This is our first episode in Financial Inclusion month. Every year we dedicate one month to financial inclusion – my goal is to highlight and bring awareness to what the payments and/or fintech industry does today to help with the global challenge of financial inclusion and to discuss what more we can do. 

The Clearing House is a banking association and a payments company that is governed by about 23 of the largest financial institutions in the United States. They move money through wires, ACH and check images and maybe are most known for their RTP network which is the nation's newest payment system that provides instant clearing and settlement of payments here in the United States. 

Elena and I go on to talk about some of the challenges that the under-banked and unbanked face, how important it is to bring these segments of the population into the financial system and how companies and other organizations are leveraging the Real Time Payments network. 

We go deep on the importance of Earned Wage Access for both the employee and the employer. This is a vital program that can help the underserved community and is becoming more and more popular. 

Before we dive into the episode, I want to give a special thanks to The Clearing House for sponsoring Financial Inclusion month. To learn more about The Clearing House just visit www.theclearninghouse.org

My guest this week is a Canadian native with a degree in computer science and a lifelong passion for music. In fact, before he decided to go corporate, he was the lead guitarist in a breakthrough band with a passion for clean-cut stardom. Versapay CEO Craig O’Neill started his corporate journey in wealth management before coming to the more pivotal side of payments, but never left his guitar behind.

For those of you who may not know, Versapay is a fintech company with a focus on both software and payments to simplify and automate A/R. They facilitate upwards of $60 billion in payments between participating companies and their mission is to change the way businesses do business together by simplifying the transaction process. How do they do this? By modernizing how companies transact in a wildly untapped market space.

One of the things we talk about in this podcast are the factors that actually drive a company to modernize. According to Craig, this includes:

·       Getting paid faster

·       Reducing cost of manual labor 

·       And optimizing the customer experience

As for their competitive advantage, Craig touts Versapay’s ability to solve the disconnect in payments through collaborative A/R. According to him, 50% of the time, customers say they never even received their invoice. And if you then combine this with a lack of visibility and lack of integration, you then land on process friction as the main catalyst to what slows payments collection down. Versapay aims to solve this disconnect through solutions that do more than just automate the A/R process and integrations that allow for time to market in just days.

Tune in this week to hear Craig talk about his journey to CEO and where he sees the industry going in the next 2 to 3 years, including the rapid growth of electronic payments, the pain points that arise, and the need for smarter payments that carry not only dollars but data as well.

My guest this week is an avid basketball enthusiast, Michael Jordan memorabilia collector and actually gets a lot of his business inspiration and insight when he’s courtside. Rapyd CEO Arik Shtilman has a professional passion to build the biggest company he can – and at a rapid pace. 

For those of you who may not know, Rapyd is a fintech company that provides API for other SMBs and enterprise-level organizations to build financial services applications on top of their white label platform. Arik will be the first to specify though that they are not a payments company but, rather, a fintech-as-a-service company.

So, what is fintech-as-a-service? According to Arik, it breaks down into four basic categories:

·       Payments 

·       Money disbursement

·       Card issuing

·       Digital wallets

And all of these comprise their white label offering that they provide for their clients to be payments prolific with a fully functioning platform. Not to mention, they take care of all the global compliance regulations behind the scenes. So, this means clients coming from almost any space on the globe can transact with confidence and without burden.

Also worthy of mention, the company has raised a total of nearly $800 million in funding, with a $400 million revenue stream and a valuation of $15 billion.

Tune in this week to hear Arik talk about his journey to CEO and where he sees the industry going in the next 2 to 3 years, including a push for even more fintechs, a checkout experience that happens without you even knowing it, and a growth strategy focused solely on gross margin.

My guest this week has a passion for payments and a genuine desire to create a product that others can benefit from. He will also be the first to say that he started a business based on the worst reason to ever start a business, but it worked out for him rather tremendously. Tremendous Cofounder and CEO Nick Baum spent three years punching the corporate time clock before he realized he was meant for something way more fun.

 For those of you who may not know, Tremendous is a payout platform that enables businesses to send money via prepaid cards and gift cards around the world. They make it tremendously simple for companies to pay people without jumping through the hoops of dealing with payroll or registering for undesired payment methods just to get their payout. They work with some of the largest brands out there including Google, Pinterest and Spotify and their most typical use cases revolve around employee recognition, user research incentives and marketing incentives.

 As for their competitive advantage, it revolves around their marketplace niche. They specifically target lower volume, non-recurring payouts and this makes them a standalone in the marketplace because they give so many payment options for these one-off use cases. Money is money and recipients will always want their incentives regardless of the dollar amount. However, it can become cumbersome to have to deal with payroll or alternative payment downloads just to collect a $20 incentive. Not anymore!

 Tune in this week to hear Nick talk about his journey to CEO, how his company actually started, and what he did as a startup that startup companies are absolutely never supposed to do.

My guest this week is a very talented musician with a resume that touts 5 different instruments and his very first job in corporate America was a toy designer. So, how did he end up in the payments space? Dataseers Chief Seer Adwait Joshi will be the first to tell you that he has a true passion for complex data. And what industry utilizes data more than payments?

For those of you who may not know, Dataseers is a back-office solution that helps financial services companies take control of their data assets and then utilize them optimally within their vertical of choice. They are an end-to-end solution with a plethora of use cases that focus predominantly on fraud detection and prevention. 

When it comes to what separates them from their competitors, Adwait boils it down to experience and knowledge. They position themselves in the marketplace as the solution for “taming the data demon” and they analyze all aspects of their customers data to provide them with prescriptive analytics and a consultative approach to reducing risk. According to Adwait, if you guard your gates, you don’t have to waste time chasing bad actors. And something else to keep in mind? Fraudsters only have to be right once to get through your firewall and security protocols. You (the company) have to be right every single time to prevent them. 

Tune in this week to hear Adwait talk about his journey to CEO, including a small consulting engagement that turned into an 11-year career. We also talk about the future of the industry as it relates to the disappearance of fintechs, the consolidation of banks and what the real reason was for the Covid fraud spike. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t really a “spike” after all.

My guest this week is a self-proclaimed technology nerd that built his first hand-held radio at 15 years old. His love for technology eventually turned into an obsession with payments and he hasn’t stopped building since he started. CellPoint Digital Cofounder and CEO Kristian Gjerding has coined the term “payments orchestration” as the foundational offering that his company provides, far surpassing the needs of merchant customers worldwide.

For those of you who may not know, CellPoint is a payments orchestration company that helps merchant clients manage their entire financial supply chain with the intent to: 

1.     Increase conversion rates on digital channels 

2.     Operate more efficiently in the back office 

3.     And reduce the cost of payment acceptance

So, what exactly does Kristian mean when he refers to payments “orchestration?” He is referring to the capacity to enable merchant clients to provide appropriate payment methods based on the entire range of rules and regulations, and an overarching intent to offer the best payment option for their consumers. How? By providing a centralized view of each individual ecosystem, with the ability to manage it in the most optimum and profitable manner.

When it comes to the defining characteristics that enable merchants to know whether or not they need payments orchestration, according to Kristian, it all comes down to a basic frustration with the need for a payments department and payments (in general) becoming such a pain.

Tune in this week to hear Kristian talk about his journey to CEO, including where he sees the industry going in the next 2-3 years as it relates to the rise of efficiencies in the SMB payments market, the continued expansion of alternative payments, a barter-based payment system and the need for a different approach to data as the government continues to get more involved. 

My guest this week is a Boston University graduate with a law degree from Yale and a passion for “building really great software products in complex spaces that make them seem easy.” So, what does that have to do with payments? Well, besides the fact that fintech is most definitely a wildly complex space, it also doesn’t hurt that Coast CEO and Founder Daniel Simon can’t seem to talk about anything but the future of fleet and fuel payments.

For those of you who may not know, Coast is proactively working to build the financial platform for the future of the transportation industry, beginning specifically with fleet and fuel payments. According to Daniel, fleet is a massive space dominated by a handful of players with huge margins and, for whatever reason, the industry never really thinks about it, even though he himself can’t stop. And it’s because of his passion for this under supported industry vertical that he proactively created a modern fleet card entirely from the ground up, “reimagined for how it should be if it were born online and spoke a modern digital language.”

Coast’s core benefit is that it offers a sophisticated solution that allows fleet managers to set policies and rules to proactively control spend. Daniel refers to it as a “vertical-specific expense management solution.” Their target audience is the $4 million local commercial fleet company, but they have customers transacting billions of dollars in revenue over a sales cycle managed in a handful of days. And as for the future vision of the company, Daniel sees Coast eventually offering other financial services to cater to the complex financial lives of their customers, including fleet management software, dispatch software and the like.

Tune in this week to hear Daniel talk about his journey to CEO, including the real reason he went to Yale, the start of his first company, and where he sees the industry going in the next 2 to 3 years as it relates to verticalization, specialization, the need to embed financial services in order to add value in vertical SaaS, and why he’s not betting against the inevitable disappearance of Visa and MasterCard anytime soon.

My guest this week is an avid history buff, Yale graduate and prominent change agent in the healthcare vertical that got his start at the intersection of healthcare and financial services. PatientFi CEO and Cofounder Todd Watts has a fascinating story that revolves around choice: a choice to build a business directly in the epicenter of the two most regulated industries available today.

For those of you who may not know, PatientFi is a technology platform that provides an affordable and user-friendly modality for patients to finance their healthcare procedures. This includes everything from fertility and dentistry to ophthalmology, aesthetics, and plastic surgery. They are the industry leader in training medical sales to market financial options to customers and their target market includes any aspect of the healthcare vertical that is not covered by traditional medical insurance.

As for what makes them stand out in such a heavily saturated marketplace, their go-to-market solution offers a one stop shop to enable approved financing options that are faster, easier, and more amenable to the overall customer base than their competitors. And they partner with banks and credit unions directly to offer first-look and second-look underwriting to ensure patient approval on almost every application.

Tune in this episode to hear Todd talk about his journey to CEO and what makes his solution such a leader in the industry. We also have a very insightful conversation about traditional underwriting procedures versus alternative underwriting modalities. And it all ultimately comes down to data. How do you get innovative with your data and analytics in a manner that enables more resourceful methods for underwriting verification as we enter into a potential economic recession?

My guest this week was born in Barcelona, moved to New York for love and started his entrepreneurial journey out of pure necessity. Nate Founder and CEO Albert Saniger will be the first to say that the only way he knows to create value is to create it from scratch. And that’s just what he did – on a journey that took him from T-shirts to payments in a niche market that targets 60% of the ecommerce population.

For those of you who may not know, Nate is a unified shopping wallet that allows you to share and shop your world without compromising your data. It exclusively targets the non-Amazon purchasing market by offering them the opportunity to aggregate all their purchases into one single app. They are retailer agnostic, and their philosophy is consumer first and consumer only. This means they don’t sell to retailers, nor do they make any money from them. And their target market equates to 60% of the US e-commerce population, or $1 trillion in annual purchasing potential.

As for their business model, it’s completely customer centric. Nate functions as a direct extension of the consumer in that all you have to do find the image of the product you desire on your phone, tap share, tap Nate and then tap buy. Nate will then purchase the order for you using a virtual card. Another bonus? Nate offers a social presence on their app that enables you to share your top picks with your friends and followers. And should someone purchase from your list, you’ll receive a 5% kickback into your Nate wallet just for having good taste.

Tune in this week and hear Albert talk about his journey to CEO, including what fuels his passions both personally and professionally, where he sees the industry going in the next 2-3 years and what it is specifically that makes Nate a “way” to shop versus just a “place” to shop.

My guest this week is a Wyoming native with a passion for solving problems. Known by many in the tech scene as “the disruptive guy,” Nautical Commerce CEO Ryan Lee spent more than a decade operating at the intersection of commerce, fintech and logistics, only to bring us a platform capable of democratizing access to marketplace technology.

For those of you who may not know, Nautical Commerce is a multivendor platform with the elegance of Shopify and a scalability parallel to none. According to Ryan, they are a start-to-finish, soup-to-nuts platform with a toolset that enables turnkey efficiency for B2B or B2C multi-vendor commerce. If they had an ultimate (measurable) goal, it would be “to see the next Jeff Bezos launched from a Nautical company.” They specialize in high-transaction product and digital marketplaces and their competitive advantage lies in the fact that they are a commerce system – versus an app that sits on top of another commerce platform. Payments is the cornerstone capability of their platform and, according to Ryan, the foundation of any successful marketplace.

Tune in this week to hear about Ryan’s journey to CEO, including a self-taught coding proficiency in high school that landed him a certifiable “in” to the technology sector once he got to college. We talk about all things payments, commerce and what the industry looks like in the next 2 to 3 years as it relates to contactless, the proliferation of more payments orchestrators, and crypto as a solution desperately looking for a problem.