Leaders In Payments

This episode is sponsored by Citizens Pay. Designed to streamline the buying process, Citizens Pay is a leader in “Buy Now Pay Later” that provides merchants the security of a premier national bank on an omnichannel platform which drives sales and builds loyalty.If you want to learn more about Citizens Pay, visit https://citizensbank.mvk.co/2hycr where you can find additional information about Citizens Pay’s buy now pay later financing solution.What does a video game designer and avid Vietnamese art collector have to do with payments? A lot! Evvio Co-Founder Adrian Jones started his entrepreneurial career at 15 years old in the videogame design industry, only to find that his passion for technology and the impact it can have on the world around him would eventually propel his career into the ecommerce payments space.For those of you who may not know, Evvio is an ecommerce technology company that provides opportunities for anyone, anywhere to participate in ecommerce. They specialize in person-to-person emerging ecommerce transactions and their technology adds tremendous value to exchange networks such as: ●      Social commerce●      Super apps●      Online gaming ●      And the metaverse!Fluid commerce is probably one of the biggest buzzwords you’ll hear in this podcast, with Evvio driving this intention for their target audience. And one of their main objectives is to make ecommerce inclusive in that it doesn’t require a bank account or credit card to transact. As for their competitive advantage, the ability to earn and spend without value passing out of the e-commerce network is the first thing that Adrian points out, followed closely by fraud prevention capabilities that allow the seller and buyer to maintain a cryptographic agreement of services being used.Tune in this week to hear Adrian talk about the future of our industry as it relates to the projected growth of person-to-person ecommerce, the demise of credit and debit card payments, and the social commerce exchange that will spike from $560 billion in 2020 to $2.9 trillion in 2026. As for what he projects beyond the next 10 years, he has this to say based on his own experience: “Much as we try to forecast what the world will be like in years ahead, there are just so many things we don’t see coming.” Don’t miss this one!

My guest this week has a genuine passion for building things that create a significant impact and then using it as a mechanism for change. But according to Inscribe CEO and Co-Founder Ronan Burke, the true fulfillment in this comes with creating the opportunity on your own and not waiting for someone else to give it to you.For those of you who may not know, Inscribe is a fraud detection automation company that helps fintechs approve more customers by automating their account opening and underwriting workflows. This includes automatically overseeing some of the most fundamental checkpoints when it comes to ensuring safe, secure transactions, such as:·       Identity verification and KYC·       Corporate control·       Platform integrityFrom a long-term perspective, Inscribe’s mission is to create a fair and efficient payments ecosystem by protecting platform integrity through automation and fraud detection. And their product adds value to any company that transacts large payments and facilitates high-trust interactions. And as for what makes them stand out against their competitors, one of their main advantages is they offer a fully automated solution with absolutely zero human engagement in the detection approval loop.Tune in this week to hear Ronan talk about his journey to CEO and what the next 2-3 years look like as it relates to fraud. One thing he knows for certain is that fraud will increase substantially as the payments industry moves towards faster, cheaper, and more real-time transactions. As for what he foresees in the next decade, it looks like we can expect an ecosystem that offers less risky and even safer options when it comes to facilitating large transactions in an online environment versus a traditional retail scenario. 

This episode is sponsored by Citizens Pay. With Citizens Pay, merchants have the security of a leading national bank and an omnichannel platform designed to streamline the buying process.  If you want to learn more about Citizens Pay, visit https://citizensbank.mvk.co/2hycr where you can find additional information about Citizens Pay and the buy now pay later payment model. My guests today are President, Lynne Baldwin and CEO Jack Baldwin from BHMI. BHMI develops and licenses the Concourse Financial software suite which is an integrated cohesive collection of back-office products that operate in near real-time. The product is architected around the Common Core with four separate applications that bolt on to it including extended settlement, reconciliation, fees and commissions and disputes. BHMI sells primarily to large scale financial services companies including financial institutions, banks and co-ops, processors, networks, issuers, and acquirers. Their primary differentiators are that they focus exclusively on the back-office and their near real-time processing. BHMI employees less than 100 people by design and pride themselves in providing excellent customer support.   Jack and Lynne are passionate about helping injured wildlife and have help create the Baldwin Wildlife Center where they care for between five and seven thousand injured animals per year.  

My guest this week has a passion for learning and evolving as a leader, as well as keeping in touch with his employees and understanding what their day-to-day looks like. In fact, it’s his favorite way to spend his coffee break. SEON COO and Co-Founder Bence Jendruszak is a leader in the fraud prevention space with a proprietary platform that offers a plug-and-play API and a data enrichment advantage.For those of you who may not know, SEON started as a cryptocurrency exchange platform. However, a string of fraud experienced personally through this business venture eventually led Bence and his team to rethink their strategy. In his own words, “we faced fraud in our own skin because we started accepting credit card payments and our business was pretty much going to burn to the ground.” Upon looking for a solution in the marketplace to address their specific needs, Bence and his team found nothing. Thus, SEON was born. Originally a fraud prevention tool to address their own business needs, they later pivoted it into a sales tool that became their dominant go-to-market asset. “Our mission outgrew itself when we realized we could sell it on a global scale to make a global difference.”As for their target audience, SEON offers value to any online business dealing with fraud issues or authenticating online users. They offer an out-of-the-box solution with one single API that can be individually adapted to the needs of the user, in addition to a meaningful data enrichment advantage with the intention to focus on live information versus stale data.Tune in this week to hear Bence talk about his journey to COO, as well as where he sees the industry in the next 2-3 years when it comes to decentralization, cryptocurrency and blockchain. Spoiler alert: fraud is here to stay!

My guest this week has a vision for payments and a passion for ice cream! Orum CEO Stephany Kirkpatrick comes by her entrepreneurial spirit naturally as the daughter of an immigrant who came to the U.S. with nothing and “built from zero to something.” This in and of itself gave her passion for what our financial system can do to power the American household. Fast-forward several years later and Stephany found herself with a burning desire to “power a financial system where everyone has the freedom to build to their potential.” And that is just what she did with Orum. For those of you who may not know, Orum is a B2B embedded payments program that gives customers access to their money faster, along with a better capacity to maneuver through the financial system. Through their unified API, you can move money in all directions and across all major domestic payment rails. According to Stephany, they are “at the intersection of infrastructure in the financial ecosystem,” with speed being the number one problem they’re solving for. Or, more specifically, the speed at which customers can get money into their crypto wallet and onto the blockchain. “We sit in the middle of the complex two-part transaction with an interoperable layer that allows customers to start their transaction on RTP and finish it on card rails,” for example. Stephany goes on to say that Orum is consistently optimizing for speed, risk, and cost so that consumer lives can be transactional 24 hours a day, seven days a week.Tune in this week to hear Stephanie talk about the future of crypto, the necessity of RTP, and the $72 trillion market that Orum strives to support and optimize.

My guest this week has a burning desire to take the road less traveled and a passion for interacting authentically with others who have different lived experiences. He comes from a family of entrepreneurs and always knew he wanted to start a business that would make a positive impact on the world. So, of all the different businesses he could choose to start, why did he choose technology? According to Remitly Co-Founder/ CEO Matt Oppenheimer, “inherent in technology is the ability to scale and make a massive impact.” And this is just what he set out to do! A global citizen who has traveled close to 100 countries, Matt saw firsthand the challenges that come with cross-border payment remittance. And thus, Remitly was born with a vision to “transform the lives of immigrants and their families by providing the most trusted financial remittance services on the planet.” They sent more than $20 million to 5 million customers across 2,000 corridors (think U.S. to Mexico) last year alone and their core value proposition includes three main pillars: trust, peace of mind and reliability. According to Matt, Remitly is “doing for remittance what Amazon did for e-commerce.” They have 22 different send countries, with 130 receive countries in their portfolio. And just to give you an idea of their target audience, there’s roughly $1.6 trillion worth of funds that get sent globally every year. Tune in this week to hear Matt talk about is journey from Nairobi, Kenya to Remitly’s CEO. We also talk about what to expect from our industry in the next 2-3 years as it relates to remittance specifically. Did you know, for example, that 75 to 80% of customers still go to a physical cash location to send money back home? Matt foresees a shift coming in this sector as consumers begin to trust digital more. As for what keeps him up at night and what he spends a tremendous amount of his time and intention trying to create? You’ll have to tune in to find out! 

My guest this week has laid a truly impressive foundation for his company fueled by skill, passion, ingenuity, and a tremendous amount of grit! Blackthorn.io is a Salesforce application company that started back in 2015. And according to CEO Chris Federspiel, the road to success has not necessarily been an easy one. Chris talks about the go-to-market phase of his company in a manner that is truly admirable. Not only did the company face potential bankruptcy in 2018, but Chris himself petitioned multiple investors for funding support, none of which complied, only to charge the company forward and eventually turn profit as one of the fastest and most prolific apps in the Salesforce ecosystem.For those of you who may not know, Salesforce has a 20% market share of the global CRM deployment network, with 100,000-150,000 independent organizations using the application, as well as 10 million installs in AppExchange alone. As for what Blackthorn.io does, Chris says the best way to think of them is a middleware that connects their customers from Salesforce to multiple other gateways. Their market share is concentrated in the higher education, nonprofit and healthcare verticals, with their target audience being any organization within the Salesforce ecosystem needs to move money.As for their competitive edge, they have apps within the Salesforce ecosystem that cater to payments, events, messaging, and commerce. According to Chris, none of their competitors do even three out of four of these offerings, with most doing only one. They are also the fastest to install by a ratio of 30-45 minutes to 20-40 hours!Tune in this week and hear Chris talk about his journey to CEO, as well as where he sees the industry going in the next 2-3 years, including a massive consolidation and a saturation of API-based payment clones.

My guest this week has a passion for figuring out “how to do things different and better,” and his first experience of moving money was helping Fannie Mae move their federal funds across telephone lines. Verituity CEO Ben Turner keeps his philosophy pretty simple when it comes to business: “All you should ever have to say is how much to who and when, and the rest should just happen.”And for those customers transacting through the Verituity platform, it does! For those of you who may not know, Verituity is a payout platform that connects banks, payers, and payees to first-time and on-time verified payouts and pay-by-anything experiences. In Ben’s words, they introduce choice. Choice for the payer to support the method they can afford and choice for the payee to choose how to receive their funds. How do they do it? Verituity’s platform has the intelligence to know which payment method can support the size of each transaction, while still giving the payer the option to decide which payment types to offer based on cost. So, like Ben said… “who and when,” and the rest just happens.Some of the most common use cases for this platform include the insurance company that wants to send payment for their insured’s accident via PayPal, the mortgage company that wants to payout escrow via a wire transfer, or even the online gaming company that held a tournament and wants to pay their winners digitally. Tune in this week to hear Ben talk about the three core principles he aligns his company to and why it gives them no choice but to hire people they can trust to make good decisions. He also talks about where he sees the industry in the next 2- 3 years, including the rise of alternative payment methods, Verituity’s plans for offering pay-by-crypto later this year and the concept of a world without payment rails.

My guest this week is an avid tennis player with a passion for alternative payments. She started her career as a programmer in the brokerage business, with a degree in computer science, and ended up the CEO of alternative payments platform Payverse. So, how did she get from one end of the spectrum to the other? You’ll have to tune in to find out!According to CEO Sandra Blair, Payverse is a company that “enables payment processing traditional payment processor don’t typically do.” What does she mean by that specifically? Think cryptocurrency, buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) and their most foundational payment method: UnionPay. For those of you who may not know, UnionPay is the largest card issuer in the world, with more than 9 billion cards issued. And they came to Payverse exclusively with a request to develop the first complaint U.S. bank sponsorship model for UnionPay acceptance. The company launched in March but has already paved the way for progress with this UnionPay initiative. As for their competitive advantage, they have a fully augmented platform that is built entirely in the cloud, with API-enabled technology, that allows for a truly optimized plug-and-play solution.Tune in this week and hear Sandra talk about her journey through payments and the future of our industry over the next 2-3 years. We discuss consumer expectations around faster payments, new technologies that will be developed to mitigate the risk associated with these faster payments, and other emerging alternative payment methods that will come on the scene and continue to disrupt the ecosystem.Also a point of interest, we discuss her company’s current cryptocurrency roadmap to get them to their inevitable goal of shielding the merchant/processor from having to deal with all the complexities of crypto, as well as emerging BNPL options that strive to protect the merchant and pay them in full. Don’t miss it!

My guest this week started as a software engineer but soon discovered he had a love for payments. Brightwell CEO Larry Hipp has had a fascinating journey throughout the fintech space. He has a genuine passion for seeing people succeed and places a tremendous amount of intention and importance on the resiliency that a strong company culture can provide.For those of you who may not know, Brightwell is a fintech company that grew up in the prepaid industry. They cater predominately to the cruise ship market by providing prepaid cards for employee payroll. In fact, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that they single-handedly transformed the cruise ship industry from cash to digital. So, how did the global pandemic impact their business model? It’s inspiring to hear how the company continued to survive and thrive when cruise ships around the world completely shut down.Post-pandemic, they are going strong and have expanded their product suite into cross-border payments just as much as cruise ship payroll. One of their most coveted offerings, and a competitive advantage that truly sets them apart in the industry, is their capacity to have so many of the country’s top money movers under one roof. Their proprietary app interface features Western Union, MasterCard, MoneyGram, and several other key players to facilitate cross-border payments for their customers.Tune in this week and hear Larry talk about his journey through fintech and where he sees the industry going in the next 2-3 years, including a predicted consolidation throughout the fintech space to create new versions of the legacy players and how blockchain will change our industry significantly.