The AFT podcast: At the Forefront of Transactions | Payments | Fintech | Pay-tech | Banking

Jiakai Guo - Vice President at Sound Point Capital Management in this episode goes in-depth on how Buy Now Pay Later system operates. How does the capital flow look like, how is this form of debt being treated, what are the delinquency rates and of course, can this serve as an indicator of the country's economic health.

P.S. Apologies for the quality of sound on my side, the system defaulted to the wrong microphone and I've missed it.

Find us on Substack: https://aftfinance.substack.com/

Our official website: https://www.aft.finance/

Casey Hingtgen - COO of Whale in this episode talks about the process of building a system of pulling and pushing without inter-mingling the funds.

Goal of the system in question:

- making sure that money is guaranteed to the landlords. Ability to lock the funds in the FDIC-insured funds.

- for the renter (user): easy to fund the account. As frictionless as possible.

Find us on Substack and join 7k+ people who read about payments' intricacies every month! https://aftfinance.substack.com/

It's exactly how it sounds like - read the title:)

Here are some of the specific questions we've covered during the interview:

- Travel cards, let's start with the definition here - what is it and how is it different from a regular credit card?
- How do the reward points work? Who offers them and why?
- What actually happens when you click "redeem points" to, say, book a rental car for your trip? How do these funds settle on the backend?
- If the cash equivalent is sent to the provider (car rental in this case), why is it more efficient for the consumer to redeem points through a provider rather than receiving cash-back?
- Let's talk about people who are worried about getting new credit cards or overuse their existing cards. What are the key "unknown" factors that might affect the credit score of an individual?
- expand on the topic if time permits.

Spencer Hurst, Founder of MercuryVote in this episode explains how stock voting rights operate, how they can be bought and sold (rented) and how the funds flow when a stock or a share of a mutual fund is purchased.

Brace yourselves for a deep dive into the confusing space of STONKS.

Spencer's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/spencerhhurst/

MercuryVote website: https://www.mercuryvote.com/

AFT's website: https://www.aft.finance/

AFT's substack: https://aftfinance.substack.com/

Wesley Walton - CEO of Glendale Area Schools Credit Union [GASCU] in this episode takes a deep dive into the structure and operations of credit unions.

GASCU's website: https://gascu.org/

Our substack: https://aftfinance.substack.com/

Our website: https://www.aft.finance/

How do credit unions make decisions, what are the key differences between commercial banks and credit unions, who should consider joining a CU and much more.

Key notes that I took during the interview:Glendale Area Schools Credit Union was founded by 2 school teachers and has over 11,000 members now.
514F - service based nonprofit.
SEG - select employee group
insured by NCUA
Credit unions decrease their numbers by 3-6% but as an industry in asset size and member numbers are growing every year.
1400ish credit unions are on FedNow
stanford credit union was the first to be an online banking website
7 members are board memebers
5 members of supervisory comities - watchdogs of the institution
CUSOs - aggregations of credit unions who want to adopt a new technology for themselves and want to share resources
Interest rates on credit cards issued by credit unions are between 18%-21%
9.9% interest on a credit cards is offered by GASCU. 9.9 people - freaking 9.9
IF YOU HAVE CREDIT CARD DEBT - SWITCH TO A CREDIT UNION

Marshall Greenwald, the Founder of Ionia in this episode digs deep into the souls (backend) of card processing.

Marshall's LinkedIn for those who don't know how to use hyperlinks: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marshall-greenwald-9480351/

Ionia's website: https://www.ioniapay.com/

AFT's Substack: https://aftfinance.substack.com/

AFT's website: https://www.aft.finance/

Here are the questions we've covered during the interview:

- tell us the rough outline of how the current credit/debit card processing look like?
- how many parties are involved in this process? What does inter-party communication look like and who is in charge of facilitating this communication?
- how are the flows for debit and credit card processing different? Why?
- why is it so expensive to accept credit or debit card payments?
- do the higher time limits for chargebacks affect it or is it mostly related to the complexity of communications mentioned in the second question? Or does it have anything to do with the potential NSF issues?
- key solutions that you see for all the problems we've discussed?

Terry Husayn (Talha), VP of Technical engagement and a member of the founding team at Orum. In this part Terry spoke about the process of building an early stage sales team - from the ground up. Specifically we focused on hiring, training and creating compensation plans for BDRs and SDRs.

Some mentions from the episode:

Terry's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/talhahusayn/

Link to Orum: https://www.orum.com/

And of course, keep an eye out on our articles through SubStack that you can check out here.

Terry Husayn (Talha), VP of Technical engagement and a member of the founding team at Orum in this episode talks about the following:

- intro to cold-calling, who needs to do it and why

- testing of the outreach strategy

- specifics of outreach

Databases of emails/phone numbers:

Zoominfo

Apollo

LeadIQ

Lusha

Intent based signals tracking can be done here: Sixth Sense

Tool to capture your website visitors: Warmly

Terry's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/talhahusayn/

Link to Orum: https://www.orum.com/

And of course, keep an eye out on our articles through SubStack that you can check out here.

Amjed Aboukhadijeh - head of sales at Socket. In this part he takes a deeper dive into the specific strategies included in the territory planning, more specifically - creating drip campaigns and running a POC (Proof Of Concept) that has a much greater success rate.

Here is the link to a spreadsheet template that you can use to run your Proof Of Concept: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16RFCe-VnSILzZerdbdPsajKSsfNQHzbKxcVIG48ngYk/edit?usp=sharing

This is the second episode of two that we've had with Amjed, you can listen to part 1 here.

Amjed Aboukhadijeh - head of sales at Socket, talks about the importance of territory planning in the sales process. He explains what steps does territory planning consist of and how you should work on each step.

This is the first episode of two that we'll have with Amjed - part 2 will be focused on very specific strategies that were mentioned in Pt 1 (this episode) so stay tuned!