Leaders In Payments

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.

My guest this week has a passion for creating something new that will change the industry and leave a legacy he can be proud of. In a fast-paced world and a time of life where everything seems to have already been done and you always hear people say there are no new ideas under the sun, Engage People CEO Jonathan Silver has managed to come up with something quite innovative.

For those of you who may not know, Engage is a technology-focused loyalty company that aims to democratize loyalty currency. How do they do it? They integrate into the payments ecosystem in a manner that enables prompt technology to offer your loyalty credit card points, for example, as a form of payment for your Starbucks coffee. According to Jonathan, their proprietary platform provides the conduit between loyalty programs and the retail checkout process, with a vast network of clients and partners integrated into one truly unique ecosystem.

As for their competitive advantage, they have developed the first true payments network for the loyalty industry, as well as a data driven platform that enables promotional engagement in real time. Not only does that bring the value of points to the forefront, it provides meaningful incentive for all touchpoints in the payments cycle, including the customer, the retailer and the partner.

Tune in this week to hear Jonathan talk about his journey to CEO, including the two proprietary brands under the Engage umbrella, what the future of loyalty payments looks like in the next 2 to 3 years and how his passion for creating something impactful will eventually lead to a de facto payments offering for the loyalty currency market.

My guest this week is a self-proclaimed “accidental entrepreneur” with a passion for facilitating the extraordinary. Justifi CEO and Cofounder Joe Keeley has had a fascinating journey through the world of entrepreneurship that all began with an employment ad that “wouldn’t be found anywhere but Minnesota.”

It was during his undergraduate career, and he was just looking for a way to make some extra money. When thumbing through the paper one day, Joe came across an employment ad for a nanny position with one major requirement: the applicant had to be a hockey player. Not only did this catch his attention due to the sheer uniqueness of the request but he was also highly qualified as he was playing hockey for his college team. His willingness to respond not only got him the job but also led him down a prolific entrepreneurial journey that lasted 15 years and resulted in 200 national locations and a lucrative sale to a public company.

And this was just his first business. For those of you who may not know, Justifi is a company that specializes in providing the technology for platforms to be world-class at payment monetization and going beyond payments. They accelerate the potential of vertical SaaS platforms and help them increase their value in the areas of payments technology, virtual fintech and the beyond payments space.

According to Joe, if you structure payments correctly, you can anticipate all the things customers want to do in the future and be set up for success. Tune in this week to hear him talk about his journey to CEO, including where he sees the industry in the next 2-3 years, the orchestration within his company that allows for the monetization of payments and beyond, as well as the various reasons why platforms shouldn’t always aim to become a payfac and how that can actually be a better business decision.

What does a math challenged sales guy that migrated into the merchant industry by accident have to do with going Beyond in payments? Quite a bit, actually…

Beyond CEO and President Mike Peters is a north Jersey native with a passion for helping people reach their goals and facilitating a genuine team player environment that has everyone working towards a common goal.

For those of you who may not know, Beyond is a merchant acquiring company that drives new merchant sales and facilitates daily necessities such as payroll and business services to midmarket and small business verticals. They have a large focus on the SMB middle America, feet on the street environment and their business model is largely influenced by the one-stop-shop philosophy that so many merchants desire.

As for their competitive advantage, this is established largely through their published promises to their merchants. They include:

·       Price protection

·       Flexible contracts

·       Top security

·       Adaptable product solutions 

·       And trusted business advocacy services

So, what attracted Mike to this role at Beyond personally? He has a tremendous amount to say about the philanthropy and thriving culture that the company builds its foundation on being a driving force for his decision. Not only do they have a proactive outreach program that sends money to underprivileged kids who would normally not be able to afford a college education, they also have a company culture that, according to Mike, “focuses on doing the right thing even when nobody is looking."

Tune in this week to hear Mike talk about his journey to CEO, his personal and professional passions and what the industry looks like in the next 2 to 3 years as it relates to technology advancements, AI integration and the remaining runway for the agent model.