Leaders In Payments

Andrew Jamison, the CEO & Co-Founder of Extend is our special guest this week on episode 83 of the Leaders in Payments podcast. Andrew spent the first 10 years of his career at SAP and then moved over to American Express for 12 years where he managed all B2B payments solutions, including virtual card platforms and products. Andrew currently lives in New York City with his wife and two small children.  In 2016 he started Extend with two partners. They raised a friends and family round to build their MVP. Extend has starting the process of raising $30 million in a series B.As traditional banks look to compete in the digital world, Extend helps them to build out digital capabilities – an extension that builds or sits over their core technology and repackages what they have in ways companies would want to use them. They started with credit cards or virtual cards as nearly every business has this need.  Andrew has some great advice for those just starting their careers and on a personal level, although living in New York City – he loves the outdoors and more specifically hiking. 

Chris Chestnut, the CEO & Co-Founder of Payix is our special guest this week on episode 82 of the Leaders in Payments podcast.  Chris moved to North Texas from Arizona when he was 12 and has been in North Texas since including attending college at University of Texas in Arlington. Chris assumed his career would be in sales but he actually hated sales, so he went into the IT department at Americredit and learned the technology side of business. He left Americredit and started a company that bought auto receivables.    In 2015 Chris left that company with another partner to start Payix. Payix is a software platform that helps non-bank middle tier lenders communicate with their borrowers and ultimately take their payments – whether that is online, mobile, IVR or with an agent on the phone. Their integration with loan management systems helps to differentiate them in the marketplace. Today Payix has 30-40 team members and has close to 100 customers using their software today. Chris has some great advice for entrepreneurs and for those just starting their careers – whether in payments or not.  

Ari Horowitz, the CEO of Yardline Capital is our special guest this week on episode 81 of the Leaders in Payments podcast. Ari grew up just outside of New York City and went to college at the University of Pennsylvania. He’s been an entrepreneur his entire life starting by tarring driveways and tutoring SATs in high school. He’s started over 10 business to date.   Yardline Capital provides non diluted capital for ecommerce sellers operating on marketplaces like Amazon, Etsy, eBay and others. Many companies that compete on these marketplaces need capital to grow their business – typically using funds for marketing or buying more inventory. Yardline has been in business for just over a year and is continuing to build their brand. Yardline differentiates themselves because they started the company from the operator’s perspective and know what it takes to be successful as a seller on the marketplaces. They also provide their customers with a seller success manager that helps each customers grow their business through consulting and thought leadership.  

That was Patricia Montesi, the CEO of Qolo and she is our special guest this week on episode 80 of the Leaders in Payments podcast. Patricia grew up in Charleston, West Virginia, and went to the University of Miami and has never left south Florida. She started in the car rental space and was there for 9 years before moving into the payments industry.   Qolo is an omnichannel, unified payments platform and is 100% in the cloud. They are powering fintechs and companies competing against fintech. They were founded in 2018, got seed funding in late 2019 and got their first customer in 2020.  The founding team has worked together on and off over the last 20 years before coming together to build Qolo.Qolo is an acronym for quality-of-life organization. Most of their customers demand an omnichannel solution with the most modern APIs and Qolo provides this in multiple engagement models from outsourcing everything to Qolo to bringing and managing everything in house at the customer.  Patricia has a passion to build great products, a great team and a great company. On a personal level she’s passionate about spending time with her family. 

That was Dimitri Akhrin, the founder and President of IRIS CRM and he is our special guest on episode 79 of the Leaders in Payments podcast.Dimitri was born in the Ukraine and his family moved to New York when he was 8 years old. He went to high school and college in New York. He started his first business when he was 12 years old and started in payments in high school and has worked in every role in a payments company from appointment setter to sales to becoming an ISO.  IRIS CRM where IRIS stands for integrated reporting is simple – is a business management system designed for payments – it is an ISO enablement platform that helps companies that sell merchant services. Customers use IRIS to track leads, it has an electronic signature process for boarding a merchant, a help desk system, residual reporting and more. IRIS CRM  services more than 200 ISOs which represents over 300,000 active merchants.  Dimitri has three boys, ages 5, 3 and 1 that keeps him busy when he isn’t leading and growing IRIS CRM. 

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 and fintech industries. 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 twelfth episode of our special series on D&I by Garima Shah, the president at Biller Genie.  As Biller Genie president, Garima Shah can usually be found (and heard) reviewing company financials, finding strategic business opportunities, managing the Biller Genie team - and serving as volunteer dancer for the team’s social media videos. More competitive than Conor McGregor, as a child Garima would do anything it took to win at monopoly (and still does), which pushed her to pursue an MBA in the competitive fields of entrepreneurship and finance. Garima learned early on that she enjoyed helping and leading others, which led her to serve in key positions in the fintech industry, such as head of national sales for eMerchantPay, and Chief Business Development Officer at Direct Connect. She has cultivated long relationships throughout her 17 years in the payments industry. Garima reunited with friend and Biller Genie CEO, Thomas Aronica, and the dream team was formed. In her spare time, Garima creates tik tok videos with her daughters and casually wins Bollywood dance competitions.

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 and fintech industries. 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 eleventh episode of our special series on D&I by Kristy Richardson, the CEO of USPay Group.  Kristy has been with USPAY since its inception in 2005. In January of this year, she was named the CEO. Prior to being named the CEO, she was the Chief Operating Officer where her primary focus was on managing all aspects of the merchant boarding process, POS equipment programming and deployment, risk management and loss prevention, client services and merchant quality assurance and retention. Kristy previously served as Director of Corporate Services for Federated Payment Systems. Kristy has over 15 years of concentrated experience overseeing company operations with concentrations in risk management, underwriting and client services. Her diverse experience and constant diligence to stay current on industry developments, makes her an invaluable asset to the USPAY Team.

Anand Goel the President and CEO at Optimized Payments is our special guest this week on episode 76 of the Leaders in Payments podcast. Anand went to middle school in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, high school in Houston Texas and went University of Texas in Austin for his undergrad degree. He worked at MCI Telecommunications in a management training program, left there and got his MBA from Babson College and stayed in Boston. And in his words “I got into the payments industry because of a girl.”  Ultimately leaving Boston for Atlanta – where he went to work for Elavon. Optimized Payments is a payments analytics and consulting firm that has been in business for 14 years. They allow organizations to measure or benchmark the performance of their payments. They built a one-of-a-kind SaaS platform that consumes transaction data from all the big acquirers to not only help their customers save money by reducing the cost of accepting payments but also to enhance or drive revenue as well as many other interesting use-cases.  Most of their clients do billions of dollars in card payments so clients like Apple, Verizon, Staples, Waste Management and more. Currently 2/3rds of their business comes from recurring SaaS fees for the analytics platform and 1/3 comes from their traditional consulting business.  On the personal side Anand has two teenage daughters and enjoys spending time with them. We’ve got a great episode today so let’s get started. 

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.