Leaders In Payments

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. 

Marwan Forzley, the CEO of Veem is our special guest this week on episode 73 of the Leaders in Payments podcast. Marwan grew up and went to school in Canada and is now based in San Francisco where he started Veem in 2014.  Prior to starting Veem, he ran e-commerce for Western Union after having sold his prior company to them. Veem is the simplest way for businesses to pay and get paid around the world. All you need is an email address. They operate in 110 countries with 50 plus currencies and have a quarter of a million accounts on their platform.Their goal is to make paying and getting paid as simple as possible. A simple way to think about it is that they're the Venmo for businesses, both domestically and internationally. They use six different rails to move money, including things like the MasterCard and Visa rails, Swift and blockchain technologies, as well as several others. What makes Veem different is their simplicity, cost savings and timing of the payments. Marwan has a passion for using technology to create a great customer experience and loves to make a difference in the lives of his business customers.

Craig Sobol, the Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of XUP is our special guest on episode 72 of the Leaders in Payments podcast. Craig grew up in New York and went to school in upstate New York and moved to Charlotte, North Carolina when he took a job with Bank of America and currently resides there with his wife and two sons.  XUP was founded with the premise to help banks drive transactions up so in the name “x” is for transactions and then “up.”Banks have typically outsourced merchant services to a third-party acquirer and keep merchant services at arms -length even though merchant services is a very sticky product. Banks need to deepen their relationships with their customers but 92% of business customers at a bank gets their merchant services from someone other than their bank. So the founders at XUP saw an opportunity to build software that sits between the bank and their merchant processor. Their software includes 5 different modules from top of the funnel sales and marketing to onboarding to analytics.  Craig has a passion for creating a tremendous user experience for his customers and personally loves to watch his sons succeed in their endeavors. Craig’s also loves to play the piano. 

This is the 4th episode in our Q1 2021 Pulse of Payments series sponsored by Company.com.Today’s guest is Nick Starai, the Chief Strategy Officer at NMI.  At NMI their mission is to use their expertise to enable more payments, in more ways and more places. They provide ISOs, Fintech Innovators and Technologists the freedom to focus on what they do best, liberating them from restricted payment solutions and giving them access to the latest payment technology now and in the future.In this episode Nick and I discuss many of the latest trends in payments including contactless payments, transit payments, the disruption by fintech in the banking space and omnichannel commerce. 

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. I’m honored to be joined on the tenth episode of our special series on D&I by Melanie Tinto, the Chief Human Resource Officer at WEX.  Melanie joined WEX in 2018, bringing an almost 20-year track record of leading global talent acquisition, talent management, leadership development, and organizational development for large, multi-billion dollar corporations. As Chief Human Resource Officer at WEX, Melanie is responsible for developing and executing human resources strategy in support of the company’s overall business plan and strategic direction, specifically in the areas of succession planning, talent management, change management, organizational and performance management, training and development, and compensation and benefits. Prior to joining WEX, Melanie served as Medtronic’s vice president of talent acquisition, talent management, and its chief learning officer and as Hewlett-Packard’s vice president of executive leadership development and organizational development. She also held HR Business Partner roles at Walmart, Bank of America and Cigna. Melanie earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting from the University of Maine and an MBA with a concentration in finance from the University of Connecticut.