowers the risk of check-related errors or re-issues. And ultimately, it reduces the costs and time associated with printing, mailing and replacing checks.
In addition to healthcare, ReimbursePro works with many other industries including insurance and finance, energy and utilities, higher education, legal, telecom and technology services, nonprofit and government agencies and real estate and property management.
And it sells itself, says Ford.
“We’ve launched a number of solutions here over the last two to three years, and I would tell you that what we’ve done with Regions ReimbursePro has been the strongest demand that we’ve seen of any of those capabilities or solutions.”
Ford also sees plenty of opportunity for future growth in the partnership with Dash Solutions.
“They keep sharing examples of places they’ve seen their solutions work, and we’ve got clients that have those needs. It’s been a very strong collaboration.”
“I thought I knew a lot about Regions, but through this partnership it’s easy to tell why they’re so successful in the market,” says Faust. “They take a very professional and collaborative approach when they work with partners, and we’ve [both] been leaning into that. You start to see the fruits of these efforts quickly. It’s really been great.”
Ford says, “Convenience is a big driver for clients. And when I say ‘clients,’ I mean not just our business clients, but consumers as well. [We’re all] consumers, and we know what that convenience feels like. While we’re often targeting a business entity, we also think about it from the consumer side of the house and what that convenience means. We see it, our business clients see it, and that gives us an ‘in’ on the consumer side as well. And it’s been a great opportunity to work with a Birmingham-based entity.”
Katherine MacGilvray is a Huntsville-based freelance contributor to Business Alabama.
This article appears in the July 2026 issue of Business Alabama.
