Anand Goel the President and CEO at Optimized Payments is our special guest this week on episode 76 of the Leaders in Payments podcast. 

Anand went to middle school in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, high school in Houston Texas and went University of Texas in Austin for his undergrad degree. He worked at MCI Telecommunications in a management training program, left there and got his MBA from Babson College and stayed in Boston. And in his words “I got into the payments industry because of a girl.”  Ultimately leaving Boston for Atlanta – where he went to work for Elavon. 

Optimized Payments is a payments analytics and consulting firm that has been in business for 14 years. They allow organizations to measure or benchmark the performance of their payments. They built a one-of-a-kind SaaS platform that consumes transaction data from all the big acquirers to not only help their customers save money by reducing the cost of accepting payments but also to enhance or drive revenue as well as many other interesting use-cases.  

Most of their clients do billions of dollars in card payments so clients like Apple, Verizon, Staples, Waste Management and more. Currently 2/3rds of their business comes from recurring SaaS fees for the analytics platform and 1/3 comes from their traditional consulting business.  

On the personal side Anand has two teenage daughters and enjoys spending time with them. 

We’ve got a great episode today so let’s get started.