Monetize Your Payments

This is episode 13 of the Monetize Your Payments podcast and Jeff Porter the Founder & CEO of Handbid is our special guest this week. Jeff was born in Colorado and currently lives in a suburb of Denver – but he mostly grew up in the Washington DC area and went to the University of Virginia where he got a degree in electrical engineering. Handbid is an automated events fund-raising platform built around silent and online auctions. His start-up story is fascinating and actually ties into the Kentucky Derby of all things. The main reason they have integrated payments into their platform is for the customer experience. Currently they primarily leverage Stripe because of their developer tools. 

Russell Olsen the Chief Product Officer for WebPT is our special guest this week on episode 12 of the Monetize Your Payments podcast.Russell grew up in Atlanta went to Brigham Young University – and is currently in Phoenix Arizona. WebPT helps rehab therapists more efficiently run their business – it was co-founded by a therapist and built for therapists. The company is about 12 years old and have about 40% market share. Their goal is to make the payment experience more seamless and frictionless so the business owner, typically a physical therapist can focus on their patients and not on collecting money. Today they are leveraging a referral model as the timing and costs to fully own the payments experience just didn’t align with their goals. 

This is episode 11 of the Monetize Your Payments podcast and Jona Georgiou, the GM of Payments and Financial Services at LightSpeed is our special guest this week. Jona is from Toronto Canada and came into the world of payments in a unique way as early in her career she leveraged her statistics background to help a company solve a chargeback problem. She been with Lightspeed for about 2 and half years.Lightspeed powers small and medium size businesses – it is a cloud based omnichannel platform that includes a point-of-sale system.  According to Jona, “having financial services paired with the POS and management tools allows merchants and restaurateurs to focus on what they do best instead of getting into the details of managing the POS.”

This is episode 10 of the Monetize Your Payments podcast and Paul Bridgewater, the CEO of ResMan is our special guest. Paul lives in the Washington DC area. The company is based in Plano Texas. Paul has been in the US for 14 years and is originally from the UK.  He spent many years in payments in both the UK and the U.S.  He’s been the CEO at ResMan since beginning of 2019.  ResMan is a property management platform for property management companies in the multi-family industry -from marketing services to website services, handling the leasing and application process basically every aspect of running a property management company including of course payments.   ResMan has built payments into the application and rent payment flows so it is embedded into the software which creates a seamless process and experience for both the renters and the property management company. According to Paul, “improved end-customer experience, increased revenue, and better customer experience all leads to a better valuation for ResMan as a company.”

This is episode 9 of the Monetize Your Payments podcast and David Giannetto, the CEO of WorkWave is our special guest this week. David grew up in South Jersey, went to Monmouth University, and was an officer in the Army for 4 years.  He’s been the CEO at WorkWave for a year and half and has been around the field services software industry for some time. WorkWave has 7,000 customers both large and small but all related to field services. They offer four core services or platforms that help their customers; grow their business, service their existing customers and everything related to how they move money.  WorkWave is first and foremost a software company and they consider payments as a multiplier. Their customers’ desire for more progressive payments functionality in the WorkWave software as well as WorkWave’s desire to control their customer’s experience and service led to the decision to becoming a payfac a year and half ago.    David stresses that having the right partners is a major key to success. If becoming a payfac is part of your payments roadmap, you need to listen to this episode. 

This is episode 8 of the Monetize Your Payments podcast and Biju Nair, the GM and VP of Payments Boulevard is our special guest this week.  Biju grew up and did his undergrad work in India and got his MBA at Babson College in the Boston area and currently lives in Lexington, Massachusetts.  He spent the last 15 years in payments.  Boulevard was founded in 2016 and is a business management platform that makes work easier for salon and spa owners. The company was founded on the principle that doing business in the beauty industry should be convenient for everyone. The average salon operates on a 5% profit margin, but with the Boulevard platform, the profit margin can double 90 days. Their early customers asked for payments so it really was the customer experience that drove the need to integrate payments into their software. They used some payfac-in-a-box solutions initially and are now on the path to becoming a payfac themselves. Becoming a payfac will allow them the control their own destiny and offer other fintech solutions to their customers.   Biju provides some great advice around being educated about payments before making strategic decisions. www.joinblvd.com www.monetizeyourpayments.com www.podcast609.com

This is episode 7 of the Monetize Your Payments podcast and Brandon Tompkins, the VP of product management and strategy at Stack Sports is our special guest this week. Stack Sports provides SaaS based solutions to over 20,000 sports organization worldwide. Their league management software offers free websites, registration, competition management tools and more. Stack Sports doesn’t charge for the registration software but rather has integrated that cost into their payments offering so there’s no monthly SaaS fee per se.  Stack Pay is their branded payments solution and can be used for paying during registrations, product purchases or easily integrated into an organization’s website. Stack Pay is also used outside of just the Stack Sports software. A business development team works to find other sports organization where Stack Pay can add value by providing payments.  www.stacksports.comwww.stackpay.comwww.monetizeyourpayments.comwww.podcast609.com

This is episode 6 of the Monetize Your Payments podcast and Dylan Penebre, the CEO of PointOS is our special guest this week. Dylan grew up in a small town north of New York City. He was heavily involved in sports growing up and played football and baseball in college. He began his payments career right after college and soon thereafter started Cayan which back then was known as Merchant Warehouse. Today Dylan is the CEO of PointOS. PointOS is a restaurant management platform designed to help full-service restaurants, bars and grills, nightclubs, cafes, and quick service restaurants operate more efficiently and profitably. Their platform provides POS software, payment processing, reporting, analytics, and deep insights that help their customer’s bottom line. The customer experience drove the decision to integrate payments into their software. The stickiness of the account which ultimately drives more revenue was also a major factor. PointOS was stood up as a payfac but really operates like an ISO. They realized for strategic purposes and for the betterment of their customer they could still provide the frictionless onboarding process and get great buy rates without making the investment and having the ongoing expenses of an inhouse underwriting and risk team.  www.pointos.comwww.monetizeyourpayments.comwww.podcast609.com

This is episode 5 of the Monetize Your Payments podcast and Nick Dennis, the CEO of fitDEGREE is our guest this week. Nick was born and raised in New Jersey and considers himself an accidental entrepreneur. He went to college to get a degree in math and become an actuary but today runs a software company. Nick sets the culture and strategy at the company and also helps set the direction of the product development efforts at fitDEGREE. fitDEGREE is a management software for class-based fitness studios like yoga studios, pilates and personal trainers. They help customers find classes, register and of course make payments while helping the studios owners manage their business.  fitDEGREE leverages a partnership with Payrix to provide payments through iFrames on their website and mobile app. The referral model didn’t make sense for their customer experience needs and Nick considers his payments model a hybrid. fitDEGREE facilitate the onboarding but not the underwriting and PCI compliance. Regardless of the business model, in some respects all software companies that take on payments as a module within their software have to take on some of the functions like managing customer service for disputes, chargebacks, recurring billing and more. Nick talks about some of the advantages and the pain points of the hybrid model versus being a payfac.  Some of the pain points he mentions include learning the disputes process and understanding interchange rates that need to be communicated to the studio owners. Recurring billing, which was expected in the industry, also required them to add a lot of safeguards in their software to make sure consumers aren’t double charged or billed multiple times.www.fitdegree.com www.monetizeyourpayments.com www.podcast609.com

This is episode 4 of the Monetize Your Payments podcast and our special guest this week is Kris Riley, Head of Business Development and Platforms at Paystand. Kris was born in Philadelphia and grew up the Washington D.C. area and went to Marquette University in Wisconsin and now resides on the west coast. Kris focuses on the indirect sales side of business for Paystand. His team engages with partners like Netsuite as well as software companies that operate in the B2B space.   Paystand was founded in 2014 and is privately held, venture backed and recently had a series B with DNX Ventures and Battery Ventures. Paystand considers themselves a B2B payments network with the focus of being a “Venmo” for B2B payments – making it seamless and intuitive. According to Kris the three main advantages on bring payments in house are: 1. the customer or merchant experience, 2. the monetization aspect and 3. the data that is created and how the customer can leverage this data for new and interesting products and services. Website: paystand.com Paystand blog Paystand Twitter Paystand LinkedInmonetizeyourpayments.comThis and all Monetize Your Payments podcasts are produced by: Podcast609.com 

This is episode 3 of the Monetize Your Payments podcast and our special guest this week is Omer Shatzky the Head of Billing and Payments at Wix.  Omer was born and raised in Israel and currently lives in Tel Aviv. He started in biotechnology and food engineering with the goal of combining his passion for cooking with science but after 5 years in the Israeli army he decided to pursue software development.  Wix is a world-class platform for do-it-yourself website building that many of your I’m sure have heard of. Wix Payments is a payment service that allows their merchants to manage orders and payments from within the Wix ecosystem without needing third-party payment providers.  Wix has 180,000,000 users in 190 countries and 3,500 employees worldwide. They have a 360-degree view of their merchants and feel confident they know their customers better than anyone and can provide a merchant experience that no one else can. Payments plays a huge role in that experience. Omer provides some great insights into how and why they brought payments in house. www.wix.com www.monetizeyourpayments.com www.podcast609.com

This is episode 2 of the Monetize Your Payments podcast and our special guest this week is Angie Ammon the Vice President of Professional Services at Finix. Angie is mid-westerner and grew up in Cincinnati Ohio and went to school at Miami of Ohio and spent many years at Vantiv/Worldpay or what is now FIS helping to build out their payment facilitator model. She joined FINIX about a year ago to lead FINIX professional services. Their goal is to help companies define their payments strategy and then execute on it. Education is the core of what the professional services team at FINIX does.  FINIX is a payments infrastructure company that helps various companies across the ecosystem become payments companies. In this episode we talk about what differentiates FINIX in the marketplace as well as some of the keys to success and pain points companies run into when becoming a payments company.  www.finixpayments.comwww.monetizeyourpayments.comwww.podcast609.com

Randy Eckels the CEO of Club Essential Holdings is my guest on this episode. This is episode 1 of the Monetize Your Payments podcast. Club Essential Holdings includes 4 entities: ClubReady, Vermont Systems, PrestoSports and ClubEssential.  Randy grew up in Altoona Pennsylvania – a small blue collar town – known for it’s past in the railroad industry. Randy attended college at Penn State where he was also a wrestler.  Payments is strategically important to their businesses which includes $4B plus in payments. They see less churn, improved margins and increased revenue and they have really reduced the friction in the customer experience. Some of the challenges they faced were related to people, process and hardware but according to Randy every software company should explore payments and how each potential business model fits your business.  www.clubessential.comwww.monetizeyourpayments.comwww.podcast609.com 

There has been tremendous change over the last 15 years in payments. Most recently one of the biggest trends in payments is the ability for software companies, for example SaaS companies, ISVs, and marketplaces to no longer view payments as an expense but rather to monetize their payments and convert that process into a better experience for their customers.  The Monetize Your Payments podcast was created to provide you unbiased information, really a platform for you to learn and understand the nuances of the payment facilitator space. In this episode I provide an overview of what this podcast series will be all about and why I created this podcast. www.monetizeyourpayments.com www.podcast609.com