Leaders In Payments

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.

What does an avid Squash player with an underdog mentality and a passion for sales have to do with payments? A lot! My guest this week is Engagesmart CEO Bob Bennett. He has run four different companies over the last 30 years and been in the payments ecosystem long enough to acquire a passion for the electronic payments industry and a desire to create differentiation within that space.For those of you who may not know, Engagesmart is a bill presentment company that simplifies customer and client engagement through electronic payments. They own 4 different brands serving health and wellness, utilities, healthcare, and fundraising, all of which drive a digital self-service and payments experience. Their goal is 100% paperless and autopay solutions for invoice management and their proprietary brand Invoice Cloud drives their customer base at a rapid pace.If you were to ask Bob what got him from an applied math and computer science degree to a prolific CEO in the payments space, he will be the first to tell you that sales became his calling at a young age and he “got really good at selling hard things.” Tune in this week to hear Bob talk about his journey to becoming CEO, including his highly prescriptive method for hiring, recruiting, and retaining employees, his desire to create a unique SaaS business and his personal/professional “grow or die” philosophy. We also discuss the overall impact of the global pandemic and the tailwinds Engagesmart is still riding as a result of it.

My guest this week has been in the payments industry for 20 years and credits the lifespan of his prolific career to a small decision that was motivated by an empty gas tank. It all started in the basement of a dental office, at a startup ISO space with no windows, and an inclination that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. But he needed enough gas to get to where he was going next, so he decided to give it a chance and the rest is history. TRNXN Company CEO Paul Hadfield has made it his charge to modernize payments for his clients and provide them with a “project design” that optimizes their potential and maximizes their revenue. According to him, “the point-of-sale is really the central nervous system of any business. It can manage and connect every single moving part of your company.” For those of you who may not know, TRNXN is a modern transaction company that designs, implements, and supports custom payment solutions for the retail and restaurant verticals. It is Paul’s belief that in order to build successful ISOs and profitable payments companies today, you have to leverage technology and service. With this intention in mind, TRNXN Company “helps ISOs modernize their business by helping them modernize their client’s business.”What’s their business model? According to Paul, they’re not just payment providers but rather small business consultants. “Anything that has to do with a financial transaction, we are involving ourselves with and trying to make that process easier or less expensive for the business – or more expensive but with a strategy that drives more sales.”Tune in this week to hear Paul talk about TRNXN Company – A business with “no exit plan” that he intends to run for the rest of his life and represents “a combination of everything he has learned in the industry coming to a head.” We also talk about what payments looks like for the retail and hospitality industry over the next 2 to 3 years, including everything from a spike in QR code implementation, to the astronomical margins on the current delivery model, and how long it will take crypto to make it into the restaurant space. Don’t miss it!