Leaders In Payments

Michael Tomko the COO at CardX is our special guest this week on episode 75 of the Leaders in Payments podcast. 

Michael grew up Columbus Ohio, went to Harvard College studying philosophy and then went to Harvard Law School and initially worked in real estate. He actually went to high school and Harvard Law School with the CardX CEO Jonathon Razi. 

CardX is a fintech company that makes it easy for businesses to accept payments – with a focus on the credit card surcharging model. The company was started in 2013 and actually doubled their headcount during the last year. Their distribution is through their channel partners – so ISOs, ISVs and others sell the CardX solution. 

CardX is the only company in payments that leads with surcharging. Everything that CardX has built is focused on the surcharging model first. They are most differentiated for larger merchants typically selling online with larger ticket items. The surcharging model doesn’t work well for smaller ticket card present businesses.  

There are 47 states that now allow surcharging – so only three states left that don’t allow surcharging.  The latest state to allow it was Kansas and CardX was the primary driving force behind that change.   

Michael has a professional passion for helping solve new use cases for surcharging and a personal passion for being in the outdoors, especially hiking.  

Dov Marmor, the COO of North American at Railsbank is our special guest this week on episode 74 of the Leaders in Payments podcast. 

Dov grew up in Miami, spent 13 or 14 years in New York and now lives in Los Angeles with his wife and 3 kids and dog Batman.  He got his undergraduate degree at University of Maryland and his masters at Cornell.  

Railsbank is a platform that allows any company to become its own fintech. The company has been around 4 years, is headquartered in the UK, has about 200+ customers on the platform and 3 million end users and is live on 3 continents. 

Railsbank has gone to market in the U.S. with a credit card as a service model. There are four verticals within fintech that they target including, lending, neo-banks, investment and personal finance, and cryptocurrency. Outside of fintech their customers are major brands like large tech companies, large retailers, airlines – basically anyone that has a co-branded credit card today.    

One key differentiator for Railsbank is the fact they built their product from the ground up and all their APIs are country agnostic – so it really removes the headache of starting a credit card or a debit card in one country and then having to find another vendor to launch in another country.  

Dov is passionate about building tools that help other people innovate. Personally, he’s passionate about seeing his kids excel. 

Marwan Forzley, the CEO of Veem is our special guest this week on episode 73 of the Leaders in Payments podcast. 

Marwan grew up and went to school in Canada and is now based in San Francisco where he started Veem in 2014.  Prior to starting Veem, he ran e-commerce for Western Union after having sold his prior company to them.

 Veem is the simplest way for businesses to pay and get paid around the world. All you need is an email address. They operate in 110 countries with 50 plus currencies and have a quarter of a million accounts on their platform.

Their goal is to make paying and getting paid as simple as possible. A simple way to think about it is that they're the Venmo for businesses, both domestically and internationally. They use six different rails to move money, including things like the MasterCard and Visa rails, Swift and blockchain technologies, as well as several others. 

What makes Veem different is their simplicity, cost savings and timing of the payments. Marwan has a passion for using technology to create a great customer experience and loves to make a difference in the lives of his business customers.

Craig Sobol, the Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of XUP is our special guest on episode 72 of the Leaders in Payments podcast. 

Craig grew up in New York and went to school in upstate New York and moved to Charlotte, North Carolina when he took a job with Bank of America and currently resides there with his wife and two sons.  

XUP was founded with the premise to help banks drive transactions up so in the name “x” is for transactions and then “up.”

Banks have typically outsourced merchant services to a third-party acquirer and keep merchant services at arms -length even though merchant services is a very sticky product. Banks need to deepen their relationships with their customers but 92% of business customers at a bank gets their merchant services from someone other than their bank. 

So the founders at XUP saw an opportunity to build software that sits between the bank and their merchant processor. Their software includes 5 different modules from top of the funnel sales and marketing to onboarding to analytics.  

Craig has a passion for creating a tremendous user experience for his customers and personally loves to watch his sons succeed in their endeavors. Craig’s also loves to play the piano. 

This is the 4th episode in our Q1 2021 Pulse of Payments series sponsored by Company.com.

Today’s guest is Nick Starai, the Chief Strategy Officer at NMI.  At NMI their mission is to use their expertise to enable more payments, in more ways and more places. They provide ISOs, Fintech Innovators and Technologists the freedom to focus on what they do best, liberating them from restricted payment solutions and giving them access to the latest payment technology now and in the future.

In this episode Nick and I discuss many of the latest trends in payments including contactless payments, transit payments, the disruption by fintech in the banking space and omnichannel commerce. 

This episode is part of our special series focused on Diversity and Inclusion. In this series I will be talking with leaders in the payments industry (and maybe some experts from outside of the industry) about diversity and inclusion. It has been proven that a diverse workforce and diverse management team leads to increased creativity, better decision making, reduced employee turnover and increased profit – as well as many other benefits that we will be talking about. 

I’m honored to be joined on the tenth episode of our special series on D&I by Melanie Tinto, the Chief Human Resource Officer at WEX. 

 Melanie joined WEX in 2018, bringing an almost 20-year track record of leading global talent acquisition, talent management, leadership development, and organizational development for large, multi-billion dollar corporations.

 As Chief Human Resource Officer at WEX, Melanie is responsible for developing and executing human resources strategy in support of the company’s overall business plan and strategic direction, specifically in the areas of succession planning, talent management, change management, organizational and performance management, training and development, and compensation and benefits.

 Prior to joining WEX, Melanie served as Medtronic’s vice president of talent acquisition, talent management, and its chief learning officer and as Hewlett-Packard’s vice president of executive leadership development and organizational development. She also held HR Business Partner roles at Walmart, Bank of America and Cigna.

 Melanie earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting from the University of Maine and an MBA with a concentration in finance from the University of Connecticut.

Kevin Smith, the CEO of Securebancard is our special guest this week and this is episode 69 of the Leaders in Payments podcast.

Kevin grew up in a small town in east Texas and joined the Marine Corps right out of high school. After the Marines he joined a small ISO in Irvine, California before making his way to Atlanta Georgia that he now calls home.  

Securebancard has built its own in-house portfolio management platform. Their customers can customize statements, adjust billing schemas and create unique offerings in the market. They have $22-23 million in annual revenue and process payments for roughly 3,500 merchants. They focus mainly on ecommerce but they really provide solutions based on their customers needs and their customers are typically other ISOs.  

According to Kevin one of the payment trends he sees in the next few years is the continued push for compliance and risk mitigation especially as real time payments becomes a standard way of doing business.  

Kevin has a passion for automating processes within his business and on the personal side he has a passion for cars. He also some great advice for those just joining our industry.  

Anand Goel, the CEO of Optimized Payments is our special guest this week. This is the third episode of The Pulse of Payments special series for Q1 2021 The video podcast for this episode can be found here. Or visit our YouTube Channel. 

Optimized Payments has helped Fortune 100 to mid-sized companies save over $300 million in interchange and processing fees. Anand has also led efforts to revolutionize payments analytics. 

Anand and I covered topics ranging from data in payments to new NACHA requirements to what the post-COVID-19 payments ecosystem looks like to other hot trends in the industry. 

For more information about Optimized Payments visit their website: www.optimzedpayments.com 

This episode is the final entry in our special series on The Digital Payments Tipping Point. In this three-part series I've been talking with executives from WEX’s Corporate Payments division who partnered with the research team at The Economist over the summer of 2020 to look into the state of business-to-business payments in financial services, fintechs, and technology companies. The research found that companies that have grown most robustly during the pandemic are accelerating their evolution away from slow, manual, paper-based payments into secure, data-rich, real-time digital payments.

This 3-part series digs into the issues surrounding this rapid evolution in digital payments. Our first episode featured Greg Sassone, SVP of Business & Partner Growth at WEX Corporate Payments, and focused on whether banks should build, buy or partner when it comes to adopting new technology or innovation. 

The second episode featured Dylan Jones, Vice president of operations for WEX Corporate Payments and Laura Shen, Director of Strategy for WEX Corporate Payments. This discussion focused on the interchange realities that the payments industry needs to face. 

My special guest on this final episode in the series is WEX Corporate Payments President Jay Dearborn. Jay and I will be discussing the Shape of Payments to Come, and what might lie beyond the digital tipping point.

WEX is a global B2B Payments Technology Company. Their Corporate Payments division focuses on innovating digital payments solutions for financial institutions and fintechs as well as large corporations that need to modernize their AP processes. 

This episode is part of our special series focused on Diversity and Inclusion. In this series I will be talking with leaders in the payments industry (and maybe some experts from outside of the industry) about diversity and inclusion. It has been proven that a diverse workforce and diverse management team leads to increased creativity, better decision making, reduced employee turnover and increased profit – as well as many other benefits that we will be talking about. 

This special series is brought to you by Wnet and Paysafe.

Wnet or Women's Network in Electronic Transactions is celebrating 15 years of helping women achieve greater personal success, influence, and professional parity in the payments industry. Wnet is a not-for-profit organization with a mission of creating a stronger and more diverse industry by empowering and investing in women. Learn how at wnetonline.org.

Paysafe is a leading, global specialized payment provider. They’ve been driving innovation in and around payments for over 20 years all over the globe for both businesses and consumers. Paysafe believes Diversity and Inclusion is not just a checkbox, but rather a journey in which they are fully committed to being on around the world. Learn more at www.paysafe.com. 

I’m honored to be joined on the ninth episode of our special series on D&I by Tracey McCant Trentel. 

Tracey is the Vice President, Business Integration, for Paysafe. She joined their leadership team last year and is responsible for oversight of a portfolio of strategic initiatives designed to deliver an outstanding and differentiated customer experience that will ultimately drive business growth.   

Before joining Paysafe, Tracey established herself as an accomplished leader in service delivery and process re-engineering, always targeting heightened customer satisfaction. 

She previously worked for Worldpay where she was responsible for managing various complex business transformation projects that incorporated work process redesign and the implementation of new cost-effective technologies. 

Before Worldpay, she gained wide-ranging experience working for high profile companies such as Dow Chemical, Newell Rubbermaid, and the Coca-Cola Company. 

Tracey holds a BSE in Chemical Engineering from Tulane University and is both a certified Six Sigma Black belt and PMP.  She currently resides in her hometown of Atlanta, GA.