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

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