Leaders In Payments

Kevin Smith, the CEO of Securebancard is our special guest this week and this is episode 69 of the Leaders in Payments podcast.Kevin grew up in a small town in east Texas and joined the Marine Corps right out of high school. After the Marines he joined a small ISO in Irvine, California before making his way to Atlanta Georgia that he now calls home.  Securebancard has built its own in-house portfolio management platform. Their customers can customize statements, adjust billing schemas and create unique offerings in the market. They have $22-23 million in annual revenue and process payments for roughly 3,500 merchants. They focus mainly on ecommerce but they really provide solutions based on their customers needs and their customers are typically other ISOs.  According to Kevin one of the payment trends he sees in the next few years is the continued push for compliance and risk mitigation especially as real time payments becomes a standard way of doing business.  Kevin has a passion for automating processes within his business and on the personal side he has a passion for cars. He also some great advice for those just joining our industry.  

Anand Goel, the CEO of Optimized Payments is our special guest this week. This is the third episode of The Pulse of Payments special series for Q1 2021 The video podcast for this episode can be found here. Or visit our YouTube Channel. Optimized Payments has helped Fortune 100 to mid-sized companies save over $300 million in interchange and processing fees. Anand has also led efforts to revolutionize payments analytics. Anand and I covered topics ranging from data in payments to new NACHA requirements to what the post-COVID-19 payments ecosystem looks like to other hot trends in the industry. For more information about Optimized Payments visit their website: www.optimzedpayments.com 

This episode is the final entry in our special series on The Digital Payments Tipping Point. In this three-part series I've been talking with executives from WEX’s Corporate Payments division who partnered with the research team at The Economist over the summer of 2020 to look into the state of business-to-business payments in financial services, fintechs, and technology companies. The research found that companies that have grown most robustly during the pandemic are accelerating their evolution away from slow, manual, paper-based payments into secure, data-rich, real-time digital payments.This 3-part series digs into the issues surrounding this rapid evolution in digital payments. Our first episode featured Greg Sassone, SVP of Business & Partner Growth at WEX Corporate Payments, and focused on whether banks should build, buy or partner when it comes to adopting new technology or innovation. The second episode featured Dylan Jones, Vice president of operations for WEX Corporate Payments and Laura Shen, Director of Strategy for WEX Corporate Payments. This discussion focused on the interchange realities that the payments industry needs to face. My special guest on this final episode in the series is WEX Corporate Payments President Jay Dearborn. Jay and I will be discussing the Shape of Payments to Come, and what might lie beyond the digital tipping point.WEX is a global B2B Payments Technology Company. Their Corporate Payments division focuses on innovating digital payments solutions for financial institutions and fintechs as well as large corporations that need to modernize their AP processes. 

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 industry. 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 ninth episode of our special series on D&I by Tracey McCant Trentel. Tracey is the Vice President, Business Integration, for Paysafe. She joined their leadership team last year and is responsible for oversight of a portfolio of strategic initiatives designed to deliver an outstanding and differentiated customer experience that will ultimately drive business growth.   Before joining Paysafe, Tracey established herself as an accomplished leader in service delivery and process re-engineering, always targeting heightened customer satisfaction. She previously worked for Worldpay where she was responsible for managing various complex business transformation projects that incorporated work process redesign and the implementation of new cost-effective technologies. Before Worldpay, she gained wide-ranging experience working for high profile companies such as Dow Chemical, Newell Rubbermaid, and the Coca-Cola Company. Tracey holds a BSE in Chemical Engineering from Tulane University and is both a certified Six Sigma Black belt and PMP.  She currently resides in her hometown of Atlanta, GA.

Bill Wade, the CEO of Company.com is our special guest this week and this is episode 65 of The Leaders in Payments podcast.Bill grew up in Connecticut, and was a professional drummer before “hitting it big” in the payments industry. He was recruited by Marriott Corporation out of college, and spent a decade with them in the executive program before shifting into sales and mortgage banking, eventually making his way into the payments space.Company.com now provides resources and services to business owners. While not serving the payments industry exclusively, because of Bill’s previous decades of experience in payments, it has consistently been one of Company.com’s top priorities.According to Bill, the single biggest differentiator for Company.com is their focus on the overall user experience. With several members of his team coming from a payments background, they have an in-depth understanding of the industry’s competitive nature, as well as the importance of differentiation.A continuing payments trend, according to Bill, will be progressive advancements related to speed of transaction settlement, as well as increased opportunities for business with solid technology backgrounds that can effectively address the user experience.Bill is tremendously appreciative of the team members he’s had over the years, and is excited about helping more companies find and take advantage of opportunities moving forward. His advice for newcomers: Be innovative, be scrappy and work hard.

This is the second episode in our series "The Pulse of Payments" and Shaun Abraham, the CEO of Transaction Insights is our special guest this week. Before co-founding Transaction Insights, Shaun held leadership positions in both JP Morgan and Bank of America, and has tremendous expertise in market intelligence. Today, his company helps businesses keep track of the payments space as well as find opportunities in it.According to Shaun, one of the trends that is coming in our space is the rebundling of financial services, with companies looking to partner with and/or acquire businesses in order to expand their service offerings.  Shaun also believes that the “Buy Now Pay Later” (BNPL) space has interesting things in store in 2021, and will continue to see growth. Managing it responsibly, however, may prove to be challenging moving forward.Another hot trend, according to Shaun, is the shift toward payments in the cloud. With a partnership between Global Payments and Google Cloud having been recently announced, he believes that other similar partnerships are forthcoming. With the goals being speed to integrate, speed to market and flexibility to adapt and change, “future-proofing” your platform will continue to be a top-tier agenda item in the payments industry.

Cleveland Brown, the CEO of Payscout is our special guest this week and this is episode 63 of the Leaders in Payments podcast.Cleveland grew up in San Jose California with Apple and IBM being in his backyard. Cleveland went to college at UCLA and majored in philosophy and business economics. While in college he started a company building ecommerce platforms and software for public school systems. He currently lives in LA.Payscout is a payment technology company that builds proprietary solution designed to increase conversions, enhance compliance and reduce processing costs – focused on highly regulated ecommerce sectors like medical billing, health care, cross border, education and enterprise level entities.   The culture of Payscout is what differentiates the company having won multiple awards for best places to work. According to Cleveland one of the trends that is coming in our space is payments in immersive experiences like virtual reality or augmented reality.  Cleveland has a passion for building the best culture at Payscout. He also some great advice for those just joining our industry.  

Bill Lodes, Chief Revenue Officer at linked2Pay is our special guest this week. This is episode 62 of the Leaders in Payments podcast.Bill was born in New York and comes from a family of entrepreneurs. Bill learned the value of hard work at his dad’s own restaurant where he also learned the details of opening and operating a small business – from the pot sink to being a bartender to a line cook.   Linked2Pay is a payment technology company that provides credit and debit card processing, ACH and payment integration tools to software partners as well as offers a white label payments platform to banks, channel partners and more. One of the ways linked2Pay differentiators themselves is to really understand the pain points of their partners and their customers and then build the technology to help solve for these pain points. Bill has some great insights into the future of payments based on the behavior changes of consumers. 

This is the first episode of the Q1 2021 “The Pulse of Payments” series. My special guest this week is Krista Tedder, the Director Payments for Javelin Strategy and Research. During this episode we’re discussing how the payments industry will be affected by the new Biden administration here in the U.S. and the fact that the Democrats hold majorities in both the House and Senate. Krista talks about how interchange revenue could be regulated – both debit (again) and credit. She also covers topics like digital currencies, cannabis and online betting.     She also discusses what the payments industry will look like post Covid-19 as well her thoughts on the continuation of M&A activity and PE/VC investments.   

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 The Women's Network in Electronic Transactions is celebrating 15 years of helping women achieve greater personal success, influence, and professional parity in the payments industry. 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 eighth episode of our special series on D&I by Andrew Greening, the Managing Partner of Greenings International.  Andrew Greening has been a pioneer in the Executive Search industry for over 30 years. Andrew has disrupted and challenged the possible for cross-border executive search and talent acquisition, from turning around international offices and acquisitions to building out new methodologies for client success. Andrew’s global network is driven by his interest and passion for people, helping to further careers and being fully invested in his clients.