#30 - The CLT Payments Season - Joe Giordano, Founder and former CEO of Payzer

Speaker A: Hey everybody, and welcome to season two of the Pay CLT Payments Hub podcast, sponsored by Inava. I'm your host Scott Harkey. And this season we're going to be diving deeper into the lives of some of the local payment professionals here in Charlotte to learn about their journey into the payment space. We hope you'll join us. Really excited today for our first Pay CLT payment obsession in person.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: All right, so Joe, thanks for being here.

Speaker B: Thank you for having me. Absolutely.

Speaker A: Uh, so this series we're really excited because we're learning about kind of our local painting leaders and you've got quite a history both here in Charlotte and just in general. So why don't we start out by learning a little bit about you and

Speaker B: tell us a little bit about what

Speaker A: you do and kind of some of your background.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, uh, shoot. Uh, personally I have a family, we live at Lake Norman. I've got four children, all doing really well, beautiful wife. And uh, we're just enjoying kind of semi retirement. I sold my business back in November of 2023 paeser. And uh, I've been helping a few startups out here and there and enjoying that, you know, helping them with advisory and payments, of course. And uh, so I'm just really enjoying life right now. Yeah.

Speaker A: Awesome. Maybe if we go all the way back to the beginning. What was your first job in payments? How did you get into this space?

Speaker B: Well, I started right out of college with mobile oil, which date myself was 1985. It was a Fortune 3 company, the third largest company in the world at the time. They're now part of ExxonMobil. Uh, but I started in a tech job, uh, which was a lot different than tech today. And uh, I worked there a couple years and I got my MBA at night in finance from George Washington. Uh, because back in the day we used to go at night and uh, it worked out well. I moved into a. I uh, ran a very early data analytics function where we built the site selection modeling and uh, performed data analytics for the rest of the organization. Uh, and uh, that was cool. And then moved into finance and uh, ran the numbers for a couple of years and they said, hey, you're pretty good at tech. Uh, I said I really want to be a crude trader. And they're like, no, you're pretty good at tech. Why don't you go work in the card group? I rolled out really the first self serve implementations of payments, which was called pay at the pump, where you stick your card. As we're all familiar into the gas pump. Those were really the first self serve implementations of payments.

Speaker A: And this was for mobile.

Speaker B: Mobile oil. Yeah. And so I didn't create that but I just was responsible to roll it out, you know, 5,000 gas station dealers to buy into it and implement it. And I learned a lot. And uh, I start, you know, I kept doing more in that area and I took over the point. We built our own point of sale at mobile because it was before gateways were really commonly available. Uh, so we had our own point of sale with direct connects to all the various uh, you know, banks for debit. We had our own, essentially our own debit card network. Uh, and you know, obviously the credit card processing and all to drive pay at the pump. And uh, we were kind of a leader in payments, uh, uh, because most of the transactions at the time were in gas stations and grocery. Gas and grocery, right. Qsr fast food was just kind of coming on. Uh, and that ultimately became, but anyway, so I learned the payments business from the beginning and then you know, uh, it kept going. I took over the credit card itself and ran the port private label credit cards which were a big deal in the fuel industry and fleet credit cards. Uh, we were the first to uh, have a relationship with wex, which ultimately bought my company pacer. It all came full circle back when WEX was a startup. Uh, so I'm seeing all this happen. They came to me and they put me in charge of all this and they said we want you to figure out how to make mobile the fastest place to buy gas in the world. And so we looked at all kinds of crazy things, you know, but ultimately it came down to payment because that's what we could execute. And so I created something called speedpass, which was the first use of alias based payments, tokenization and uh, radio frequency technology for contactless payment. And uh, you would touch, you'd hang it on your key ring, you touch it at the pump.

Speaker A: I had one of those, one of

Speaker B: those little plastic, yeah, little plastic dongles. And uh, that was amazing. Texas Instruments did the core technology, the pump company did a lot of the integration. But you know we built a system that really ran it. Uh, and it was really one of the very first, that was in, you know, 1996, one of the first fintech products. I mean there was very little innovation for 20, 30 years prior to that in payments because the systems were so archaic. And then just at that time the Internet was, was really starting to take hold. Uh, and so let's pause there for

Speaker A: a second because I'M really curious about the customer adoption side of that. Right. So you go through, you know, cards at the pump and you move into Contactless eventually. And contactless had another, you know, 10 years to get traction. But even going back to the card side of things, how, how did you convince in consumers to use their card at the pump? Or is that what they wanted?

Speaker B: Oh, yeah, no car. Great question. It wasn't easy. Uh, there's a small number of early adopters. Uh, most people thought it was a stupid idea. Uh, so you go back to what Steve Jobs ultimately said, which was people may not always know what they want. Uh, so it's very tricky looking at market research for new products. But we knew they wanted speed and convenience. And we knew the experience of, uh, having to go, uh, into the store and wait in line to give the guy in the Led Zeppelin T shirt your, uh, credit card was, uh, a terrible experience. And so we knew this was way better. Right. And we knew people wanted convenience. Uh, and then we were rolling it out and, uh, we had to work with the banks to give, we'd give dollar credits, you know, a dollar off if you'd use your card at the pump. And the banks and bank of America. Bank of America used to give folks a dollar for using their debit card at the pump. And we would market that and more ways to pay. And it took 15 years to get people because now it's, you know, 80, 90% more or plus, depending on the location, use cards at the pump.

Speaker A: Yeah. Now they have the opposite problem. Right. Gas stations can't get people into the actual store to buy.

Speaker B: That's interesting, because when we were, we had to leave Mobile and the whole rollout was stopped thanks to a consulting company who I won't tell you about, I won't mention their name, who said, you're going to destroy the convenience store business if you roll this out. And, uh, you know, you know, we were kind of just following our customers. I was pretty young. I mean, I was 30 years old. I was like, oh, you might be right. I don't know. But it seems like everybody loves it. You know, why wouldn't our people are stuck in the Luns. Why don't. But, uh, so we stopped and did a study for a year and we found the exact opposite. The convenience store sales went up because it got all the fuel only purchasers out of the store. So it increased the capacity of the store. And the convenience store sales went up, the fuel purchases went up. It was a home run.

Speaker A: Interesting.

Speaker B: So then we went Back to rolling it out but now everybody else kind of caught up and so we didn't get an advantage. So we came out with Speedpass, which was the RF prime. We didn't make the same mistake. We rolled it out super fast. We got a big advantage and it increased uh, I won't say how much it increased market share substantially for mobile uh, at the time and was a real big, big win for us. But it took 15 years of marketing and uh, the fuel business is not a high margin business. So we didn't spend a ton on marketing. But we, you know we worked on our credit card. We had a big credit card holder base and we worked on that first. Uh, but then when we got to Speedpass we had learned a lot and we went fast. We marketed, uh, was kind of started pre Internet so there was no real email channel, uh, it was direct mail, uh, and follow up phone calls. But we.

Speaker A: What was the proposition for Speedpass?

Speaker B: For Speedpass it was, this is the fastest way uh, to buy your gasoline. And it was kind of hard to explain it but when, when you went to the pump and you touched your thing and it was just on. It was. I had a hot pump so we took the risk of the authorization time and we just turned the pump on instantly when you touched your. So it's instantaneous. It was something. The light, the Pegasus lit up and uh, it was like magic. It was like oh my God, I don't have to read because remember they had a little tiny green screen 2 line. You had to read that, follow the prompts, answer questions, you know, kind of like you do today, which these ridiculous prompts. They still have a point of sale inside. You know, all that was gone. It was just a light. It's on. It's good to go. For women it was really beneficial because they didn't have to. I sat in a gas station and watched what people do when they bought gas before I created. And like women especially have the most steps because they have to find their purse. It's not always right near them in the car. So they have to find their purse, then find their wallet and their purse, then find the card in the wallet and take it out and then orient the card, you know, with the mag string, uh, up and to the left, right. Which people get wrong all the time. And then they're outdoor readers, card readers. So they didn't work a lot of the time. And so it was a terrible process but it was way better than going inside. So this really fixed all that and we grew to 6 million users in just a few years. Uh, so it really, people loved it.

Speaker A: What about fraud and all that? How did you think about that or how did that.

Speaker B: The fraud was, uh, so that's a great question. Uh, so we didn't have any fraud. Just like anything new, you have no fraud initially, but we had, uh, so there was different types of fraud. But we had, you know, we, you know, it's an alias based payment mechanism. So your card was never, it's the first, you know, the card. We got the benefit of having the card not in play. But you know, somebody, you know, people lost, you know, their, their tokens. Uh, and we prevented uh, you know, duplication of them because we had tokenization. Uh, at the time we, you know, we used Texas Instruments to create, it's called digital signature technology. And it would send through a randomly generated number, match it up on the other end and you know, if it was fraudulent because they were easy to replicate. You know, the actual number wasn't clear, you know. But that was back in the day, you have to understand, uh, they had a journal tape in the back of the gas station and all the transaction history was printed on the journal tape including the full card number. Um, so that's the environment we were in. At the time it was much less. It wasn't until the Internet came that it created places to use all these fraudulent companies.

Speaker A: Well, I think, and the ability to scale it, I feel like fraud back then was a lot more. You would have to physically go to this individual and how much can you really commit to?

Speaker B: But we did have some fraud, Some fraud issues creep in, you know, uh, with losses sold. And we, you know, we started building more sophisticated systems to track it. And uh, we worked pretty closely with the car companies to monitor. They were quite interested in it, you know, at the time. And uh, they told us it was a terrible idea. Uh, but now they, you know, 25 years later, they all have, they make a lot of money off of that. Contactless payments finally. But yeah, it was uh, yeah, it was a shame we couldn't bring it outside of mobile at the time. It's one of my great regrets. We tried a little bit, but we weren't able to really create a startup from inside of anything. Especially after we got acquired by Exxon. And it was a really big corporation. It just was a very difficult thing to, very difficult to create a startup from within a big corporation.

Speaker A: So what happened from there? You eventually end up with one. So what happened from there?

Speaker B: So I, I, you know, we got acquired By Exxon. I stayed for four or five years and I, but I really love the payments business and so I came to Charlotte, uh, with, you know, to work for bank of America to learn more about it. Uh, the world's biggest payments company at the time. You know, bank of America maybe still are, but.

Speaker A: And uh, J.P. morgan's.

Speaker B: Maybe J.P. morgan's taking it over. Yeah, I'm sorry Bank of America, but uh, but they're still big enough and uh, we um. You know, I learned a lot about the payments. You know, I got a first class education in payments from a banking perspective and it was a bit humbling, I gotta tell you, but I learned a lot. And uh, then I uh, you know, met up with, you know, while I was there I met up with my co founder and we started talking about the contractor space and then I ultimately quit after five years to start Paeser. And I worked there for 12 years and then just kind of exited from that. But Paeser was interesting to me because you know, I was, it's a big decision to leave the bank when you have two kids in college and uh, two more that need to go through, uh, actually one in college, one about to go. And uh, I was 47 years old. That was a big decision. And uh, I did it though because when there's a quantum leap change in technology, it creates huge opportunity. And uh, we were about to have the change to LTE in 2012. It came in 2014, ish, you know, roughly. But I knew that that kind of a quantum because there wasn't really a mobile Internet for businesses. Like the Internet via your mobile phone was not good enough to run a business off of. It wasn't robust enough, it wasn't uh, fast enough, it wasn't reliable enough. But I knew with LTE and so, and these service businesses, contractors, so they didn't have Internet cloud based solutions even to 2012 because they couldn't use it where they worked, which was in your house, not in their office. And so uh, I just said, and I looked at the size of the market and it's not a very, you know, uh, front and center market that folks think about. But it maybe not the sexiest, but it is big and it's fragmented, lots of problems, which means opportunity and uh, big market, no cloud based solutions. I was like, we didn't miss the Internet and you know, here's our chance to create cloud and mobile solutions for a huge business sector. And uh, lo and behold, you know, 10 years later they now call it field services. Management and it's a big sector with many verticals, many sub verticals to it. And so really, really still a big opportunity.

Speaker A: Yeah, a couple things in that that resonate. One, I also left bank of America when I was 35. Uh, and I remember how hard a decision was because I had three kids. Yeah, two of mine were only one at the time. So, um, but it's always hard to step out of that. Uh, what feels, at least for me, it felt like kind of security of a big company, big job. Um, I don't know if it still feels that way these days, but certainly then it felt that way. You mentioned also when you were at Mobile that you wish you had been able to spin out that idea into something. So it sounds like you've had that kind of entrepreneurial spirit.

Speaker B: Yeah, we even tried, uh, for a few years actually. Uh, and uh, you know, it was a combination of difficulty of getting it outside of corporate, you know, outside of corporate and innovation within a corporate structure with. It's really not the corporate structure, it's all the egos, quite frankly, uh, of all the people that get in the way of innovation. It just becomes so hard to fight through, you know, a million different opinions, you know. And um, so, you know, you don't, you don't control your palate. Right. And that's really the hardest thing. Uh, and so we tried, but we were unable to really, to really pull it off.

Speaker A: So you start PACER and then you have the opposite challenge of, uh, you could do anything, any. How do you decide what to do and how do you kind of make that journey through finding the product market.

Speaker B: That's a great point. So to me, the process of building a company is a process of problem identification and prioritization and solving the right problems in the simplest, cheapest possible way possible. Uh, and all my training at Mobile, ExxonMobil, bank of America, they train you great on everything you need to know to run a business. They don't train you though, on the creative problem solving that creates that you need, you know, to be, uh, a successful entrepreneur. So ultimately it's about figuring out, you know, there's a thousand things that Exxon and Bank of America will tell you you need to do to, to run a business. And you need to pick the three that matter today. Right? And you need to pick the right three, because time, you'll run out of money if you don't work on the right things. And so that's what it's all about. And then finding the solutions are really the fun Part and the easy part, it's really about the problem. Finding the problems that matter, figuring m out which ones matter, defining properly, and then solving them quickly. And keep doing that every day, you know, 15 hours a day when you start. And uh, do that and do it and do it. And the faster you do that, the faster you grow. And uh, then you can look up and then people, you know, you're able to attract investment and then it really goes fast. But you got to keep doing the same thing, but then you got to build a process to run that feedback loop. You know, to me, it's all about the feedback loop. You know, I mean, it's a lot about a lot of things, but if you run the feedback loop right, it focuses you on the right things and uh, uh, you can get where you need to go.

Speaker A: How do you keep your kind of North Star of your own instinct as to what the right path is versus that feedback? Right, because that earlier point, some of that feedback may, may be right or maybe interesting, but may not be relevant to what you're ultimately trying to do.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, you, you do have to, uh, you have to know, uh, you have to know where you're going or you may never get there. Uh, so, you know, we, you know, we started out as the all in one financial tool and we stuck to that vision. You know, all the payments and financing solutions all rolled into one place for a contractor right at their finger, right in their, you know, in their pocket, you know, on their phone. And uh, but we came up against another problem, you know, so that was our focus. That's all we did. We didn't do anything else. Uh, I was kind of an ogre. I just said no a lot, you know, to things like, I mean, a rogue product person, as smart and creative as they may be, can change your whole business. If you don't, especially in the early days, they can change your business in a way, week. And uh, so you have to be a bit of an ogre as you start, you know, hiring folks. Uh, and, but then we, we found like, hey, we needed to protect, you know, there were. If, if we didn't have the software and workflow wrapped around it, uh, we couldn't defend our space. So, you know, we tried to do some deals with some folks, but they weren't open to very good deals, you know, because they were in control. Uh, and things were evolving fast and we realized these contractors need everything. So we just built it. And so we wound up building. We've essentially built two startups and then we became, as I said, the all in one everything tool, you know, for the contractors that we targeted. And you have to know, you have to pick your target market, you know, uh, because if you don't pick your target market, it becomes impossible to satisfy your customers because you have too many customers, too many different types of customers to satisfy. So you have to pick a homogeneous target market that gives you something you can solve with the money that you're likely to get. And uh, so we just picked H vac and plumbing contractors because honestly the banks didn't want to work with other verticals, uh, in the contractor space at the time. And the businesses were fundamentally good. They were good, strong businesses. So they could, they didn't mind paying us. That always helped. So we uh, and they were big enough to matter, you know, and so we focused on those segments and uh, we just, you know, work the feedback loop every day. And we built the software this way until we could defend our space and make those contractors happy. And uh, that required a lot more money. I wouldn't recommend building two startups on your way there, but you do what you have to do. But then we kept our focus on that once we changed, once we expanded our vision a bit, uh, because we had to, as you know, if you run a payments business and you're not wrapped up in the workflow, you're uh, dead. So, uh, unless you're bank of America, you know, was there a particular point

Speaker A: in that journey where you feel like, all right, I think we got this right. Like, I don't know exactly how it's going to go or exactly what the outcome is going to be, but we're pretty locked in. We've clearly got a business model. We've got it working.

Speaker B: When we first got funding and we were rolling out the all in one financial tool, it was great. And we were just signing. I mean it was a pretty easy sell. And uh, we were signing contractors up. And then it became obvious that we could lose all that if we didn't build more software. And that was a kind of a sad day because the build for that product was so much larger than the payments product and it required so much more money. And uh, you know, so the day I raised money, the first round, I was right on to the next problem. It's like, how am I going to grow? You know, how are we going to grow this fast enough to keep these investors happy, you know, and uh, so it's right onto the next problem. Then we started to feel good about things and then we realized oh, shit. We need to build a lot. Sorry, we need to build a lot more software. And then that was, you know, that took a few years. Uh, I mean, I, it was the hardest thing I've ever done because that was a hard product to build and get. Make it simple. It's very hard to do all the things they wanted in a simple way, you know. And so it took a few years, but I would say when we got to, I mean, it was seven or eight years from the time we started before. I felt like, yeah. And I still felt like we could lose it, you know, because then you start worrying about, you know, when should we exit, you know, should we hold on and, you know, and keep going, you know, because this is still a big market that's still under penetrated. Should we just hang on and keep going? And that's a tough decision. But I got to the point where, like, I saw, I knew AI was coming to the next big tech change and I was like, we're going to have to invest heavily to survive in this environment. Yeah. And so I said, I need, I need some help with this. Like, I don't, I don't want to risk it all again. And so I got a little. Plus, I'm, you know, 60 years old. You know, I didn't want to, I didn't want to risk it all, everything at that point. So I. And we got a great offer from a great company and so we, uh. And I think it gives them the additional resources to do what they need to do to compete in the AI, you know, era.

Speaker A: Awesome. Well, it would be remiss not to say congratulations, obviously a huge accomplishment, fantastic exit, but also just, just in general setting out to achieve something like that, going through all that and ultimately coming out the other side, uh, and feeling really good about the outcome. Yeah.

Speaker B: When you look back on it, you realize you also have to be a little bit lucky.

Speaker A: Oh, for sure.

Speaker B: And it's just, you know, a lot can go wrong.

Speaker A: I think it's the, uh. I always view it as. It's the combination. Right. But fundamentally, you work hard to put yourself in the right place to where when good luck happens, you benefit from it. Right. You do need the lot to happen as well. You do.

Speaker B: But you're right if you keep doing what you're supposed to do, finding the problem, solving them, you got to look for them. Some people don't want to look for them because it's awful when they find work. It's hard work, but you got to look for the problems because the Faster you find them, the faster you can fix them, uh, and you can move forward. And if you don't do that or if you don't define your target market well, and you never get to product market fit, I mean those things are, you know, and then if you don't, you know, set up a great go to market process and, uh, manage the crap out of that every single day, you know, lead by lead for several years, you know, you don't get this. So there's a lot of things you have to do, but, you know, if you keep doing the right things, eventually something good will happen. Yeah.

Speaker A: All right, so you have to exit, you transition into advising and kind of more mentorship stuff. Tell me a little bit about that stage of your journey.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, I, you know, again, I, you know, just kind of feel my way through it. But, uh, I didn't know what to do initially. You know, we didn't do anything for 90 days.

Speaker A: Just 90 days. That was it.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: That's all you gave yourself.

Speaker B: People were calling, you know, people want to talk to me. And I, so I helped. I must have talked to, you know, 30 different entrepreneurs. And you know, it was fun. You know, it was like motivating and invigorating because, you know, that's really what I love is I love the beginning of the journey is the most, to me was most stressful, but also the most fun. And, uh, it's where the creativity throws.

Speaker A: Right. It's where you're not into process and operating. Right. Yeah, you're still in the creative zone of like, how do we even look

Speaker B: at this the right way? So I really like that. And then I just started talking to more people and you know, you know, so now I'm kind of involved with a few companies. Uh, I might get involved with one in a much bigger way, but, uh, kind of, you know, kind of feel my way through that. So. But I, I'm happy doing this. I'm helping folks with their, you know, set up their payments properly and set it up so they can make some money and not take huge amounts of risk. And uh, and so I enjoy doing that. It's kind of tricky to do that. And uh, you know, there's always the devil's in the details in that. But, you know, if you work through it, you can help them get to a good place. So I really have enjoyed that. Uh, you know, I'm probably going to get involved in a, in a company, uh, here soon that, uh, you know, in a bit, in a bigger way, not as the CEO, but just as, you know, helping to share everything I've learned.

Speaker A: Well, what do you, what do you see as the big opportunity in the payment space? What are people not focused on they should be, or where even if maybe there is somebody, where do you see the biggest opportunity?

Speaker B: Well, I think still there's a lot of opportunity just in all of these verticals, you know, just building, you know, integrating, you know, really good payment and if it makes sense, financing solutions into the various verticals. Uh, I still think there's a long way to go on that.

Speaker A: But uh, do you think the. So you know, on the banking side, the whole embedded finance and a version of banking as a service, like there's a theory from some of the banks, especially smaller community banks, that they can go after that space. Do you think that's a space, right, for a bank or is it.

Speaker B: Uh, I think it's. The banking space has been ripe for, you know, decades, for more and more innovation. And the banking as a service model to me is super exciting. The large banks have such control, you know, and uh, um, you know, it's, it's hard.

Speaker A: So you gotta crack through that.

Speaker B: You gotta create value propositions that are so compelling that you can, uh, that you can work, you know, and they also have all the money. Yeah. So it's uh, it's, it's a tough. Banking is a tough one, you know, but I think working around the periphery, there's lots of opportunities that are really big enough to matter, limitless. And I think, uh, it's really just down to the basics of defining the target market, making sure it's big enough to matter, achieving product market fit, and just grinding it out for many years. There's a lot of opportunities. I'm, uh, really interested in the real time payments, uh, you know, innovation I would love to see. I think, you know, it's hard because the value of a lot of the payment systems is the network. You know, it's not that, it's not that you can, you know, make the payment go instantly, you know, although that's very quite valuable. I'm not saying it's not valuable, but you have to sort of crack the network somehow. And it'd be great if the networks could be opened up, uh, you know, so that entrepreneurs could access all of the endpoints through the networks, you know, at a fair price so that folks could create the innovations on the front end and ride through the networks, uh, to get to the endpoints. I think that would be great for payments innovation in our country. Um, you know, I wouldn't hold your

Speaker A: breath for that one.

Speaker B: No, that one's not going to happen. But that would be.

Speaker A: But I do think that's where innovative banks can provide that on ramp. Right. I mean the banks are really committed to enabling that ecosystem I think can provide that access both from a technical standpoint but also from an economical standpoint.

Speaker B: Right. No, I agree it moves slow, but that, and it's hard, but that's what creates, you know, the opportunities as well.

Speaker A: So I think the other challenge that certainly we see in real time payments is there's still a bit of a search for the business case that really drives meaningful volume. So it's not really in consumer, other than some very narrow use cases. I think in corporate and kind of larger money movement scenarios, even in some B2B, you know, same day ach, ah, with three or four windows or however many it is now like works fine. Right.

Speaker B: That's pretty good.

Speaker A: So there's not the evolution in the product yet to really drive meaningful value add and that's certainly slowing things down as well.

Speaker B: Yeah, you know I'm kind of interested in the, in this, in some of the split settlement, you know, use cases where um, you know, ah, a retailer takes where there are large payments and so uh, contracting is a great, you know, uh, example where um, the retailer or the contractor or whoever the retailer is takes a payment but really half of it is owed to the manufacturer. You know. And uh, you know, ah, you know, split settlement implementations where uh, you have a contract with the retailer to automatically pay the manufacturer. Right. Would be, you know, that's where speed would really help because they're not getting paid for the. Depending on the U.S. 50 days.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Uh, and that would make a tremendous difference to those manufacturing. There are other verticals.

Speaker A: Yeah, Construction is another big one. Right. Delivery of goods and all that sort of stuff.

Speaker B: There are a lot of verticals where there's opportunities for speed like that. Uh, and uh, maybe real time payments could play a role in that. But I agree that the same day ACA is pretty fast.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Ah, you know it's. But ultimately uh, you know, I think you know, the world needs to go to real time.

Speaker A: Well, I think all of us practitioners trying to uh, drive volume on real time payments and usage often go back to the enhanced messaging that exists in the real time system and the ability to carry data and other things.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, which I 100% buy into and I think that will ultimately drive that incremental value add.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: The problem is just it's not ubiquitous enough. Right. To really drive it. So when you look in the ERPs that organizations are using M, like they're

Speaker B: not really leveraging it yet or you look at the full flow.

Speaker A: Yeah, they're not fully embedded yet, uh, to where you're able to actually utilize them. But I think direction of travel, to me that still remains to be the biggest space of opportunity.

Speaker B: And I, you know, I really, you know, I've kind of, I'm more of a, of a, of a sad. People like to think of me as a payments guy. I'm a payments guy, but I'm more of a SaaS CEO now. I spent 10 years, you know, running a SaaS company.

Speaker A: Happened to be a payments company.

Speaker B: Yeah. Just. But I honestly uh, I feel like I've kind of uh, semi pivoted to more of that focus and you know, uh, you know, that's really where a lot of my thinking has been the last 10 years. So I haven't been as close to, you know, when I was at the bank I saw everything.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: You knew, everything going on. In the last 10 years I've been heads down, building, learning how to, you know, implement a SaaS product, uh, efficiently and effectively. And uh, uh, it's a much different problem. The payments part, you know, we had down in year one, you know, and uh, it was really the other 10 years was all of that.

Speaker A: So is there anybody, even with that context, is there anybody that stands out to you in the payments community or kind of the payments folklore that you've always wanted to have a conversation with or that you have had a conversation with that really stood out to you?

Speaker B: Oh, I mean there's, you know, honestly it's, you know, so many people, it's the folks who are doing, who are doing the work, you know, like, you know, I gotta tell you, like the whole movement to, you know, using credit cards to make payments, you know, essentially bill payments and you know, extracting the interchange and splitting it with the payer. I would have never thought that would have worked if, you know, if someone told me, you know, that 10, 15 years ago that that was going to convince businesses to use credit cards like Mike Prager. And you know, he's done an avid, uh, exchange. I just like, I think that's amazing, you know, and he was just focused on the, to me he must have just been focused on the problems and solving the problems and came up with a solution. And I know a lot of other folks do that as well, but it is uh, you know, I mean what he's done is amazing. And uh, you know, I think folks like yourself, I mean, uh, your understanding of the payments industry, I just pretend like it.

Speaker A: I don't really know.

Speaker B: I'm really just an innovator. I run across a problem and I use my creativity to solve it. I don't, I don't have the breadth, you know, of payments knowledge that I've just solved a series of problems that happen to, you know, happen to work out.

Speaker A: I think you probably know a little more than you're giving some credit for, but I'll, I'll take the humbleness about it.

Speaker B: Yeah. Well, what.

Speaker A: Maybe one last question.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Like I said, this whole kind of series is about solid celebrating local leaders in Charlotte. Um, what do you like about Charlotte? What was something about Charlotte that you've really grown to like? Uh, you stayed, so you must like it a bit.

Speaker B: I love Charlotte. I mean, I lived in the Washington, Baltimore area my whole life and uh, grew up in Northern Virginia and it was a great place to live, but it got kind of crazy. Ah. Towards the end. And so, you know, I came down here to work with bank, but I also came down, you know, to put my kids in a better ecosystem.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker B: And uh, I love this. The growth of Charlotte and the energy of Charlotte and how clean and vibrant Charlotte is. And uh, it's, it's a great, great community. And love uh, the city this. I think the city is beautiful. Every time we drive by, look at the lights. I mean we love it and love how like South End and all the uh, places along the rail and all the different little pockets of communities are being rebuilt and re. Energized and I just think it's a great place to live and uh, you know, uh, it's a fair, you know, cost of living and uh, the people are good. Uh, you know, we just love it here. Wish the sports teams, the Hornets would, would learn how to work the ping pong balls a little better. But uh, other than that we're pretty happy and it has all of the elements of a big city without a lot of the problems. Like our police chief, Johnny Jennings, uh, you know, coached his son in basketball. He's a great, great man. Uh, so, you know, I like our city.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Um, awesome.

Speaker A: Well, thank you, Joe. Yeah, thank you so much for the conversation.

Speaker B: Thank you.

Speaker A: It's been really great to talk, talk to you.

Speaker B: Thank you.

Speaker A: Uh, thank you all for joining us for this edition of the Paint Podcast. Uh, talk to you next time.

Speaker B: Thank you.