$20 million? Meh.

PayNearMe CEO Danny Shader is used to raising money — this was a Series E raise, after all — so the $20 million of funding his company received this week was no big deal to him. More important was the deal struck with Family Dollar stores, which greatly expands PayNearMe’s footprint “in all the locations that matter,” Shader told Bank Innovation.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company has raised more than $56.5 million in total since its founding in 2009.

PayNearMe allows cash-dependent customers to pay bills and send money using retail channels such as 7-Eleven, Ace Cash Express, and now Family Dollar. 7-Eleven and Family Dollar have about 8,000 retail outlets, and Ace has about 1,000, bringing PayNearMe’s footprint to 17,000 stores.

As many as 100 million cash-dependent customers are in danger of being left behind by the movement of transactions to digital channels. PayNearMe solves this problem : “We make cash payments look like an electronic form of tender,” Shader said.

Shader said that PayNearMe’s business “tripled in the last year – we keep growing,” and specified that PayNearMe is strong in the housing sector, government, transportation, lending, direct sales, and has a large presence in healthcare. “There is need with the Affordable Care Act to collect from cash consumers, error-free and at scale,” Shader said. “We’re expanding vertical by vertical. We have no fraud, no chargebacks.”

The platform is broadening in other ways, as well. On the horizon are initiatives in e-commerce and with financial institutions. Expanding the platform requires new hires in engineering and customer service.

“It takes an amazing amount of technology to make something simple,” Shader said. “Apple showed that.”

PayNearMe faces not only engineering challenges, but regulatory ones, however. “We have more lawyers than most companies have product managers,” he joked.

But the process of getting money transmittal licenses for 47 different jurisdictions in the United States alone is no joke, and to be a player in bill pay, which PayNearMe expects  to be soon, requires just that. For now, Shader says, “What we are doing is not money transmittal. We do merchant processing.”

The engineering challenge of working three large retail chains’ point-of-sale systems is considerable. Shader shared some specifics as to how PayNearMe payments register with the systems at each store, noting that at 7-Eleven and Family Dollar, the payments “look like” gift card purchases.

Shader also emphasized that he is content with PayNearMe’s retail reach. “We don’t want to dilute our presence,” he said, which would presumably mean costing its retail partners business, “but we’ll be looking carefully to see if there’s a gap.” Family Dollar filled an important gap in large cities such as Atlanta and New York.

Another opportunity for PayNearMe lies outside the borders of the U.S., but the Sunnyvale-based company is concerned with capitalizing on opportunities domestically for the time being. Shader estimates the company’s potential market at $220 billion annually, so there is plenty of work to be done here before going abroad, “but we know that our technology would work well internationally,” Shader said.

And of course, banks represent another large opportunity. For the moment banks are missing out on providing payment services to cash-dependent customers beyond issuing prepaid cards, but the new breed of enhanced ATMs being rolled out by JPMorgan Chase, Fifth Third and others, could do just that. We know that PayNearMe, for one, has noticed.

Learn more about what’s next in banking at Bank Innovation 2014 on March 3-4 in Seattle. Request an invitation here.