Leaders In Payments

As we continue our deep dive into diversity and inclusion, we meet this week with Covenant Pay CEO Quincy McKnight. A fully registered ISO looking to “really change the payments industry,” one of the questions I have for Quincy is how he prioritizes something like diversity and inclusion in a small company that already has so many priorities when it comes to establishing growth and momentum within the industry? His answer? “Leadership reflects attitude. Whatever they’re putting out at the top will be what’s executed at the bottom.” According to Quincy, Covenant has a strong company culture that encourages diversity and rewards employees who aren’t afraid to bring ideas to the table. He will be the first to say that people are very different, in many different ways, and it’s these differences that make any company stronger if they allow them to. And from an industry perspective, he will be the first to admit that it’s very obvious diversity and inclusion are not being practiced as a priority within our ecosystem given the lack of female and minority leadership. “Sometimes it feels like a bunch of used car salesman running around. We need to get a handle on not only how to use the technology but how to nurture the relationships.” Another point he brings into consideration from the consumer perspective is the impression your leadership team is giving to the public. If there aren’t any representatives that look and talk like the diverse community members, they will be less likely to transact in your playing field, according to Quincy. Tune in this week as we continue our deep dive into D&I and get some good perspective from the only fully registered ISO that is completely minority owned. Hear how they do it and what makes it successful!

I can’t think of a better guest to kick off diversity and inclusion month than Remitly Chief Customer and People Officer Rene Yoakum. With more than 40 years in Big Tech, including 19 years at Microsoft alone, Rene is more than qualified to speak to our listeners about this crucial topic. According to Rene, diversity, equity and inclusion (or DEI) means making sure your workplace offers a broad set of thinking, lived experiences and people with different identities and cultural backgrounds. And it’s not just about recruiting ethnic minorities. You have to make sure you have practices that allow diversity and inclusion to genuinely thrive in the workplace, in a manner that engages everyone from the employee to the customer.For those of you that may not know, Remitly is a money remittance service that helps immigrants send money back to their families and home community. They serve more than 5 million customers, with 17 send and 25 receive countries in their global portfolio. And, as if that wasn’t impressive enough, the company can service up to 1 billion of the 7 billion people on the planet — either immigrants or the families from the developing countries they’ve come from.Tune in this week and hear us discuss everything from best practices for managing large-scale diversity programs to creating a corporate culture that thrives on inclusion and equality. And as far as where to start on DEI, we tackle that too. Here’s a hint: “diverse recruiting is false advertising without also nurturing and growing a diverse employee experience.”Don’t miss this one!

This week marks the last episode for our Pulse series featuring Open Banking platform Trustly. And to close it out with a bang, I have Trustly President of North America Pete Ohser. Pete is a true industry veteran with more than 20 years in the payments space and a byline that includes an integral part in developing the first risk system for online money transfer platforms.In his own words, Trustly is “a payments company that does data really, really well.” They have been in the marketplace since 2008, originating in Europe where the Open Banking platforms are much more widely used. But according to Pete, the U.S. is primed for adoption and the need is growing at a rapid pace. What are some of the main motivators for early adopters? A lot of it has to do with speed and low-cost payment options. And when it comes to the benefits, they are strong on both sides of the equation. From a merchant perspective, they have less risk, an amazing user experience and all at a lower cost. From a customer perspective, Pete focuses on the value that comes with enabling them to build a relationship with their bank data that goes beyond what certain banks have the capacity to offer.  According to him, “the world is ready for alternatives to cards” and Trustly has a strong commitment to blazing that trail in the Open Banking space. Tune in and hear him talk about the journey of open banking from the EU perspective, the rise of adoption in the U.S. and what the future looks like for Open Banking as it relates to the simplification of cross-border payments, geographic expansion, greater bank regulation and the possibility of one single API to hit the entire world.

For someone who never thought he would end up in payments, Fleetcor Group President of North American Fuel Cards Alexey Gavrilenya sure has proven himself wrong. Having been with the company for more than 13 years, Alexey has overseen operations in Russia, London and now stateside in Atlanta. And he credits a lot of his success to his two passions: bringing the future forward and continually learning new things through a burning curiosity.Fleetcor is an established player in the payments space, with more than 20 years in the ecosystem, and a market cap of $20 billion. As for their core offering, they “help businesses be more effective by providing them best-in-class payment tools,” according to Alexey. Their model caters to a two-sided marketplace in that they not only work with customers, but they also acquire merchants and drive revenue to their bottom line. Their global headcount is around 10,000 employees, with a US presence of 2-3,000.When it comes to their competitive offering, one of the most important things they provide is competitive data analytics that enable significant value adds to their customers. Some examples of this include blending connected legal data with payment transactions to offer electrical payment solutions that allow customers to consciously impact their carbon footprint with carbon-neutral fleets. They can also authorize or decline in real-time based on location, use machine learning to provide credit lending options to SMBs and implement real-time fraud detection.In fact, felt cards generate less than half of their revenue annually. Tune in to hear more about this dynamic company from one of their seasoned leaders, including a glimpse into the future of fintech as it relates to big tech, embedded finance and going beyond payments for legacy players.

In this episode, I continue my deep dive into the unattended retail sector of the payments space with industry leader Cantaloupe. Their Vice President, GM Micro Markets Michael Johnson is my guest, and he has been in the autonomous retail space for quite some time now so the perspective he offers on this rapidly growing niche within our industry truly gives some food for thought about the future of where consumer engagement is headed.For those of you who may not know what the unattended retail space refers to, think the free-standing snack and drink kiosk’s you see at the airport, or the unmanned shops in corporate breakrooms and hotel lobbies. Cantaloupe is a digital payments and software company that acts as a full-service technology partner for businesses looking to expand their reach into the self-service micro market. In a nutshell, they help companies collect money through payments, run a tight ship with business efficiency and build life-long customer relationships through meaningful engagement practices.  As a result of the global pandemic, self-checkout and unattended retail went quickly from a nice-to-have classification to an absolute must. And Cantaloupe has been the industry leader driving all the buzz. Tune in this week to hear Michael talk about the growing consumer demand for a frictionless experience when it comes to payments, how AI has helped us take the enormous data dump that came with the digital age and make that data both meaningful and profitable, and what to expect moving forward in terms of cryptocurrency and relevant trends or unique applications predicted to dominate the unattended retail space. 

Our Open Banking pulse this week is on Trustly VP of North American Bank Partnerships Eric Foust – and for good reason! Not only is Eric a 20-year veteran in the banking space, he’s also the first VP I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with that has almost a super-hero theme to his roles and responsibilities within the Trustly empire. His chosen staff? A Trident. And the responsibilities represented by the three prongs?  1.     Facilitating all of Trustly’s banking relationships concerned with originating depository financial institutions (ODFI).2.     Overseeing all of Trustly’s Open Banking support for financial institutions in the U.S.3.     Collaborating with corporate bank partners to become resellers of the Trustly product suite.So, to say this podcast is full of invaluable takeaways would be an understatement. For those of you that may not have a baseline on the Trustly brand, they processed more than $10 billion in 2021, with more than 10 million users here in North America and just closed out a YOY growth revenue increase of 537% in the North American territory alone.Impressed? I was too! And listening to Eric discuss the Open Banking ecosystem is fascinating. He relates it to a stage of actors that feature the consumer as the main character (of course) and the merchant as the supporting role with other notable performances given by the banks (or keyholders) and the fintechs (technology wizards). Tune in to hear him share his invaluable perspective on the Open Banking concept from the frontline – including the three pillars of regulation, lessons from across the pond and what the future looks like as it relates to standardization and 24/7/365 banking.

What does an avid snowboarder with three degrees (legal, accounting and business) and a lifelong passion for solving problems have to offer to the payments space? You mean besides a genuine desire to accelerate the industry and a resume that includes 5 successful companies to establish his foundation before he even went fintech? A lot! Anchor Co-Founder and CEO Rom Lakritz has taken his passion for problem solving to the next level with his automated invoicing and accounting software that targets the service provider sector. According to Rom, when they started developing the idea for Anchor, they looked at the payments space and saw they could divide it into two segments. Half of all payments in the world are completely automatic, with the other half initiated via more of a manual process in the B2B space. And with this manual process comes elevated risk. There’s the risk of chargebacks, fraud, duplicate payments and the like. And with $200 trillion B2B payments being transacted worldwide, Rom set out to solve this very real challenge and mitigate that risk.And, thus, Anchor was conceived (on the way up a ski lift during a snowboarding trip, no less). To put it simply, Anchor is an autonomous billing and collections platform that strives to take the manual process out of accounts receivable by automating it.And one of the biggest issues Rom targets with his software? Revenue leakage. In the U.S. alone, this impacts 4.6% of top-line revenue for service providers which, according to Rom, actually effects between 30-40% of their overall profit margin. Tune in to hear about his problem-solving solution, his journey up the corporate ladder and where he sees the B2B payments space in the next 2-3 years.

A self-driven man with a passion for innovation that changes the marketplace and “doing payments right,” One Inc. CEO Ian Drysdale is a true leader in the payments space, with a resume that includes some of the biggest names in payments. So, how did he get his first job at PNC? He simply cold called the CEO and asked him for it.For those of you that may not know, One Inc. is a leading digital payments platform for the insurance industry. They facilitate upwards of $20 billion in payments annually for the property and casualty space, with two dominant types of transactions: inbound and outbound. The former refers to premium payments such as car insurance and the like, while the latter refers to claim payments similar to what you would see in an accident or damage claim. They are currently growing exponentially at a rate of 50% per year and their ultimate goal is to digitize the more than $1 trillion of paper checks floating around the insurance industry in the U.S. alone.As far as what differentiates them from their competitors, not only do they have exceptionally deep knowledge of the complexities of the insurance industry, they provide a full digital experience to their clients that accounts for so much more than just payment processing. According to Ian, One Inc. is “solving for all the use cases of insurance companies – not simply moving money in and moving money out.”Tune in to hear about Ian’s climb to the top and his expectations for the future of our industry – including the evolution of cryptocurrency and the dramatic shift towards real-time payments and authentication. In his own words, Ian believes that payments “can be done wrong or right and if done well, they become a massive differentiator in the marketplace.” Don’t miss this one!

As we continue this month with our focus on Open Banking, our pulse is on Trustly – a well-established open banking platform that enables merchant commerce, via ACH, in a manner that reduces fraud and promotes a more seamless payments flow.  Today, I talk with Chief Legal Officer Kathryn McCall about Trustly as both a rapidly growing company and a true leader in our industry. For those of you that may not know, the Trustly brand was launched in the U.S through a merger with local platform PayWithMyBank. To say that this partnership was well-matched is an understatement as the already-established Trustly brand facilitated a significant growth spurt for the company’s overall market share. And since 2018, Trustly has grown exponentially from just 20 employees to 300! Hearing Kathryn talk about the nuances of this merger is a fascinating glimpse into the difference between the U.S. and EU ecosystems. Both are well-established, but the EU is much more effortlessly driven towards the open banking concept largely because they were early adopters of the bank transfer model. Their ecosystem has been thriving on it for decades. The U.S. ecosystem, on the other hand, still gravitates largely towards card and (though less prevalent now) check payments. Not to mention, the challenges the EU presents with cross-border rules and regulations offer an interesting spin on cross-border commerce.  Tune in to hear how Trustly has had to adapt in order to establish and grow their global footprint, as well as how the benefits of open banking differ from the merchant versus the consumer side, and what the future looks like as we charge forward towards automation and digitization.

For those of you looking to quantify and understand all the benefits of open banking, you’ve come to the right place! In this Pulse of Payments episode, I speak with Trustly VP of Enterprise Growth Ross McFerrin – a self-proclaimed payments geek admittedly obsessed with the innovation and disruption within our dynamic ecosystem. Open banking, by definition, is the use of open APIs that enable developers to build applications and services around the financial institution. So, what do companies like Trustly provide in the way of innovation and disruption? Simply stated, they make ACH a viable method of payment within the digital commerce space. And this is a big win for merchants because it offers them a payment alternative to card that is less risky and more cost effective. In the ecommerce space, Trustly thrives as an alternative to card because they can guarantee payments with no chargebacks and at a cost that is much lower. When it comes to travel, merchants appreciate the level of security and confidence experienced on both sides of the payments loop and the fintech space also benefits from open banking options to help facilitate various offerings including NACHA compliance, loan underwriting, RTP disbursement and the funding of crypto wallets.  But, truly, Trustly offers benefits on both side of the payments equation. Merchants realize material savings from a payments standpoint, have the capacity to deliver a payments experience that resonates well with the younger generations and can even benefit from future-proofing their business as real-time rails become more ubiquitous. Consumers, on the other hand, unlock value in the form of more benefit-driven incentives offered by the merchants they choose to transact with. In this episode we'll answer - how is open banking shaping our industry and what do we have to look forward to in the very near future.