According to Nic Beique, the payments space is generally boring, but his goal is to build a payments company that is loved by his customers and that can be the heartbeat of their customers success. Nic tells me that it would be enough of a differentiating point for Helcim to have built the brand that they have already built, one based on processing billions in payments per year with a human touch. But in an industry notorious for bad practices, he's going even further. 

Nic Beique is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Helcim, a payments company that makes it faster, easier, and more affordable for businesses to get paid.  Helcim is a payments company who believes in giving small businesses every possible edge to thrive and enrich their communities, delivering an easy, smart, and affordable payment experience with a human touch. They serve thousands of businesses in Canada and the US across 800 different industries, processing billions in payments each year.

In our chat, Nic discusses how the legacy players in the payments space have enjoyed their monopolies and it is the new entrants and fintechs forcing a customer service first approach to the industry. "A lot of companies see their customer service as a place for bottom of the barrel employees, and it's like, no, no, they are the touch point for our customers, they have the single most impact to our brand. We need to treat them very differently." 

We also discuss how the data at the core of the payments industry can paint of picture of the health of the economy. Through their platform they are seeing a huge shift to omni-channel commerce, not just online transactions. And on the technology side we discuss how anyone entering the payment space has to have a huge technology stack with a focus on uptime, security, and simply getting payments right.

The point is, being successful in the payments space is really, really hard.