Latest / Leaders In Payments / Jane Podbelskaya, Principal of Information Venture Partners & Nicolas Beique, Founder & CEO of Helcim | Episode 290

Transcript

Jane Podbelskaya, Principal of Information Venture Partners & Nicolas Beique, Founder & CEO of Helcim | Episode 290 · Leaders In Payments

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast, where we talk to C-level leaders from across the payments landscape.
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: We'll be discussing the products and services that impact the payment space today, as well as trends and predictions for the future of payments.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: We will also hear stories from our guests about their journeys to the top.
• 0:18
  Speaker 2: The reality of scaling a startup is that it's extremely difficult.
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: Sometimes you have months where you feel like you're a hero and you have months where you feel like everything is on fire, and you need capital partners that appreciate that extreme difficulty and that are supportive, not just in the good times but in the bad periods, because the bad periods also show up because you're taking a risk and you're trying new things and you're pushing the envelope and you're putting your foot down on that growth pedal and things sometimes going to blow up, and it was important for us to find somebody to have that reputation.
• 0:54
  Speaker 3: Hello and welcome to episode 290 of the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 0:58
  Speaker 3: I'm your host, greg Myers, and today on the show we have Jane Podobelska, the principal at Information Venture Partners, and Nick Beek, founder and CEO of Hellsum.
• 1:07
  Speaker 3: Information Venture Partners is a team of experienced venture capital investors focused exclusively on investing in B2B technology companies that are innovating in the FinTech and Enterprise SaaS space.
• 1:18
  Speaker 3: Hellsum is on a mission to build the world's most loved company.
• 1:21
  Speaker 3: They are relentless in their pursuit to provide a radically transparent and honest payment solution that saves business owners all while treating them like human beings.
• 1:30
  Speaker 3: In this episode, we discuss what makes Hellsum a unique and different payments provider.
• 1:35
  Speaker 3: We also talk about why IVP invested in Hellsum and what Hellsum saw in IVP.
• 1:40
  Speaker 3: I also get Nick and Jane's view of the future of our industry.
• 1:44
  Speaker 3: We've got a great episode ahead, so let's get started.
• 1:46
  Speaker 3: Hi, nick and Jane, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 1:56
  Speaker 3: Thanks for having us.
• 1:58
  Speaker 3: Hi, greg, yeah, great, thanks so much, and let's just dive right in.
• 2:02
  Speaker 3: And, nick, I'll start with you, if you don't mind.
• 2:04
  Speaker 3: Tell our audience a little bit about yourself, maybe where you grew up, where you went to school, where you currently live, a few things like that, and maybe a little bit about your professional journey as well.
• 2:13
  Speaker 2: Sure, I was on the personal side.
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: So I actually was born in Texas, west Texas that side of family is from there but moved to Montreal when I was one year old, so I actually grew up French, so it's a little bit of a strange kind of journey.
• 2:25
  Speaker 2: And then moved in my teens to the Rockies, to Calgary here, which is Canadian city, just kind of very similar to Denver.
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: So I'd like to say I'm a Texas, french, canadian and at this point I feel like I speak none of the languages quite properly, but it's just a little bit of a mix.
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: Grew up self-talked computer programmer.
• 2:43
  Speaker 2: Grew up loving everything about computers.
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: I ended up taking a degree in business.
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: I knew the computer side, or I felt like I knew the computer side and I wanted to learn something different.
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: And I always fell in love with the idea of the small business journey and kind of my own small business journey, kind of starting small companies when I was young and fell in love with computer programming.
• 3:02
  Speaker 2: I kind of fell in love with the world of finance and business and you put those three things together and somehow you end up in payments and that's where I'm here today.
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: Awesome.
• 3:11
  Speaker 3: Thanks for sharing that, jane.
• 3:12
  Speaker 3: Your turn.
• 3:13
  Speaker 3: Same question for you.
• 3:14
  Speaker 3: Maybe a little about where you grew up, where you went to school, where you currently live, a few things like that, and a little about your professional journey as well.
• 3:20
  Speaker 4: Thank you.
• 3:21
  Speaker 4: There's a long journey to compress here in just a few minutes, but I'll do my best.
• 3:26
  Speaker 4: Actually, I was born and raised in Russia and my mom is Ukrainian and my dad is Russian, so I'm actually very upset about everything that's happening in that part of the world right now because I absolutely see those two nations as basically like parts of the same family.
• 3:41
  Speaker 4: But I moved to Canada in 2007.
• 3:45
  Speaker 4: I actually, just as Nick I, grew up loving computers and computer science.
• 3:50
  Speaker 4: I was one rare child and rare girl right who was very nerdy and I loved coding from like literally the age of 12.
• 4:01
  Speaker 4: And I went on to get a computer science degree in Moscow State University and I worked as a software engineer while I was still in Russia.
• 4:10
  Speaker 4: But when I moved to Canada I became an architect, a solution architect.
• 4:15
  Speaker 4: I worked for large corporations, I worked for Xerox and then I completed an MBA at the University of Toronto Rothman School of Management and I then jumped into management consulting.
• 4:27
  Speaker 4: I worked at Bain and Company for a number of years, experienced that crazy travel lifestyle that consultants have, but frankly I missed technology way too much.
• 4:38
  Speaker 4: So after a couple of years of consulting, I went back into tech, but this time on the investor side.
• 4:46
  Speaker 4: So I joined a venture fund back in 2015.
• 4:49
  Speaker 4: It was a growth stage venture fund Georgian Partners.
• 4:53
  Speaker 4: I spent the next five, almost six years working there and then I actually got really passionate about early stage investing and, in particular, I got interested in fintech investing.
• 5:07
  Speaker 4: So I left Georgian to join Information Venture Partners, which is a fintech fund, and I'm happy to tell you more about that.
• 5:15
  Speaker 4: But as far as my life journey, I currently live in Toronto.
• 5:19
  Speaker 4: I have a family here and I am a Canadian citizen now.
• 5:24
  Speaker 3: Awesome.
• 5:24
  Speaker 3: Well, thanks for sharing that.
• 5:25
  Speaker 3: So, Nick, back to you.
• 5:27
  Speaker 3: So tell us about the company Hellsum.
• 5:29
  Speaker 3: So what does Hellsum do?
• 5:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I'll assume Our audience is familiar with payments.
• 5:35
  Speaker 2: So forgive me, I'm going to jump straight into the payment lingo side.
• 5:39
  Speaker 2: My kind of marginal four into business or into payments was about a decade ago as an ISO MSP.
• 5:44
  Speaker 2: So we were a partner of Elevons and really got to learn the payment space and the merchant space and kind of fell in love with the whole payments business in general.
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: And we did a major pivot about three years ago where we became a payment facilitator or pay fact and we really took it all the way.
• 6:01
  Speaker 2: We essentially became our own processor.
• 6:03
  Speaker 2: So we run our own, not just our merchant front end but our back end, our settlement systems.
• 6:08
  Speaker 2: Everything is really our hardware.
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: Deployment is really run by Hellsum.
• 6:12
  Speaker 2: And the best way to think about us in the marketplace this is how we like to kind of describe it is you have a lot of kind of fintech entrance on the micro merchant space.
• 6:20
  Speaker 2: If you think about the squares of the worlds and the sum ups of the world, they do really well in that kind of micro merchant space.
• 6:27
  Speaker 2: And then you have a lot of other fintechs in the embedded marketplace and enterprise space, the brain trees and the stripes and the add-ins of the world.
• 6:36
  Speaker 2: But when it comes to this really interesting middle space in payments, which is kind of more traditional businesses you think about vets and dentists and wholesalers and auto mechanics most of those businesses there's millions upon millions of them that are still being serviced by more kind of traditional legacy acquires the global payments of the world and the first data of the world, and we felt that there was a lot of room in there for disruption and new entrants and somebody that could take a very modern approach to that market.
• 7:06
  Speaker 2: And then that's essentially where we've what we've built Hellsum to be today.
• 7:09
  Speaker 2: So we have 150 employees right here in Calgary.
• 7:12
  Speaker 2: We service tens of thousands of merchants across Canada and US and we like to say that our mission is to be the world's most loved payments company, and if you're familiar with payments, that can be a little bit of an oxymoron sometimes.
• 7:24
  Speaker 2: You know merchants it's a little bit of.
• 7:26
  Speaker 2: They need payments but they don't always love their payments provider and we're really trying to change that in the market.
• 7:31
  Speaker 3: Okay, I love it.
• 7:32
  Speaker 3: I love it.
• 7:32
  Speaker 3: So what makes Hellsum unique in the market?
• 7:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think there's a couple key pillars the way we look at our service.
• 7:38
  Speaker 2: So pricing transparency is a huge part of it.
• 7:41
  Speaker 2: Sure, you know, merchants are super sensitive to the rates they pay and we make sure that we know that our rates have to be affordable.
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: But it's not about having the lowest rates in the market, it's about having the most transparent rates in the market.
• 7:51
  Speaker 2: You know we really stay away from bad industry practices of, you know, monthly fees, hidden fees, you know, pci compliance fees and all the stuff that merchant, that really kind of irk merchants ultimately.
• 8:02
  Speaker 2: So that's a big part of our service.
• 8:04
  Speaker 2: We also have amazing customer service.
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: We make it up and down part of our brand and really treat merchants the way that I think they deserve to be treated, no matter how small they are.
• 8:12
  Speaker 2: And then the third thing is we take a full digital first approach to our service.
• 8:16
  Speaker 2: So everything is self-service, everything is omnichannel, everything is kind of wrapped in really slick software to make the experience as modern as we think that these businesses deserve.
• 8:27
  Speaker 3: Okay, great.
• 8:27
  Speaker 3: Well, Jane, let's go over to you.
• 8:30
  Speaker 3: So tell us about Information Venture Partners.
• 8:33
  Speaker 4: Yeah, happy to.
• 8:34
  Speaker 4: So we are a FinTech fund so we invest in B2B FinTech technology.
• 8:40
  Speaker 4: Specifically, we're investing in technology for financial services institutions, but also we're quite active in payments.
• 8:49
  Speaker 4: We are an early stage investor.
• 8:52
  Speaker 4: We are primarily coming into the companies around series A or when companies reach around 1 million in run rates.
• 9:01
  Speaker 4: If you're talking about SaaS, that would be run rate and revenue.
• 9:06
  Speaker 4: If you're talking about payments, that's your gross profit run rate.
• 9:09
  Speaker 4: We invest across North America and we're investing our third fund right now.
• 9:15
  Speaker 4: So we've been around for a while, but we've always been a relatively small 100 million dollar fund and we've been very consistent about our strategy.
• 9:24
  Speaker 4: We're happy to have back to number of unicorns and had very successful exits, and now we're here excited to be an investor in Hellsum.
• 9:33
  Speaker 4: I'm hoping that one day they will join the ranks of those unicorns.
• 9:39
  Speaker 3: Great, great segue to the next question.
• 9:40
  Speaker 3: So in March of 2022, you led Hellsum Series A round of funding.
• 9:45
  Speaker 3: So what was it about Hellsum that was so unique that you wanted to invest in them?
• 9:51
  Speaker 4: Yeah, so I've actually been talking to Hellsum for about a year before we decided to jump forward with the offer.
• 10:01
  Speaker 4: Well, first off, when I joined the information partners maybe, if I kind of step, take a few steps back right One of the ideas I had was to build our payments thesis and find some new interesting payments companies.
• 10:15
  Speaker 4: As I said, information venture partners have invested in payments companies before, but it's been a while since the last investment and I got really interested in the space and I was actually looking at a few payments companies and Hellsum crossed my desk and I first spoke to Hellsum, seafoil, marjory a year prior to investment, so that would have been about March 2021.
• 10:41
  Speaker 4: And I've been talking to Marjory and later with Nick for, as I said, for almost a year, getting to know the team, watching them grow, watching them develop.
• 10:51
  Speaker 4: And what really struck me well first off is I realized that, well, this is an early stage company, but Nick has been actually an experienced operator in the payments space for almost a decade, so he's not a newbie when it comes to managing a payments company.
• 11:10
  Speaker 4: He was actually managing an MSP organization or reseller organization and then he took the initiative to basically develop a payment facilitator solution from scratch, which he financed through the MSP business, which was the second point that I really liked about Nick and his team is that they were very cash conscious and in the world especially in the year 2021, with all the companies were burning through VC Capital like there's no tomorrow because capital was almost three.
• 11:45
  Speaker 4: They were a very rare example of a company that was basically like coming out of bootstrapping and have built a very sophisticated payments tech stack on their own money.
• 11:59
  Speaker 4: So I was quite impressed with that, and there were other things that were very interesting to me, and some of that is what Nick just told you about.
• 12:08
  Speaker 4: Right, I know that the payment space and the market that helps them is addressing is truly big, and the way I kind of like my investment hypothesis around payment solution was that you have on the Micro merchant side, you have square, and when I talk about micro merchants, I'm talking about your coffee shops or your local artists that are making a lot of payments transactions that are relatively small in size but at high volumes.
• 12:36
  Speaker 4: Right and square has captured that market very successfully, and then on the other end of the spectrum, you have idioms of the world that are very equally successfully servicing enterprise customers.
• 12:47
  Speaker 4: But what's in the middle?
• 12:49
  Speaker 4: It's primarily I don't upset anyone, but it's really like old-school traditional Payments companies.
• 12:57
  Speaker 4: That's been a year around for dozens of years and there hasn't been a lot of innovation in that mid-market segment for quite some time.
• 13:06
  Speaker 4: And Helsing has truly developed a brand new, noble, best of Class payments technology to service that middle market and they were growing.
• 13:19
  Speaker 4: Over that year that I've been talking to them, they were capturing merchants very, very fast and we did quite a number of reference calls with those merchants and everybody was raving about the customer support that Helsing was providing to them.
• 13:33
  Speaker 4: Squares notorious about basically letting your customers talk to them to the robots instead of humans and the rates that they were providing were super competitive.
• 13:44
  Speaker 4: Onboarding process was very easy.
• 13:46
  Speaker 4: So lots of great feedback and combination of experience, team, great market opportunity and great customer Feedback made me very excited and convinced that this is gonna be a future winner.
• 14:01
  Speaker 4: So we went ahead.
• 14:02
  Speaker 4: We were not the only investor at the table, so it was actually a competitive round and a little way Nick, maybe you'll tell us that it's a shameless plug but we actually co-invested into the round.
• 14:16
  Speaker 4: We went together with the US investor, aqueline, so it was a joint round, but we were the ones who actually initially identified the opportunity.
• 14:28
  Speaker 3: Great.
• 14:28
  Speaker 3: So, nick, it's back to you.
• 14:30
  Speaker 3: So we know why Information Venture Partners wanted to invest.
• 14:36
  Speaker 3: Why did you choose?
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: them.
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: I mean, isn't it great when your investors are on a podcast talking great about you?
• 14:43
  Speaker 2: I'll take that all day long.
• 14:45
  Speaker 2: But, joking aside, the IVP and Jane and Rob and Dave and all the partners at the firm they truly have a reputation of being long-term partners that will be with you through the ups and downs and it wasn't competitive round and ultimately we went with IVP because of that reputation.
• 15:06
  Speaker 2: The reality of scaling a startup is that it's extremely difficult.
• 15:09
  Speaker 2: Sometimes you have months where you feel like you're a hero and you have months where you feel like everything is on fire and you need capital partners that appreciate that extreme difficulty and that are supportive, not just in the good times but in the bad periods, because the bad periods also show up because you're taking risk and you're trying new things and you're pushing the envelope and you're putting your foot down on that growth pedal and things sometimes going to blow up.
• 15:34
  Speaker 2: And it was important for us to find somebody to have that reputation and it sounds obvious.
• 15:39
  Speaker 2: I mean, you could give the same advice to somebody about relationship or marriage.
• 15:44
  Speaker 2: You know it's going to be lots of up and down and this is a long-term partnership and find somebody that's going to not just support you in good times but really be in your corner during bad times too, and it sounds like obvious advice, but the reality in the investor space is that a lot of investors kind of don't meet that standard.
• 16:00
  Speaker 2: And you talked to a lot of different CEOs and sometimes they have really great things to say about some investors and sometimes they have really not so great things to say.
• 16:07
  Speaker 2: But, ivp, everybody we talked to just said they will be in your corner, they will help you build that company into a big, the big, huge company that we want to build into and take it public one day.
• 16:17
  Speaker 2: And we've been together for over 20 months now and that reputation has absolutely been proven.
• 16:22
  Speaker 2: So we're so happy that we ended up choosing them.
• 16:25
  Speaker 3: You gave a little advice to other companies, but obviously times have changed and since 2022, the markets are a lot different.
• 16:34
  Speaker 3: So what advice would you give companies today, when they're out there looking for capital?
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: I mean, obviously, the markets have shifted.
• 16:40
  Speaker 2: We are lucky that we've continued to have pretty significant growth, so I think the top tier companies are having an easier time still finding capital, I think, but it's definitely tougher.
• 16:51
  Speaker 2: Valuations are not what they used to be.
• 16:53
  Speaker 2: The advice I would give to CEOs out there looking to raise is that, regardless of what's happening in the market, regardless of what's happening with some of the pullback with investors, regardless of what's happening with valuations, I think the basic advice doesn't change, which is you are not trying to build a business in a year or two.
• 17:12
  Speaker 2: You're trying to build a business over a decade and you're trying to build something really big and really different and unique and it's going to be a journey and finding investors that has that same long-term thinking.
• 17:23
  Speaker 2: I think one of the blessings in disguise of what's happened is that I think investors have really shown a little bit more of their true color, of who's in it, who's a true VC, who's a true venture capitalist and understands that roller coaster and who has maybe is really focused on the short term.
• 17:41
  Speaker 2: I think you're seeing that in the investors that are stepping up and willing to have those conversations and make offers to investors, and then you're seeing it in others that are maybe don't truly have that same long-term startup mindset.
• 17:54
  Speaker 2: So I do think that while the markets are tougher out there, it's a little bit of a blessing disguise you get to see who's really in it for the long run.
• 18:01
  Speaker 3: Okay, well, final question for you, nick.
• 18:03
  Speaker 3: So where do you see the payments industry headed, say, in the next maybe two to three years?
• 18:09
  Speaker 2: I think it's a continuing trend where not only do you have to build a world-class payments experience but you need to bring in a world-class software experience with it.
• 18:17
  Speaker 2: Your relationship with merchants might start with payments, but it needs to evolve in a way that is much beyond that in order to keep that customer and you really need to be the one making the investment in building that software.
• 18:30
  Speaker 2: If you're reselling somebody else's software, unfortunately first you're going to be on the short list to be cut out of that relationship sooner or later, and then, second, the experience will never be to the level that it needs to be for you to stand out in the market.
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: So I think that companies that really take the hard path and combine payments and software seamlessly together on one roof and sometimes the market is going to come as software first and then they'll do the effort to bring in payments Sometimes it's going to be payments first and they'll bring in the effort to bring in software.
• 18:57
  Speaker 2: But the ones that are being able to put it seamlessly together are the ones that are ultimately going to win the market.
• 19:02
  Speaker 3: Yeah, a little follow-on to that.
• 19:04
  Speaker 3: So, being kind of in that software pay-fax space, you know a lot of people have talked about, you know, the software being kind of the operating system that these small businesses run on and Looking out to the future, you know I often talk to people about, okay, well, it's payments today, but does it become Insurance and payroll and all those other Products that small businesses need that they have to go to 17 people to get them from?
• 19:32
  Speaker 3: I mean, is that a vision that you have for your company or do you think the industry is headed that way?
• 19:36
  Speaker 3: What are your thoughts on that?
• 19:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I do think that ultimately everyone is aiming to own the full vertical and there's different ways to go about it.
• 19:44
  Speaker 2: So I do think that there's a fallacy in thinking coming from both sides.
• 19:49
  Speaker 2: So, for example, on the payment side, people go you know, you know we'll figure out payments, we know payments well, then we'll throw and we'll slap on some software right.
• 19:56
  Speaker 2: And I think that's a mistake because software is a lot more complicated to to get it right.
• 19:59
  Speaker 2: But then I think the same mistake happens on the other side, where you have software companies saying oh, you know, we're good at software, payments is easy, we'll just kind of slap on a payment offering on top of it.
• 20:09
  Speaker 2: And the reality is that you know to do payments right, are the right rates with the right depth, and functionality is really, really hard.
• 20:14
  Speaker 2: So I think that the ultimate winners in this market are people that take both of those things seriously at the depth that you need To, to go to and bring them together, and that's what we're doing, that's how we think we're gonna be unique in the market one other question about sort of the future and, and you know, back a couple years ago it was all the the rage talking about Blockchain and all of the the newer technologies around, you know, using blockchain and Bitcoin and all of that fun stuff.
• 20:43
  Speaker 3: Do you see a future there in any of that?
• 20:45
  Speaker 3: Is it?
• 20:46
  Speaker 3: Is it just now off the table or are you hearing it still in the market?
• 20:50
  Speaker 2: We really dug hard to try to find a way to see if there's a fit for us and as part of the merchants that we service, because that comes from our first place, which is what our small business customers are asking for.
• 21:00
  Speaker 2: And the reality is that in the years I've done this, we have yet to have a single merchant ask us hey, I really want to accept, you know, bitcoin or or Ethereum or anything like that.
• 21:09
  Speaker 2: It just hasn't been the demand in the market, right?
• 21:11
  Speaker 2: So then you kind of fall into a bit of a trap of trying you know it's back to solution trying to solve the problem that isn't really there.
• 21:17
  Speaker 2: So, you know, who knows, maybe I'll eat my words and and somebody's gonna figure out a way to crack that market, but we're gonna stick to listening to what our customers are asking, and our customers are just asking for For us to take the existing payments you know schemes with, with a ch and fed now and and Car payments and just make it faster, cheaper, more you know and and more seamless and and with better software.
• 21:41
  Speaker 2: And that's what we're doing awesome.
• 21:42
  Speaker 3: Well, jane, over to you.
• 21:43
  Speaker 3: Final question for you what are you seeing in terms of venture capital?
• 21:48
  Speaker 3: Like you know, we all read the headlines and we've talked a little bit about this already where things are different than they were, obviously, a couple years ago.
• 21:53
  Speaker 3: So do you think that we've turned a corner and there's gonna be more investments in fintech, or it's gonna be picking up in 2024 and beyond all.
• 22:03
  Speaker 4: The big picture Question here is that we're rather returning to the norm as opposed to Going into some bad time where there's no BC capital available.
• 22:14
  Speaker 4: It's busy.
• 22:15
  Speaker 4: Capital absolutely will be available.
• 22:17
  Speaker 4: The question is that what pace?
• 22:20
  Speaker 4: And it's definitely not going to be the pace of 2020 to we want 22.
• 22:25
  Speaker 4: However, there is Still so much opportunity in fintech.
• 22:29
  Speaker 4: Niggas right valuations have adjusted and this, of course, is is correcting a lot of things for a lot of both companies and investors and it's a rocky time for Everyone to live through.
• 22:46
  Speaker 4: But nevertheless, I see quite a few very interesting trends and fintech and, to answer your question maybe on the decentralized finance, actually Think that there is absolutely more role for blockchain technology in In financial services.
• 23:04
  Speaker 4: Down the road, we have lived through the hype cycle of bitcoins and all the currencies, but as a foundation for structure, I still think that we're yet to see some really good developments.
• 23:18
  Speaker 4: In terms of payments, I actually think more of cross-border payments more than domestic payments, because for domestic and For a lot of consumer to business smaller amount payments we have great infrastructure in the world today in form of the credit cards, visas and master cards, but for B2B transactions, I think there's room to explore new technologies and blockchain.
• 23:45
  Speaker 4: I think will play a role there.
• 23:47
  Speaker 4: In terms of other exciting trends in fintech that I'm watching, I Actually continue to be excited about embedded Financial services and embedded payments.
• 24:00
  Speaker 4: I help some, just to be clear, is much more of a customer facing, merchant facing solution as it is spent today it's.
• 24:10
  Speaker 4: It's not meant to be an embedded solution but as a VC, I'm watching both sides of the market the merchant facing from facing solutions like how some an embedded and also as as a 16 Z has famously wrote two years ago that every company is gonna become a thing, that company, every company will be a payments company and now I think we need to find tune that.
• 24:38
  Speaker 4: What is the say?
• 24:39
  Speaker 4: That every company will become and I am able to find that company.
• 24:45
  Speaker 4: So absolutely watching closely how Gen I is being used in fintechs.
• 24:53
  Speaker 4: I know that even helps me uses I in the background for some of the risk scoring and server.
• 25:01
  Speaker 4: We actually just made an investments in insure tech.
• 25:05
  Speaker 4: I am able to company, so that's definitely gonna be another trend to watch.
• 25:10
  Speaker 4: But yeah, I'm very bullish on the space is we continue to have high hopes for what it's gonna bring us in your future Show and the long term future to you know, we used to hear, right, the growth, growth, growth and that was what it was all about.
• 25:26
  Speaker 3: Now it's about profitability.
• 25:27
  Speaker 3: I mean, do you think that kind of way of looking at it will continue?
• 25:31
  Speaker 3: Where, you know, the software companies are the payments companies, fintech companies, of all that we're really just trying to almost grow it at all costs as really kind of shifted to it's more of a profitability conversation.
• 25:45
  Speaker 3: I mean, are you seeing that and do you think that's gonna continue in the future?
• 25:49
  Speaker 4: Absolutely.
• 25:49
  Speaker 4: I'm seeing that.
• 25:50
  Speaker 4: I wish I could tell you, like I'm not.
• 25:52
  Speaker 4: Growth is always gonna be important.
• 25:53
  Speaker 4: Growth will be important for investors and this is kind of why we invest in companies to begin with is because we expect them To grow bigger over time.
• 26:03
  Speaker 4: But yeah, the reality is capital is no longer free and again I will repeat myself here we are going back to the norm, where it's not just about growth, it's about the efficiency of that growth.
• 26:17
  Speaker 4: And then Metrics and what's your cost of customer acquisition?
• 26:21
  Speaker 4: What is your turn?
• 26:22
  Speaker 4: What is your net retention?
• 26:24
  Speaker 4: All these metrics will be more important than ever.
• 26:29
  Speaker 4: Similarly, like health and, for instance, is investing a lot in fine tuning their marketing and go to market engine right now to make it as efficient as possible so that every new dollar of new revenue, gross profit that they gain, they're gaining and adding efficiently and that ultimately translates into a better capital efficiency.
• 26:52
  Speaker 4: Right, if you are growing efficiently, that means you're burning less capital.
• 26:57
  Speaker 4: And, yeah, you have to actually budget when the capital you raise to last longer than you would have just a year ago.
• 27:06
  Speaker 4: So that's just a reality.
• 27:08
  Speaker 4: And yeah, you need to have, as a fintech these days, you need to have a backup plan of how you become what about a wall and sustain your own growth if you hit some headwinds in the markets, like we have today with high interest rates etc.
• 27:23
  Speaker 4: That is to say, companies that grow efficiently and show that great unit economics and their growth will continue to attract venture capital, grow further.
• 27:35
  Speaker 3: Well, nick, jane, we've covered a lot of ground so far.
• 27:38
  Speaker 3: Is there anything else you guys want to cover before we wrap up the show?
• 27:42
  Speaker 2: No, thank you so much for having us really appreciate the time thanks so much, greg.
• 27:46
  Speaker 4: This has been super exciting.
• 27:47
  Speaker 4: I guess we are been taking us there, so we're biased here on the payments.
• 27:51
  Speaker 4: But yeah, cheers to a new year financial services evolution.
• 27:58
  Speaker 4: I think there's great things to come.
• 28:01
  Speaker 3: Absolutely well.
• 28:02
  Speaker 3: Happy new year to both of you and thank you so much for being on the show today.
• 28:06
  Speaker 3: I know your time is very valuable, so I really appreciate you being here.
• 28:09
  Speaker 3: Thanks a lot.
• 28:09
  Speaker 3: Thank you and to all your listeners out there.
• 28:12
  Speaker 3: I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story.
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us this week on the leaders in payments podcast.
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: Make sure you visit our website at leaders in payments dot com where you can subscribe to the show and where you'll find our show notes.
• 28:25
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