Leaders In Payments

How does one go from a degree in math and physics to a profession in payments? Highline CEO Geoff Brown has the answer for you on this week’s episode! A self-proclaimed numbers geek, Geoff has a genuine passion for data-driven insights and patterns – all of which support his very successful and beneficial contribution to our U.S. payments ecosystem.

For those of you who may not know, Highline is a brand-new payments network that originates payments directly from payroll platforms. Unlike card and ACH payments that pull directly from the consumers bank account, Highline has the funds pulled directly from the customers paycheck. According to Geoff, this translates to a vastly improve customer experience and a significant decrease in payments liability.

From a consumer perspective, the customer benefits from no longer needing to worry about drafting from their bank account and the payment failures that often can result. Highline pushes out payments to lenders and recurring platforms directly on payday, so the liability is decreased dramatically. The optimum use case for this product revolves around lenders who will be looking to help reduce losses or prepare for an upcoming increase in loss exposure, and Geoff touts a customer experience that is “far better than ACH,” in addition to a one-click authorization process that far surpasses their competition. 

Tune in this week to hear Geoff talk about his journey to CEO, including how he came up with the idea for this entirely unique offering in the payment space. We also talk about where he sees the industry going in the next 2 to 3 years as it relates to the evolution of P2P, the rapid growth of the payroll space, and the anticipated consolidation throughout the banking industry.

My guest this week has a degree in engineering but no passion for being an engineer. Instead, he has a passion for vision, strategy, and execution. And all revolving around the world of payments! ForwardAI CO-Founder and CEO Nick Chandi is a self-proclaimed subject matter expert on “how things need to be done.” And, as is evident by his career, he knows how to do them very well.

For those of you who may not know, ForwardAI is a technology company with a truly distinct offering. They offer a core product and a vertical-specific solution with a proprietary build out that enables seamless integration between the two. Their industry niche is in accounting and their target audience is both fintechs and lenders. 

Their core product, Precise API, connects to multiple accounting systems that function as the main control panel at any given business. With this integration, customers are able to push data and provide their accounting information to any one of their clients. They also offer a product called Forwardly that specifically targets the small business market with optimized cash flow management solutions integrated with their precise API platform. With the Forwardly app, small businesses receive instant payment from their clients using the RTP and (as of July) the FedNow payment rails.

As for their competitive advantage, Nick touts the capacity for his customers to request payment from their clients via a one-click interface for funds received directly into their preferred bank account in a matter of seconds!

Tune in this week to hear Nick talk about his journey to CEO, including being the first company to go to market on behalf of the small business B2B sector with instant payment options. We also talk about where he sees the industry going in the next 2 to 3 years as it relates to cryptocurrency, Blockchain, SB RTP, and Central Bank Issued Digital Currency.

My guest this week grew up snowboarding and mountain biking in the mountains of Sweden, only to find himself much later in life in a place with more ocean than mountains and absolutely no snow! MAJORITY CEO Magnus Larsson has always had a genuine passion for people. And it was this passion that fueled the business plan for a company dedicated to promoting the thriving potential of the U.S. immigrant population.

 Being an immigrant himself, Magnus has a firsthand understanding of what this population faces when they migrate to the United States. The hurdles can be vast, and the support can often times be minimal. And this, of course, is one of the foundational pillars for the success of his company.

 For those of you who may not know, MAJORITY is a digital banking platform for immigrants that offers so much more than just financial access. In fact, they have a vast array of services to help people thrive and succeed as they transition into the U.S. While banking is their core product, their customers also benefit from other cross-border services such as sending money, calling internationally and, most importantly, establishing a community connection outside of their native country.

 According to Magnus, one of the best ways to think about MAJORITY is to take the check cashing stores and the payday loan stores and convert them all into a digital product offering. As for their competitive advantage, not only do users see savings that average anywhere from $10-$50 per month, MAJORITY also works community to community to ensure that there will be someone from their native country onboarding them throughout every step of the process.

 Tune in this week to hear Magnus talk about his journey to CEO, including where he sees the industry going in the next 2-3 years as it relates to the future of neo versus niche banks and the most recent waves of our ecosystem’s evolution. We also talk about the 23% of our small business population that started the same way he did.

My guest this week has a very intense musical background, with proficiency in four different instruments: piano, saxophone, oboe, and double base. He currently performs to this day and makes a concerted effort to have a very strong presence in what he calls the four F’s of life: family, fitness, fintech, and flavor! Phos CEO Brad Hyett has a passion for trying new things, going new places, meeting new people, saying yes to things outside of his comfort zone and doing it all with a fintech spin in company socks!

For those of you who may not know, Phos is a softPOS technology platform enabling contactless payments onto mobile devices with no requirement for exclusive payments specific hardware. They offer a softPOS payments orchestration platform to complement the pain points typically associated with going to market through softPOS solutions and they target their main verticals (mobility, charity, and retail) with commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) devices that are not specifically certified for EMV usage. How do they make it work? They replicate an EMV level certification in the cloud to enable these products to offer integrated an optimized contactless options.

As for their competitive advantage, Brad will be the first to say that they offer a customizable solution that enables them to meet their customers where they are and take them where they want to go, in a way that offers much more flexibility and potential than their current competition.

Tune in this week to hear Brad talk about his journey to CEO, including a “predestined alignment of the stars” that enabled his wife to replace him at his previous company, prior to his tenure with Phos. We also talk about the evolution of contactless within our global ecosystem, as well as the upcoming M&A spree Brad expects within the industry over the next several years.

My guest this week has a passion for configurability, customization and customer satisfaction. He originally started his journey in marketing, but it didn’t take long for him to pivot to finance and, more specifically, what would eventually be called fintech. He was the second employee to join his current company, next in line only to the original founder himself, and has been adding value to the prepaid technologies sector of our industry ever since. Dash Solutions CEO Stephen Faust is a true leader in his piece of the payments pie.

For those of you who may not know, Dash Solutions has been in the payments industry for a very long time, branded originally as Prepaid Technologies. The re-brand itself was a recent one and also a bit of a no-brainer. According to Stephen, Dash is the name of the product brand they went to market with for many years and what they really do from a value adding perspective is provide solutions to their customers’ payments needs.

They currently have four payments pillars where they provide cutting edge digital solutions: Pay, rewards, corporate disbursement, and expense management. And as for their competitive advantage, Stephen touts the fact that they are not a single solution provider. They have built their technology to be multi solutional with more than 80 approved bank issued card programs and endless customizable configurations for each one of these product offerings. In a nutshell, they don’t go in looking to sell a product. Rather, they go in looking for the solutions that the business needs and then they customize a product specifically for them.

Tune in to hear Stephen talk about his journey to the role of CEO, including where he sees the industry going in the next 2 to 3 years as it relates to digital advancement and real-time offerings. We also talk about the trillions of dollars in commercial payments that have yet to transition to digital in multiple “niche” industries where payments have detrimentally lagged.

My guest this week grew up on a small-town island in Canada but had to go all the way to Hong Kong before he finally realized that being a lawyer wasn’t his calling. When he returned, he had exchanged his passion for a “reputable career” for an obsession with technology. ZayZoon Co-founder and President Tate Hackert went from Meetups to mainstream via the tech startup path – and all on behalf of the employee/employer dynamic when it comes to payments.

For those of you who may not know, ZayZoon is a way for employees to get paid prior to their individually scheduled paycheck date. And for those of you wondering why this is so important, Tate will be the first to tell you that 80 million Americans live paycheck to paycheck. For this demographic, the capacity to access earned wages as needed significantly minimizes cash flow distress and the resulting predatory product scams and credit hits that can often come with it.

How does it work? In a nutshell, any employee at a participating location can go in and request their pay prior to their pay date and then once their paycheck clears, the funds are re-deposited back to ZayZoon. This includes the ability to send money directly to the employee bank account, as well as prepaid debit card options with automatic check deposit and the capacity to stream wages, and gift card options that offer a “coupon clipping on steroids” kind of benefit. With this product, employees benefit from the ability to save money, while employers can more than double their candidate pipeline and employee retention.

Tune in to hear Tate talk about his journey to the role of Co-founder and President, including where he sees the industry going in the next 2 to 3 years as it relates to real-time payments, interoperability, and the democratization of our payments ecosystem. We also talk about his “big hairy audacious goal” to save 10 million employees 10 billion dollars!

My guest this week started working on the digital evolution before it was even recognized as evolutionary. He has a resume that is exemplary of a true leader in payments and his greatest passion (besides voraciously consuming books) is applying technology to solve business problems. Dragonfly Financial Technologies CEO Johan Roets is the self-proclaimed “other famous tech billionaire from South Africa” and this is his story!

 For those of you who may not know, Dragonfly Financial Technologies provides digital banking solutions to banks in the United States. They offer a technology platform for banks where their corporate and business customers can sign on and do all their corporate payments, cash management, and reconciliation in a manner that backs directly into their accounting platform. Their target market is larger regional banks looking to compete with the big players in the U.S. ecosystem.

Johan sees Dragonfly as “a white knight to the banks” in that Dragonfly helps them accelerate their innovations to be able to compete with those fintechs that are dominating the market. The core benefits they offer include fintech integration, open baking, AI-based solutions for corporations, and high-value payments in real time.

Tune in this week to hear Johan talk about his journey to CEO, including why he feels people still struggle to trust non-banks with their financial assets. We also talk about where he sees the industry going in the next 2 to 3 years as it relates to Blockchain and payments fraud, the bank versus the non-bank competition when it comes to owning the customer journey, open banking as a necessity in our ecosystem and just how quickly money can move in the wake of financial turmoil. 

My guest this week has a passion for people, payments, and Orange Theory? Yep, you heard me right! Orange Theory enthusiast and Elavon CEO Jamie Walker is a phenomenally empathetic leader with a fascinating journey in payments and almost 1,200 Orange Theory classes under his belt since 2013! And if you ask him where he gets his business advice from, he will be the first to tell you that one of his top advisors is his wife.

For those of you who may not know, Elavon is a payment processor and wholly owned subsidiary of U.S. Bank. They offer payment processing to a wide array of customers including the smallest business to the largest airline, and all on a global scale. Their primary verticals are airlines, hospitality, healthcare, retail, and (most recently) mass transit. And they support all money movement needs for their customers via their embedded finance solution, Talech.

As for their competitive advantage, Jamie touts their breath of distribution, their industry specific solutions that uniquely service their customers, and the digital assets provided by their U.S. Bank relationship. And when asked what Jamie’s secret sauce is for running such a high performing team, he lives by the following: Be accountable, offer thought leadership, and do both with a sense of urgency.

Tune in this week to hear Jamie talk about his journey to the role CEO, including his 22-year tenure with U.S. Bank, the catalyst that fueled his empathetic leadership style, and where he sees the industry going in the next 2 to 3 years as it relates to contactless, embedded payments, digital wallets, and a secure checkout experience.

As we move away from diversity and inclusion month and back to life as we know it, my guest this week gets us back on track as a true leader in the payment industry with a successful business targeting one of the more compelling industry buzzwords these days: open banking. But Link Money Cofounder and CEO Eric Shoykhet will be the first to tell you that open banking, as a concept in the U.S. anyways, doesn’t really exist…

For those of you who may not know, Link Money is a company that provides a pay by bank solution in the United States that enables merchants to allow their customers to pay from their bank account as part of the standard check out flow. This includes everything from ecommerce and insurance to parking, storage, and remittances, with a target prerequisite of high frequency and larger volume transactions. Why? Because this is where the real benefit is realized for merchants and customers alike.

Just like most everything else in the world these days, interchange rates are rising at an astronomical rate. One of the biggest benefits of using a pay by bank solution like Link Money is the ability to take your transactions off the credit rails, onto the ACH rails, and offer a more cost effective and more secure way to pay. For merchants, the benefit of using Link Money is the ability to reduce transaction costs by up to 70-80%, and even higher for some use cases. Additional benefits include less fraud and an overall reduction in payment churn.

Tune in this week to hear Eric talk about his journey to CEO, including why the US tends to be so far behind in the open banking concept, and where he sees the industry going in the next few years as it relates to fewer payment methods, a narrower focus on payments strategy, and the inevitable transition in customer psychology that is already happening today.

For our last episode of diversity and inclusion month, we take DEI to a place that could offer one of the most crucial necessities for a diverse and inclusive mindset: the VC space. And to discuss this segment with us, we have Novel Capital Co-Founder and CEO Carlos Antequera.

For those of you who may not know, Novel Capital leverages technology and data to provide non-diluted capital to tech entrepreneurs that don’t fit traditional bank requirements or are not an ideal match for the traditional equity process. They employee a little more than 20 people and services a few hundred customers currently, with the majority of their customers being tech founders or software entrepreneurs. The company’s goal is to collect key data points from their clients and then use their algorithms and expert data teams to provide a conducive capital match within a 10-day window.

When it comes to the venture capital space, Carlos will be the first to tell you that unconscious bias has the potential to run rampant with traditional VCs when it comes to funding companies. He explains that many will try to find a pattern around what has been successful in the past and stick to that same recipe for their future investments. Ingredients include things like the college the potential founder attended (was it Ivy League or not?), their degree, and even the type of business they’re looking to start. And this can obviously be a challenge for minority applicants who may not have grown up in a life of privilege and expectation.

Tune in this week to hear Carlos talk about his journey to CEO, how his own challenges with DEI drove his passion to start Novel Capital and what he views as the most necessary requirement for a successful DEI initiative. We also talk about the need for DEI to start at the educational level and the outlook for diverse founders looking to secure funding during the current economic climate.