Leaders In Payments

What does an Israeli native with three degrees in Fine Arts and a professional career as a New York sculptor have to do with payments? Believe it or not, quite a bit! 

Payem CEO Itamar Jobani is my guest on this week’s podcast and his story of a professional career that spans from sculptural artistry to the medical field and eventually to payments is truly fascinating.

For those of you who may not know, Payem is a spend-management platform that helps mid-market organizations with their finance operations via a streamlined integration into their ERP software. They serve as a one-stop shop for finance teams to internally manage employee T&E, expense reimbursement, credit purchasing and more. 

Itamar talks about his well-rounded journey into the payments space and where he sees our industry going in the next 2-3 years – including all the dots that need to be connected before some of the usual suspects like blockchain and cryptocurrency have the opportunity to dominate the ecosystem. 

A self-proclaimed “technology entrepreneur and intrapreneur,” CoreChain CEO Chris Aguas is our special guest on this episode, episode 134 of the Leaders in Payments podcast.  

Chris has had a fascinating career in the payments industry. Originally from southern California, Chris graduated from Stanford Business School with a passion for driving change.

CoreChain is an embedded B2B payments network that facilitates B2B payments and supply-chain financing using enterprise-distributed ledger technology – which, as many of you may know, is the foundational component for blockchain.  

The only caveat? While blockchain technology facilitates the transaction capabilities necessary for Bitcoin, what CoreChain uses is a bit different. Bitcoin runs on permissionless blockchain – meaning no identifiers or validators are required. CoreChain, on the other hand, utilizes a permission-based network that requires both identification and validation of all players involved.

And according to Chris, this is the wave of the future in fintech. 

Robin Gregg, the CEO of RoadSync is our special guest on this episode, episode 133 of the Leaders in Payments Podcast. 

 A West Virginia native and Harvard graduate with a 15-year payments career, Robin Gregg is the CEO of Atlanta-based RoadSync.

Now, when it comes to blazing trails, Robin is no stranger to lighting that fire. Not only did she climb to the top of the corporate ladder in such a male-dominated industry, she also helped create and currently leads a payments platform designed specifically for the trucking industry (another male-dominated space). These two facts alone make her story a fascinating one.

RoadSync caters specifically to the transportation industry to enable payment acceptance for various vendors, outside of fuel, that support the trucking industry. It’s a really interesting perspective to hear Robin talk about how payment acceptance is woven into an industry that is not often synonymous with fintech. But after hearing the important role that real-time payments play in the trucking space, it’s a wonder why it isn’t.

According to Robin, the trucking industry is extremely fragmented. And as a result, it has been slow to digitize. The demand for real-time payments is a huge necessity to the business model though and thanks to platforms like RoadSync, this is finally becoming a reality.

Sam Graziano, CEO of Linear is our special guest on this episode, episode 132 of the Leaders in Payments Podcast. 

A New York native with a self-proclaimed passion for filling white space and challenging the status quo, Sam Graziano scratched his entrepreneurial itch all the way from the investment banking world to the fintech space, where he eventually became CEO of Linear – a digital account originating and lending infrastructure for small-to-medium-sized businesses. And his experience has left him full of insight and expertise.

Spoken in his own words, Linear provides “the technological plumbing that allows banks and other financial institutions to modernize the way they deliver conventional credit to the small business market.” And this includes real-time data, fraud decision making and credit analysis.

So, what differentiates them from the thousands of other lending companies out there? According to Sam, they go beyond just software to offer consultative insights that assist businesses in making better, faster and smarter decisions. 

When asked about his professional passion, Sam finds the most fulfillment in offering advancement for his loyal employees. He enjoys facilitating a space where people feel as though their efforts are genuinely appreciated. And as far as what he sees for the future of the lending sector, Sam predicts the competitive environment will only get stronger between banks and SaaS companies. Though, he feels that the ability for banks to digitize will give them the competitive edge they need to retain their small-business portfolios. 

Casey Leloux, the CEO of IntelliPay is our special guest this week on episode 131 of the Leaders in Payments Podcast.

A California native with an affinity for softball and a passion for selling solutions, Casey may have grown up shelling almonds and playing sports but his passion for sales took him down a very fascinating journey that led him straight to the top… eventually.

Now the CEO of IntelliPay, Casey came on with the company when it was just a government software platform that specialized in payments for taxes and municipalities. It was through Casey’s influence that the company branched out into other verticals and really formed their niche in fee-based processing.

Coined by Casey as a “white-glove, fee-management third-party processor,” IntelliPay specializes in fee-based offerings for businesses trying to receive bill payments. They offer multiple front-end solutions that enable customers to pay their bills and have a multitude of back-end configurations that ensure the payments move through the proper channels.

And they make it a point to “swim upstream on behalf of the merchant to offer an integrated solution.” So, how did he get to all this from selling Cutco knives? You’ll have to tune in to find out!

And, as part of this episode, you’ll also hear about Casey’s predictions for the future of our industry – including how software companies will eventually become the new merchant and how fee-based offerings will leverage success.

Jason Mugford, President and CEO of Ascendant is our special guest this week on episode 130 of the Leaders in Payments podcast.  Jason is a Toronto native and loyal fintech supporter. He talks with me about his journey in the industry and how he went from an aspiring Lacrosse player to a seasoned payments professional.

 Ascendant is an international accounts payable and receivable business that facilitates foreign payments for companies on a global scale. 

 One of their most notable services is reducing the vertical fraud and risk investigation potential for their international customers and tracking payments from release to remittance. According to Jason, this not only adds more transparency to the industry but also reduces investigations from an average of 20% to less than 1%. 

 As for the future of our industry, Jason predicts that both sides of the transaction will eventually come together as a network, enabling us to expedite the movement of money in a more seamless fashion.

And can you believe all this started with a childhood affinity for Thomas Cook travelers checks?

Bob Dowd, CEO North America for Moneycorp is our special guest this week on episode 129 of the Leaders in Payment Podcast. 

Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Bob – a man who started his 38-year payments career at Kennedy airport in New York carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars across terminals in a canvas bag. So, how did he go from this to CEO of the only non-US bank in the world to have a direct relationship with the US Federal Reserve?

 Well, “the harder you work, the luckier you get” is one of his favorite adages, if that tells you anything.

Moneycorp is an international payments and foreign exchange company that leads the industry in providing global payments and currency risk management to corporations and partners around the world. They have $50 billion in foreign-exchange flows and $200 million in top-line revenue and facilitate 6 million individual payments on an annual basis.

Bob talks about where the industry is headed as it relates to real-time, low-value payment rails and blockchain – and how his company kept global economies afloat by delivering cash throughout the world during the COVID pandemic.

As we come to the close of financial inclusion month, I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge my guests in terms of what they’re doing to promote financial inclusion and ensure the betterment of our flourishing ecosystem. It’s because of proactive efforts like this that we are getting closer to closing the gap between all the advantages that digital innovations provide and all the challenges that the underserved communities face in trying to take advantage of them.

In this podcast, each of my sponsors for Financial Inclusion Month take the opportunity to highlight what they’re doing within their companies to service the underserved. We touch on everything from the current payment dilemma, to how we can effectively change the employee’s relationship with their paycheck, to how the strain of cash-only transactions impacts the rental, lending and government verticals specifically.

Each guest brings a unique perspective as they highlight fintech’s relationship with financial inclusion, including what needs to be done to future proof our journey towards banking the unbanked.

Today’s roundtable discussion includes The Clearing House SVP of Sales and Relationship Management Elena Whisler, Paysafe VP of eCash USA Jan Marc Kuelper and Instant Financial Founder and COO Steve Barha. Tune in to see what these three innovative leaders have to say about all things financial inclusion!

A native Canadian with a degree in molecular biology and computer science… and also the only guy I’ve ever met that can create a successful analogy using payments and farming, Instant Financial Founder and CEO Steve Barha speaks to us about the necessity to support financial health in some of the world’s most vulnerable populations.

The pioneers of no-fee-no-interest earn-wage access, Instant Financial is taking a proactive stance when it comes to ensuring financial inclusion. And Steve’s personal vision when it comes to the financial status of the every-day employee? To live in a world where living paycheck-to-paycheck is completely extinct.

So, how close are we? Sadly, not close enough. 

With 80% of working Americans still living paycheck-to-paycheck, we are actually worse off now than we were 10 years ago, when the number was 60%. But Steve and his team have a strategy…

It all comes down to proactively lifting the underserved communities from the status of “financially vulnerable” to at least be “financially coping.” Once that has been achieved, they can then graduate to “financially healthy.”

Tune in and hear us talk about all things financial inclusion and see if you share Steve’s vision for the future.

We’re halfway through financial inclusion month and we’ve had some really amazing guests share some of the industry’s top challenges regarding financial inclusion – as well as what their respective companies are doing to proactively close that gap. Today, I speak with FSS CashTech CEO V. Bala about the overwhelming strain of financial inclusion in India and what FSS is doing to alleviate it.

An engineer by trade, Bala has had 30+ years of experience in the technology sector, with the last decade dedicated to payments specifically. His self-proclaimed strength is working with startups to make them successful and he has done nothing short of that with FSS and their CashTech product.

In this episode, Bala shares the staggering numbers of the underserved villages in India. How are there still an estimated 1 billion people still devoid of financial services in one of the hottest pulse points of digital disruption? And what is being done to service these individuals?

Bala goes into great detail about the FSS branch-in-a-box solution that is proactively alleviating the two main barriers to financial inclusion: available access and digital literacy. The initiative, itself, is admirable and the results are quite impressive.  The ultimate goal? To uplift 1 billion lives through their own payments ecosystem.