Leaders In Payments

Will Graylin, the CEO of OV Loop and Indigo Technologies is our special guest this week on episode 95 of the Leaders in Payments podcast. 

Will immigrated to the U.S. from China when he was a teenager. He got his undergrad degree from the University of Washington, became a nuclear submarine officer for 5 and half years and then went to Boston for grad school at MIT.  

OV Loop is a connected commerce platform that has a solution for brands and businesses called a super messenger and a solution for consumers called a super wallet. We are living in a very fragmented environment when it comes to commerce and we need to get to a more connected environment – which is the problem OV Loop is addressing. 

Over the last 3 years they have bought 4 companies and are launching a minimal viable product next quarter to both businesses and consumers.  

Will also touched on the other company he is currently running called Indigo Technologies which is creating a lightweight electric vehicle. 

Ron Hynes, the CEO of Vesta is our special guest this week on episode 94 of the Leaders in Payments podcast. 

Ron lives in Connecticut and was born and raised in Maine. He’s married and has three kids, two in college and one that just graduated from high school and one little dog to round out the family. 

Vesta uses advanced machine learning to access the validity of card-not-present transactions. They provide their customers a “thumbs up” if the transaction is good and obviously identify the fraudulent ones. 

The company has been around for 25 years and has 300 employees. The company has locations across the U.S. and Dublin Ireland, Mexico City as well as an office in Singapore. 

Ron and I have a great discussion about fraud in general as well as fraud in developing countries. We also talk about his passion for financial inclusion stemming from his journey in payments with Chase and Mastercard. 

Matt Marcus, the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Modern Treasury is our special guest this week on episode 93 of the Leaders in Payments podcast. 

Matt was born in south Florida, moved to New Hampshire and attended Dartmouth College and now lives in San Francisco. 

Modern Treasury was formed when the three founders were responsible for the payment operations system at LendingHome realized that there was a need for a more robust scalable, solution that helps move money. 

In 2018 the founders completed Y Combinator and had their first customer in the fall of 2018.  
Matt and I had a great discussion around today’s real-time payments solutions and what they will look like in the future. 

Larry Talley, Founder & CEO of Everyware is our special guest on episode 92 of the Leaders in Payments podcast. 

Larry grew up in New York and has been on his own since the early age of 14. He left New York and joined the Navy where he saw 30 countries before the age of 21.  He now resides in Austin, Texas with his wife and 3 sons.  

Everyware was formed to solve problems around payments by leveraging communications – meaning text messaging. They allow businesses and consumers to interact and transact via text messaging on their own time. 

They are integrated with all of the main acquirers and sell primarily to ISVs. They are in several verticals including travel, healthcare, non-profits, restaurants, retailers, field services and more.  

Larry believes crypto will become a preferred payment method in the next few years and he has some great insights into the future of payments. 

James Oberman, CEO of Payroc is our special guest this week on episode 91 of the Leaders in Payments podcast. 

Jim grew up in the south-side of Chicago, attended the University of Arizona, married his high school sweetheart and moved back to the Chicago area after college. His first job was in public accounting where he had clients in the equipment financing industry which ultimately led him into the payments industry by financing the leases that ISOs were originating for equipment.   

Payroc is the ninth largest independent merchant acquirers in the U.S. They process about $33B a year, have over 100,000 merchant relationships; over 2,000 agents and sub-ISO partners: 40 ISV partnerships and have 400 employees. In 2016 they had 16 employees. 

2019 was a big year for Payroc. They were approached by Parthenon Capital with a strategy to bring together 4 companies: NXTGEN, Payscape, Payroc and BluePay Canada into the new Payroc. Since 2019 they have continued to strategically acquire more companies. 

Jim walks us through his fascinating journey in payments and has some great advice for those just starting their careers in payments.  

Sean Feeney, the CEO of Cantaloupe is our special guest this week on episode 90 of the Leaders in Payments podcast. 

Sean grew up in a small town in New York called Attica – which of course is famous for its maximum-security prison. He graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point and served in the Army for 6 years mostly in Europe. He currently lives in Roswell, Georgia.  

Cantaloupe is the leading provider of solutions to the unattended retail space – for example vending machines, car washes, basically anything where there isn’t a retail clerk.  They provide both the digital payments capability and the software that drives the logistics servicing of those locations. The company was started in the early 90s, will do approximately $160-170 million in sales this year and has 180 employees.  

Cantaloupe was formerly USA Technologies. They launched the new name and a complete new brand about a month ago.   

On the personal side Sean has a passion for his family and supports a lot of youth and high school activities and on the business side he is very passionate about building great leaders and helping them succeed. 

Anil D. Aggarwal, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Fintech Meetup is our special guest this week on episode 89 of the Leaders in Payments podcast. 

Anil was born in England came to the US when he was 16 and has been an entrepreneur basically his entire career. He started two businesses in payments early in his career and sold one of them to Google.  At Google he started working on Money 20/20.  

In 2011 he started Money 2020 and first event was in 2012. He subsequently sold Money 20/20 in in 2014 and launched Shoptalk in 2015. Anil has some great stories and insights about how he started both companies and about disruption in events. 

Fast forward and Anil has started Fintech Meetup – which has it’s first event next month – June 15-17 called Fintech Spring Meetup which is a virtual event but of course he has aspirations of building the biggest Fintech event in the industry. 

That was Quincy McKnight, CEO and Founder of Covenant Pay Partners and he is our special guest this week on episode 88 of the Leaders in Payments podcast.

Quincy grew up in Murfreesboro Tennessee, went to Middle Tennessee State and now lives in Nashville, Tennessee. 

In 2018 Quincy rebranded QPay into Covenant Pay Partners and refocused the company. Their current top verticals are transportation, retail/restaurants, b2b, education and municipalities.  By next year they plan to be processing $1 billion in volume. 

In addition to running Covenant Pay Partners, Quincy has personal passion for politics and will actually be running for Congress in the state of Tennessee.

Lawrence Lee, a partner from Baker McKenzie is our special guest this week on the Pulse of Payments series - part of the Leaders in Payments Podcast. 

Prior to joining Baker McKenzie, Lawrence was former in-house counsel for the digital currency exchange Coinbase, where he led all corporate and strategic transactions and investments.

He’s been repeatedly acknowledged in the legal industry as an authority on tech M&A –in 2020, he was selected by Law360 as a Top Attorney Under 40 in the Technology sector. For several years in a row, Lawrence was named a Rising Star in Mergers and Acquisitions by California Super Lawyers.

On this episode we discuss M&A in the payments/fintech space; the IPO market; SPACS and crypto currency.  

Rodney Robinson, CEO and Co-founder of TabaPay is our special guest this week on episode 86 of the Leaders in Payments podcast. 

Rodney grew up in Omaha Nebraska and has been in California for the last 40 years. 

TabaPay was named after a Lord of the Rings book called There and Back Again or TABA and TabaPay is all about there and back again payments- they can both disburse money instantly as well as collect it back – a round trip payment. 

They process 15 billion dollars in payments and have grown about 50% in the last year. 

Rodney is driven by satisfying the customer. One of the main goals of the company is to make sure their customers are happy. He also has some great advice for those just starting their careers in fintech.