Leaders In Payments

My guest this week has a genuine passion for people and was focused on financial services before the term ‘digital transformation’ even existed. EngageSmart President of Enterprise Solutions Kevin O’Brien is a true leader in payments.

For those of you who may not know, EngageSmart is a SaaS platform focused on simplifying the customer and client experience. Their main verticals include health and wellness, utilities, insurance, customer finance and tax, while their goal is to create a more streamlined experience for their clients that look to engage their customers largely through payments. 

SimplePractice is a proprietary solution that caters to the behavioral health space with a virtual software solution capable of managing scheduling, payments and all the tasks in between. DonorDrive supports the non-profit space, while HealthPay24 helps health systems, physician groups and dental practices. And finally, InvoiceCloud is their largest digital solution targeting online bill pay in the utility, insurance, and customer finance space. 

Tune in to hear him talk about his journey to the role of President of Enterprise Solutions, including where he sees the industry going in the next 2 to 3 years as it relates to online bill pay adoption and the Amazon-like experience every customer is looking for. We also talk about what we can do as an industry to capture the non-digitally native population, as well as the variance in adoption rates from vertical to vertical. 

As we continue our deep dive into embedded finance, my guest this week is here to talk to us about some of the most important components when we begin to look at the embedded world beyond just payments. Nium Chief Product Officer Robin Gandhi is willing to guarantee one thing when it comes to the ever-evolving embedded finance trend: “you can’t stop this train!”

And with a company like Nium, non-financial organizations looking to monetize financial services can embed Nium’s API into their tech stack to help them have access to a variety of financial products.

When it comes to the future of the embedded journey, Robin will be the first to say that the momentum is not slowing down and, in fact, is only speeding up. We also spend time talking about who gets disintermediated in the embedded journey? And what does it mean to the industry as a whole? Spoiler alert: according to Robin, “you don’t get disintermediated unless you’re just not paying attention.”

Tune in this week to hear Robin talk about all things embedded finance, including the main ingredient that is absolutely essential and integral to everything in the embedded journey, as well as the one thing that has the potential to slow down its momentum.

My guest this week has a passion for building products that help customers solve their pain points and considers himself a product founder at his core. Torpago CEO and Founder Brent Jackson has made it his mission to simplify spending for small businesses.

For those of you who may not know, Topago is a corporate credit card and spend management platform with slightly north of 1400 small business customers and a very vertical agnostic platform. According to Brent, they have very intentionally and successfully rebuilt the credit card experience from the ground up for small businesses. Their core product revolves around a Visa commercial charge card and spend management software that allows businesses to “spend smarter,” while their most recent product offering enables businesses to launch their own proprietary card programs.

Their software is easily configurable and customizable for anything from a two-person bakery to a 5,000-person brand. And while this makes them predominantly vertically agnostic, their core customer tends to be from non-venture-backed industries. As for their competitive offering, Brent touts the capacity for them to provide an all-encompassing solution – not just a card and not just an expense software, but the best of both worlds combined! Also worthy of mention is the functionality within the software that enables users to swipe, approve and sync in a matter of minutes!

Tune in to hear Brent talk about his journey to CEO, including where he sees the industry going in the next 2- 3 years as it relates to consolidation, innovation, the embedded journey, and the trend of non-financial companies offering core financial products. 

As we continue our deep dive into embedded finance, I have on the show with me this week the woman who quite literally wrote the book on it! Fiat Republic Co-Founder and CC&GO Sophie Guibaud has a passion for embedded finance and has been advocating for it since before the term even existed. In 2022, she co-authored a book titled "Embedded Finance" which is available wherever you buy your books. 

She defines embedded finance as the capacity to provide financial, insurance and lending services to the end user exactly at the point they need it, with the least amount of friction possible. As for the key players that make the embedded ecosystem so prolific (and possible), the regulators are number one on Sophie’s list. They are, after all, the ones that make it conceivable for a non-regulated company to use the license of another already-regulated company to provide value and service for their end users. And this is exactly what Fiat Republic does for the cryptocurrency space.

We also talk about the importance of the tech companies who own the data that makes the embedded value chain possible, as well as the multitude of benefits that result from both a consumer and a brand perspective.

As for the next 5-7 years, Sophie paints the picture of a world where we will be banking everywhere except banks, while our smartphones proactively pay our bills, and our cloud wallet intuitively performs transactions designed to optimize our finances. Tune in this week to hear Sophie talk about the then, now, and when of embedded finance, including the future promise of worry-free finance, frictionless payments, and intuitive optimization.

My guest this week is either all in or all out. When he’s all in, he’s all about fintech. And when he’s all out, he retreats to his own private island where he is consumed by nothing but nature! Zimpler CEO Johan Strand has a passion for learning and riding the line between cutting-edge tech and cutting out technology – completely.

For those of you who may not know, Zimpler is a fintech scaleup doing payments in the account-to-account space. They ride the wave of open banking and open finance and cater to various different industry segments including online gaming, financial services, lending, and investments. According to Johan, the question to always ask first when it comes to anything payments related is “where can we simplify the transaction?” Zimpler strives to provide value to their merchants by offering payments, payouts, data, ID solutions and KYC in a manner that integrates a very comprehensive and seamless experience.

This combination of offerings enables Zimpler customers to both pay and get paid, while at the same time verifying who they’re getting the money from or who they’re paying money to. There are only 492 companies in Europe that have the license to do what they do, and their competitive advantage includes a proprietary product offering that improved cashflow by 30% for their participating merchants.

Tune in this week to hear Johan talk about his journey to CEO, including where he sees the industry going in the next 2-3 years as it relates to consolidations, partnerships, and the anticipation of a 2035 goal for a completely cashless Nordic ecosystem. 

Growth gurus Sarah Hinkfuss (Partner) and Tina Dimitrova (Associate) from Bain Capital Ventures are our special guests as we continue our new series offering listeners a deep dive into embedded finance! How do you define it, benefit from it, leverage it, and determine whether or not it’s a viable option for your business? Not to mention, just how big can this industry get and why is it continuing to see such rapid growth? These are some of the questions Sarah and Tina help us answer. 

First and foremost, how does one of the world’s leading private investment firm actually define embedded finance? According to Tina, embedded finance is defined as any financial exchange whereby a non-financial institution offers financial services made possible by a financial services company. Some examples she gives of industry leaders that fit this definition include Toast, Shopify, and bill.com. Also worthy of mention is, according to Sarah, each one of these recognizable brands started as pure play software but now have more revenue coming from the financial services they’ve embedded.

So, why has embedded finance taken off and scaled so rapidly? And, more importantly, why have payments led the charge when it comes to all the offerings under the embedded umbrella? Sarah chimes in with the top 4 reasons why payments have come first, as well as a list of contenders we have in line for the embedded space beyond just payments. Spoiler alert: Lending is the next runner up!

Tune in to hear about all things embedded finance, including just how big this already $7 trillion industry is projected to grow. We also discuss the Holy Grail of embedded insurance, the various reasons why banks will be forced to participate in the embedded ecosystem, and why the strength of fintech is also its shadow. 

If you ask my guests this week about his journey to CEO and President he will be the first to tell you that it’s been a winding trail with a lot of learning on the fly. He started out with a law degree but eventually found himself in payments with a genuine passion (and opportunity) to meet as many of our industry innovators as possible. Innovative Payments Association (IPA) CEO and President Brian Tate leads on behalf of our industry and strives to see it flourish.

For those of you who may not know, IPA is a trade group of a little over 60 companies and their job is to focus solely on payments! They help members digest what is going on in the ecosystem around them, including the most recent regulatory framework and anything of interest on Capitol Hill.

One of the main benefits they provide for our industry is advocacy. They make it their business to develop positions on a consensus basis within their membership team and then use those positions to advocate for the industry as a whole. They ensure key decision makers are educated on the opinions of their membership group and they help their members understand the products in the industry and how they can be used to benefit it most significantly.

Tune in this week to hear Brian talk about his journey to the role of CEO and President, including how an innocent Google search landed him at the desk of his future employer. We also talk about where he sees the industry going in the next 2-3 years as it relates to innovation spikes, super aps, and behind the scenes support systems.

KeyBank EVP and Head of Commercial Product & Innovation Jon Briggs officially commences our embedded finance series sponsored by NMI. For the next six episodes, we’ll be taking a deep dive into this extremely prolific segment of our global ecosystem. How do banks create a successful strategy for embedded finance? What role can and should competitor fintechs play in this strategy and, most importantly, how can you best benefit the end user? Jon is here to answer all this and more.

 First and foremost, KeyBank defines embedded finance as the secret sauce to answering the following question: How do we take every product and service we offer as a bank today and get it placed in platforms to enable the end client to benefit as much as possible? And this is the ultimate goal for Jon and his team.

 When it comes to all the factors at play in creating a successful strategy for embedded banking, there are many, many moving parts. To start off, the value chain will be different for every end customer. And every customer is coming to the table with a different level of maturity and potential. Some have a robust tech stack already and others don’t. Some have a healthy appetite for risk and others feel differently. This being the case, success in this space requires a flexible model that can meet any client where they are in a manner that fulfills their needs and allows them to build the best possible customer experience.

Tune in to hear Jon talk about his strategy for success in embedded finance, including the need to maximize your data, the necessity of modern underwriting, and the important role fintechs play in maximizing KeyBank’s embedded ecosystem.

My guest this week has a genuine passion for building products, teams, and businesses. He has worked for some of the largest payment brands in our ecosystem and his focus is always on reinvention, which would explain why he, himself, holds 27 patents in the payment space. Convera our CEO Patrick Gauthier moved to the U.S. 30 years ago for what was supposed to be a three-year stint and, fortunately for us, and never looked back.

You may not know, Convera (also previously called Western Union Business Solutions) is a cross-border payments company with a mission to make cross-border transactions easy so a variety of businesses with global aspirations can grow with confidence. And according to Patrick, confidence is the main ingredient for the success of their platform. 

Convera serves 200 countries and territories and supports more than 140 different currencies. They serve a variety of different industry segments, including higher education, nonprofit, import/export, travel, and financial institutions. And their two main offerings revolve around something called Spot Payments, which provides payments across currencies and across borders immediately, as well as various different options that help companies successfully analyze and manage their risk over time.

Tune in this week to hear Patrick talk about his journey to CEO, including the one question he always asks himself when it comes to any new venture or project: “How can we meet the customer need differently for a better outcome?” I also talk about where he sees the industry growing in the next 10 years as it relates to several “megatrends” he specifies throughout the industry: Electronification, democratization, and the evolution of the increasingly complex regulatory framework.

My guest this week started her career path in electrical engineering and wound up, thankfully, in the payments space. With a career that has spanned successfully over multiple years and countries, one might begin to ask the question “how did you get from electrical engineer to CFO?” For Episode Six CFO and Cofounder Chermaine Hu, the answer is “someone had to be CFO” and she figured it might as well be her.

For those of you who may not know, Episode Six is a technology company that offers infrastructure technology primarily to banks, who then provide payments and financial products to their customers. Their two main areas of expertise are payment processing services and a digital ledger offering. And as for their target audience, their tech stack is light enough for the smaller regional banks, but sophisticated enough for the larger enterprise banks looking to provide genuine value to their customers.

When asked about their competitive advantage, Chermaine touts the capacity to provide exactly what their clients are looking for in a customizable format that allows them to offer their customers exactly what they want. Their technology is flexible, adaptable, and resilient and they are not burdened by limitations with their potential or scalability. In fact, according to Chermaine, Episode Six can give you what you need better, faster, and relatively cheaper than their other competitors.

Tune in this week to hear Chermaine talk about her journey to CFO, including her passion for building a career built on problem-solving. We also talk about where she sees the industry going in the next 2 -3 years as it relates to a hard push towards more digitized and modernized tech sacks in the financial services space, newer, better, and future proof technology, and what factors in the current market climate have helped companies that should succeed be successful.