Text messages recover payments that email misses — they are opened faster, by more people, on the device where the customer's banking app also lives. Which is exactly why the interesting question about dunning SMS is not what the message says. It is whether you were allowed to send it.
In the United States, that permission belongs to the merchant, not the recovery tool. The customer consented to the merchant's messages when they subscribed; a recovery platform sends on the merchant's behalf, inside that consent, or it does not send at all. Swipe Again is built on that line: merchants warrant at signup that their customers agreed to receive payment messages from their business, every text ends with "Reply STOP to opt out," opt-outs land in a suppression list checked before every single send, and STOP and START keywords are handled by webhook the moment they arrive.
The mechanics are unglamorous and total. There is no send path that skips the suppression check. There is no campaign tool that can text a merchant's whole list. The channel exists for one purpose — telling a specific customer that a specific payment failed, with a link to fix it — and the recovery flow caps it at three texts per failed payment.
Copy still matters; a clear, branded, human message outperforms a threatening one. But copy is the second problem. The first problem is a consent chain you can prove, an opt-out you honor instantly, and a sender who never forgets either. Get those right and the texts you are allowed to send turn out to be the ones that work.
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