Latest / Leaders In Payments / Jo Phillips & Will Corbera, Co-CEOs of Payabli | Episode 329

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Jo Phillips & Will Corbera, Co-CEOs of Payabli | Episode 329 · 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: At P&B we often talk about.
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: We see a future where businesses are going to live within vertical SaaS, all businesses are going to operate their organizations on some sort of vertical SaaS and all payments are going to be embedded within those vertical SaaS.
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: So we think the hockey puck is going in that direction.
• 0:44
  Speaker 3: That was Will Corbera, the co-CEO of Payably, and he and Joe Phillips, the other co-CEO of Payably, joined me on this episode, episode 329 of the Leaders in Payments podcast, and I'm your host, greg Myers.
• 0:58
  Speaker 3: Payably helps software companies make payments a core part of their business model to help them drive revenue, enhance the customer experience and boost enterprise value.
• 1:12
  Speaker 3: Will, joe and I talk about what makes Payably unique in the marketplace, their unique backgrounds and where they see the industry heading in the next few years.
• 1:18
  Speaker 3: We've got a great episode ahead, so let's get started.
• 1:20
  Speaker 3: So let's get started.
• 1:26
  Speaker 3: Hi, joe and Will, thank you for being here and welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 1:31
  Speaker 4: Thanks, greg.
• 1:31
  Speaker 4: It's a pleasure We've been looking forward to today.
• 1:33
  Speaker 4: Thanks, greg, thanks for having us.
• 1:35
  Speaker 3: Absolutely, so let's go ahead and dive right in.
• 1:38
  Speaker 3: So let's start with you, joe.
• 1:40
  Speaker 3: If you don't mind, 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.
• 1:51
  Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely so.
• 1:51
  Speaker 4: I'm a Cali boy, born and bred.
• 1:52
  Speaker 4: I was born in Southern California in a little beach town.
• 1:53
  Speaker 4: Well, grew up in a beach town called San Clemente, close to San Diego.
• 1:55
  Speaker 4: You know, had a kind of quintessential SoCal childhood.
• 1:58
  Speaker 4: Was big into board sports like skateboarding and bodyboarding.
• 2:01
  Speaker 4: Play played a lot of basketball as a kid.
• 2:03
  Speaker 4: That was part of my first love.
• 2:05
  Speaker 4: I was exposed to entrepreneurship from a very young age.
• 2:07
  Speaker 4: My grandfather was a Cuban immigrant, came here in the 60s and entrepreneurship was his path to building a life in the United States.
• 2:15
  Speaker 4: So I grew up in our family jewelry business and kind of got the entrepreneurial bug from an early age.
• 2:20
  Speaker 4: I was always that kid that had some type of side hustle right I was selling candy or baseball cards and that kind of stuck with me.
• 2:28
  Speaker 4: Through high school and college Went to a school in Boston outside of Boston, clark University in Western Massachusetts.
• 2:35
  Speaker 4: It was probably the most different experience you could have coming from kind of sunny beach town in Southern California but had an amazing college experience and continue to pursue a lot of my entrepreneurial spirit there.
• 2:48
  Speaker 4: And then after that kind of lived in six major cities across the US given the company I worked for and then moved back to SoCal in 2012.
• 2:56
  Speaker 4: And I live in Los Angeles with my wife and my two-year-old today.
• 3:00
  Speaker 3: Awesome, awesome.
• 3:01
  Speaker 3: Well, thanks for sharing.
• 3:02
  Speaker 3: That Will.
• 3:02
  Speaker 3: Same question for you.
• 3:03
  Speaker 3: A little bit about yourself, if you don't mind.
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: Sure, Greg.
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: First off, thanks again for having us on the podcast.
• 3:11
  Speaker 2: I was born in Miami.
• 3:12
  Speaker 2: My father is from a small town in Catalonia, Spain, called San Eladi, so after being born I was taken to Barcelona, lived there for the first five years of my life, then came back to Miami To follow my father's adventures.
• 3:31
  Speaker 2: We also moved to Costa Rica for five years and came back to Miami and California Miami ever since.
• 3:33
  Speaker 2: My mom's from Nicaragua, small town there as well, but I ultimately graduated from University of Miami.
• 3:39
  Speaker 2: I'm a diehard Miami Hurricanes fan, but my father and my brothers were very big in inspiring me to be an entrepreneur, been an entrepreneur all my life and very fortunate to be exposed to the payments industry from an early age.
• 3:57
  Speaker 3: Okay, great.
• 3:57
  Speaker 3: Well, let's talk about the company Will.
• 4:00
  Speaker 3: Let's stick with you.
• 4:01
  Speaker 3: So, if you don't mind, tell us what Payably does.
• 4:04
  Speaker 2: So Payably is part of this very exciting new category that's being created in the payments landscape called Payments Infrastructure as a Service.
• 4:14
  Speaker 2: What makes Payably very special is we've built a single unified API that helps software companies become payment companies, really built around the three P's, what we call the three P's pay in, pay out, pay ops.
• 4:29
  Speaker 2: What we've done is we help software companies embed and monetize payments on payment acceptance, payment issuance to suppliers and vendors, pay out and the payment operational wherewithal and tooling to help them scale and manage their payments business.
• 4:45
  Speaker 2: So that's really at the core of what PayMD is doing and innovating in the payment landscape.
• 4:52
  Speaker 3: Okay, and Joe, do you have anything to add to that description?
• 4:56
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I think that is a good overview.
• 4:58
  Speaker 4: I think our kind of slogan is if you're a software company or a payments company, I think looking out kind of into the future, right, it's really any entity that services a distributed network of merchants.
• 5:11
  Speaker 4: So if you sit in the middle of money movement between a payer and a recipient, there's a kind of latent business model you have there and we see a world where those types of entities are leveraging payably to not only provide better experiences for those payers and recipients but to monetize on those payment flows.
• 5:28
  Speaker 4: You know we've been growing rapidly.
• 5:30
  Speaker 4: We 3x our revenue last year.
• 5:32
  Speaker 4: We're on track to 4x our revenue this year, got about close to 50 team members today.
• 5:38
  Speaker 4: Over 60 software partners are working with Payably today and again just growing rapidly.
• 5:43
  Speaker 4: We're very excited about the future of payments and we're just having a blast kind of building out this business together.
• 5:50
  Speaker 3: So are there certain verticals that you focus on for these software companies?
• 5:54
  Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely.
• 5:55
  Speaker 4: I think you know Will to his credit, right, and he'll talk about his background.
• 6:00
  Speaker 4: But we kind of based on kind of our histories and together, right Will had a lot of experience building for the property management vertical and so we tried to target some of those more complex verticals and use cases and build around those capabilities and we felt that if we were able to tackle those then other verticals would be much easier to service.
• 6:21
  Speaker 4: And that's played out.
• 6:22
  Speaker 4: So we really like what we call need to pay verticals, any verticals that have an ongoing relationship between kind of the payer and the recipient or the merchant.
• 6:30
  Speaker 4: There's a lot of attractive qualities about them.
• 6:33
  Speaker 4: Part of it is building vertical specific capabilities for them.
• 6:36
  Speaker 4: That makes our product more valuable and more defensible in the market.
• 6:40
  Speaker 4: But you know we have a lot of home services and commercial services contractors as well, those ISVs.
• 6:46
  Speaker 4: We have a good amount of companies like Fitness Studio Softwares.
• 6:51
  Speaker 4: We even have a horse stable management software.
• 6:54
  Speaker 4: So it spans the gamut.
• 6:55
  Speaker 4: But from a go-to-market standpoint we do try and focus on those need-to-pay verticals quite a bit.
• 7:01
  Speaker 3: Okay, that makes sense, and is it mainly in the US, or are you outside the US as well?
• 7:07
  Speaker 4: Today, us and Canada, you know definitely plans in 2025 to start going into some other markets, definitely on the roadmap and starting to have those plans as we speak.
• 7:17
  Speaker 3: actually, Okay, great.
• 7:19
  Speaker 3: So, Joe, let's stick with you for a minute.
• 7:21
  Speaker 3: What would you say?
• 7:22
  Speaker 3: Differentiates Payably from its competitors out there.
• 7:27
  Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely.
• 7:27
  Speaker 4: I think Will alluded to it a bit in what we do, right, we oftentimes get lumped into this managed payables or PayFac as a service excuse me this managed PayFac or PayFac as a service kind of category, right, and that's part of what we do.
• 7:40
  Speaker 4: But we really feel that the unification of the three Ps part of what we do, but we really feel that the unification of the three Ps pay-in, pay-out, pay-ops that is really the $100 billion market opportunity.
• 7:54
  Speaker 4: And early on we just had the good fortune, based off of Will's background and my background, that we identified that for every pay-in use case that a merchant had for accepting money from their customers, they had all these payouts use cases for paying vendors, paying subcontractors, their employees needed to pick up equipment and supplies or they didn't get paid, and those kind of use cases were oftentimes very underserved and there wasn't kind of a unified API that was offering both of those services in a modern, embeddable fashion.
• 8:18
  Speaker 4: So I think that is a big differentiator for us and we have some very robust and cool and innovative products around what we call kind of embedded payables, not just funding a merchant account or doing split funding, but truly paying out a vendor and monetizing on that payout.
• 8:34
  Speaker 4: And then the last piece is the payoffs piece, right, I think given your background at other companies, greg, I think you can appreciate this right.
• 8:40
  Speaker 4: The operational tooling, the boarding, the underwriting, the risk management, the billing, all those capabilities that are oftentimes kind of under the hood, and there's a clear delineation between what the payments company does and the software companies does.
• 8:54
  Speaker 4: We've been unbundling and offering those tools in a modular fashion so that as our software companies scale and they want to have more control over the customer experience, more control over the business, they can kind of insert themselves in those responsibilities and kind of take control of the payment operations via our stack.
• 9:10
  Speaker 3: So, to correct me if I'm wrong, typical company, the merchant is a user of the software and in a lot of traditional use cases they get the merchant account through the software vendor.
• 9:23
  Speaker 3: I mean, that's kind of the whole PayFact kind of model, or payments as a service, or whatever you want to call it.
• 9:28
  Speaker 3: But they always had to go somewhere else to do their payable side of the business, and so you guys have solved that problem as well, which in turn makes you unique in the market.
• 9:38
  Speaker 3: Did I summarize that pretty well?
• 9:40
  Speaker 4: Absolutely.
• 9:41
  Speaker 4: I think on one boarding application, right Will, as our product visionary here is designed an awesome boarding experience where, on one kind of boarding application, you can get enrolled into numerous services, from payment acceptance to payables and, in the future, other types of fintech programs like lending, for example, or embedded banking.
• 10:03
  Speaker 4: So that's absolutely right.
• 10:05
  Speaker 3: Okay, great, I want both of you to answer this next question, but Will we'll start with you.
• 10:10
  Speaker 3: Where do you think the payments industry is headed, say, in the next maybe three to five years?
• 10:16
  Speaker 2: I've been in this space for close to 25 years, greg, and when I originally started it was feet on the street, if you will right ISO selling and what we call here at Pavely, kind of selling naked payment processing, right when you have the terminals that are disintegrated from the merchant's actual tools or systems that are running the business and so at Payably we see a future where businesses are going to live within vertical SaaS.
• 10:47
  Speaker 2: All businesses are going to operate their organizations on some sort of vertical SaaS and all payments are going to be embedded within those vertical SaaS.
• 10:57
  Speaker 2: So we think the hockey puck is going in that direction and we're making sure that we're building for those software platforms and tech-enabled industries and customers that want to leverage our tooling to be able to embed and monetize payments.
• 11:16
  Speaker 2: We think that over those three to five years there's still that big tectonic shift of disintegrated payments going into integrated ecosystems.
• 11:27
  Speaker 2: So big shifts will happen there in our opinion.
• 11:31
  Speaker 3: Yeah, let's follow on question, for you Will.
• 11:33
  Speaker 3: So when you're talking about those other kind of services, so you're thinking lending payroll, anything a business does to run the business will ultimately be done through that software company.
• 11:49
  Speaker 2: And different pay modalities, omni-channel needs, all different fintech capabilities.
• 11:57
  Speaker 2: From a payment standpoint, right, we want to be in the middle of all that money movement so that the software companies can essentially be their own payments company, as our slogan is right.
• 12:09
  Speaker 2: We think that there's a big demand for that.
• 12:13
  Speaker 2: We see it every day and it's complicated, as you know, to put that all together.
• 12:20
  Speaker 2: And so for our software companies that want to take advantage of all of those capabilities, leveraging our API offsets a lot of the work off their hands, right, versus hiring a team for them to build that in-house Okay.
• 12:37
  Speaker 3: Joe, what about you?
• 12:38
  Speaker 3: What's your vision of the future of payments?
• 12:46
  Speaker 4: Definitely concur with everything Will said.
• 12:47
  Speaker 4: I'd be remiss to not mention AI.
• 12:47
  Speaker 4: I know it's a real hot topic and kind of buzzwordy.
• 12:48
  Speaker 4: We're already starting to do some really innovative stuff with AI in terms of partner integration support and kind of enhancing our engineering team with AI in terms of partner integration support and kind of enhancing our engineering team with AI tools.
• 12:56
  Speaker 4: But I think, looking out to the future, we see a slew of applications from underwriting and transaction risk monitoring to business intelligent kind of applications where you're giving partners much more insights on their payments economics and kind of fluctuations and how they're monetizing payments.
• 13:12
  Speaker 4: I think one use case I'm extremely intrigued by is the payable side.
• 13:16
  Speaker 4: Right On embedded payables we have a program called Managed Payables and the key to that is vendor enablement.
• 13:23
  Speaker 4: Right, you have basically human capital contacting vendors and trying to pay those kind of bills on behalf of the merchant and kind of index or over index on modalities that can be monetized and it's very effective and it allows you to drive higher adoption of those monetizable modalities.
• 13:42
  Speaker 4: But it's very capital intensive.
• 13:45
  Speaker 4: It's a lot of human interaction, there's a lot of margin for error and I do see a world where sophisticated AI can really optimize kind of vendor enablement and make it a much better experience both for the merchant, for the provider like us, as well as the end vendor and drive better kind of monetization on those payables.
• 14:04
  Speaker 4: So that's an application that we're very keen on and hoping that we'll innovate within that space over the coming years.
• 14:12
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm glad you brought up AI because that certainly was going to be one of my follow-on questions, because we rarely have a payments conversation without it coming up in some way shape or form, so I'm glad you brought that up.
• 14:24
  Speaker 3: One kind of follow-on Joe from there is do you see some of these different payment kind of methods from any of the P2P things like Pay by Bank, zelle, venmo?
• 14:38
  Speaker 3: I mean, are you seeing those use cases a lot in this space or do you think you'll start seeing more of those?
• 14:45
  Speaker 4: Definitely we'll start seeing more of those.
• 14:46
  Speaker 4: We get a lot of interest, right.
• 14:48
  Speaker 4: I think, again, depending on the use case, right.
• 14:53
  Speaker 4: But on vendor payments, right, like definitely want to be offering RTP.
• 14:57
  Speaker 4: We're talking with some providers for push to card that we're planning to roll out as well.
• 15:02
  Speaker 4: So I think to Will's kind of points earlier.
• 15:05
  Speaker 4: Right, we want to be that internally we kind of refer to ourselves as the AWS of payments, right?
• 15:10
  Speaker 4: So whatever modalities consumers want and merchants want, we want to have solutions for, so we don't feel threatened by some of these other modalities consumers want and merchants want we want to have solutions for, so we don't feel threatened by some of these other modalities like RTP or pay-by-bank or anything else.
• 15:25
  Speaker 4: That's kind of a hot topic today.
• 15:26
  Speaker 3: We ultimately want to incorporate that in our offering and depending on the partner needs and the use case, then give them those solutions, okay, okay, that makes a lot of sense.
• 15:41
  Speaker 3: So let's switch gears a little bit and talk a little bit about each of you, so we'll start with you Will so tell us about your journey to your role there as a co-founder and co-CEO.
• 15:47
  Speaker 3: So maybe give us that career journey, walk us through some of the roles and different ways and how you got to where you are today of the roles in different ways and how you got to where you are today.
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: Sure, first and foremost, I've been very blessed to be exposed to the entrepreneur spirit very early on in my life.
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: I owe all the credit to my father and my mom.
• 16:07
  Speaker 2: My father inspired me very much so to kind of think like an entrepreneur and he was always very proud of never working for anybody and did anything and everything to support our family.
• 16:22
  Speaker 2: But he really inspired me and my brothers to be entrepreneurs and I always knew I wanted to build something and I always was starting different things.
• 16:32
  Speaker 2: And in school, while I was at University of Miami, something and I was starting different things.
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: In school, while I was at University of Miami, my brother Mike he and I co-founded a payments company, a payments platform, and we started off as an ISO and hitting the bricks, selling regular merchant accounts, and we grew that business.
• 16:53
  Speaker 2: I was still at University of Miami and recruited some buddies of mine, one of which was on the University of Miami football team, one of my really, really good best of friends and we started getting a lot of merchants and built a book around sales force.
• 17:09
  Speaker 2: But we quickly realized that it was an all-margin business and so my brother and I pivoted and started to think about how can we build software and technology around payments.
• 17:24
  Speaker 2: And we had identified Visa, had posted I think at the time many years ago kind of some emerging markets that they thought that still need to have further penetration of digital payments.
• 17:35
  Speaker 2: And so we dove into building payments technology around the property vertical and through that experience we were exposed to some incredible opportunities in South Florida to build payments technology around the property space, particularly the homeowner association world, and through that business scaled that business over the years.
• 17:56
  Speaker 2: We bootstrapped the business for about 15, 16 years and through that journey we were one of the very first payfax in the industry, helped incubate a lot of the early payfax capabilities that were at Fifth, third or Vantive at the time and ultimately grew that business to billions of dollars in process volume a year and tens of thousands of merchants, and we're very blessed to go through a process and have a successful exit in 2017.
• 18:26
  Speaker 2: And from there, joe and I had always aspired to combine our skill sets and, after my commitments to my business and all the good things that we had built there, joe and I aspire to always work together.
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: There was an opportunity to build what today is Pavely.
• 18:44
  Speaker 2: We had some light bulb moments and inspired us to what Pavely is today, and so, here at Pavely, what I focus on primarily is on the product strategy, on leading the payments platform and the ecosystem that we're supporting our software partners with in these need to pay verticals.
• 19:02
  Speaker 2: So, ultimately, just very, very blessed to have been exposed early on in my life to kind of that entrepreneurial mindset through my father, my mother, who's also been forced to be very entrepreneurial thinking, and my brothers that followed suit.
• 19:18
  Speaker 3: So I think the next logical question will since you brought up the relationship with Joe and you guys have done this together is how do you guys even know each other?
• 19:27
  Speaker 2: Joe tells a story much better than I do.
• 19:29
  Speaker 3: Okay, well, we can let's let Joe tell it.
• 19:32
  Speaker 3: Joe, over to you, tell us that, and then we'll go through your background.
• 19:36
  Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely, I'll kind of interweave it honestly.
• 19:38
  Speaker 4: I think you know it's funny.
• 19:40
  Speaker 4: We were on another podcast recently and I mentioned there I think Will and I were born to start Payable you together, or at least some business together Will, true payments expert, brilliant product mind and just an amazing business partner.
• 19:54
  Speaker 4: And you know my background's been he's been more on the payment side.
• 19:57
  Speaker 4: My background's been more on the kind of SaaS and technology company side where you know I was a, you know I've been a go-to-market operator, leading sales and business development teams at early stage companies my entire career.
• 20:08
  Speaker 4: I was a early team member at a company called Seamlesscom, which is one of the first online food ordering platforms that ultimately merged with Grubhub, and when I was at that company I was kind of jumping around from market to market building out our operations and I'd spend like six to 12 months in a given market, hire the team, train them and then kind of parachute into a new market from there.
• 20:29
  Speaker 4: When I was building out the market in Miami, I met Will.
• 20:32
  Speaker 4: We instantly hit it off and kind of like our paths, kind of parallel path.
• 20:37
  Speaker 4: I came back to business school, came back to LA for business school in 2012.
• 20:40
  Speaker 4: Will also his brother was with him at Revo and was based in LA, so Will moved out to LA.
• 20:47
  Speaker 4: Kind of long story short, the Pavely journey began.
• 20:49
  Speaker 4: We had been already dear friends and I became the sales leader at a company called Service Titan.
• 20:54
  Speaker 4: I was the first head of sales at Service Titan.
• 20:56
  Speaker 4: They the sales leader at a company called Service Titan.
• 21:00
  Speaker 4: I was the first head of sales at Service Titan.
• 21:01
  Speaker 4: They'd become the de facto leader in business management software for home services contractors.
• 21:02
  Speaker 4: And when I was there we were trying to figure out our payment strategy.
• 21:04
  Speaker 4: We had raised a lot of capital, we were looking to accelerate growth outside of me, just hiring more and more headcount on the sales team and we just kind of stumbled upon payments.
• 21:14
  Speaker 4: We had kind of a legacy processor that was just the payment.
• 21:18
  Speaker 4: Economics were not very favorable to us, even though we're processing a lot of volume.
• 21:21
  Speaker 4: Third-party processors is a very kind of disconnected process.
• 21:26
  Speaker 4: They were creating a lot of poor customer experiences and we're like we got to figure out payments.
• 21:31
  Speaker 4: Long story short, I connected Will with our heart of growth at the company.
• 21:34
  Speaker 4: Together they with our heart of growth at the company.
• 21:37
  Speaker 4: Together they kind of architected what is today's service-tying payments and it became an incredible transformation for the business, unlocked a ton of revenue and kind of catalyzed this broader embedded fintech strategy where it wasn't just payment acceptance but it was payables and lending and payroll and all these other fintech programs that we were ultimately launched at ST and that really inspired us to build out Payably.
• 21:57
  Speaker 4: We saw that Will helped execute a really strong playbook there, but ultimately we had to kind of cobble together this mosaic of all these different payment providers to execute on it and it inspired us to say, hey, this next generation.
• 22:11
  Speaker 4: There's literally this phenomenon where trillions of dollars commerce is migrating off of legacy tech and distribution onto vertical SaaS platforms and the next generation of service titans or mind bodies or toasts they're going to want a better, more modern infrastructure built around the three P's.
• 22:26
  Speaker 4: So that really inspired us and it was one of those things where Will had been an entrepreneur.
• 22:30
  Speaker 4: I'd always helped other entrepreneurs build and scale their businesses but wanted to have a crack at it myself and I think we just have very complimentary skill sets and we always kind of aspire to work together.
• 22:43
  Speaker 4: So we just seized the opportunity and jumped in and fortunately it's been a great ride thus far and we're really excited about what we're building and what the future has in store for us and our team.
• 22:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, if I may add, I think what was also very helpful is kind of in my journey, my previous journey in venture.
• 23:01
  Speaker 2: We're very blessed to be exposed to a vertical where there was a lot of money acceptance but also money issuance, and being able to see firsthand glance at the complexities behind all that money movement, the various omni-channel needs, the different payment modalities on money in and money out.
• 23:20
  Speaker 2: It really added to kind of that light bulb moment that there must be a better way to be able to support these verticals and these platforms that are neat.
• 23:28
  Speaker 2: Unifying all that, so combining that with what Joe just said, was very inspirational to what we wanted to bring to the world and got approvals from our wives and they've been huge advocates of ours and we've been off to the races.
• 23:43
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so William, you can agree with this statement Once you get in payments, you can't really ever get out.
• 23:49
  Speaker 3: So, Joe, you're stuck.
• 23:51
  Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely, he's stuck.
• 23:52
  Speaker 4: I think he's stuck.
• 23:54
  Speaker 4: A lot of people never think they're going to get in, but it's definitely an awesome industry and glad to be part of the tribe now.
• 24:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's one of those industries that you don't necessarily decide to.
• 24:06
  Speaker 2: Hey, I'm going to jump into payments because it's a fascinating industry, but once you you know, you always kind of by chance just fall into it right.
• 24:16
  Speaker 2: But once you discover it, you it.
• 24:19
  Speaker 2: It's so special.
• 24:20
  Speaker 2: We talk a lot about Greg internally especially when we bring on new team members about we're living a very special time in humankind right when in the 50, 60 years from now, they're going to be talking literally about these times where commerce and value was exchanged and migrated from, say, currency or paper and fiat and kind of all to digital right and the entire industry is migrating, how values exchange and we're a part of that right and so it's a very exciting time to be in payments and I often joke of how my baby daughter will one day ask me hey, dad, you guys used to have paper in your wallet, you had plastic cards in your wallet.
• 25:08
  Speaker 2: That's so weird.
• 25:10
  Speaker 2: So it's cool to be part of that and being able to help other entrepreneurs exchange value and transact right.
• 25:20
  Speaker 2: So being that invisible technology is very inspiring.
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 25:24
  Speaker 3: I mean, it's the innovation in this industry, the amount of money invested, the amount of companies, and I never used to step back and look at it from such a broad view, but it's really about money movement.
• 25:38
  Speaker 3: So it's any kind of money movement right I used to think of, you know, payments as credit card processing right, and merchant accounts, and you know, five years of doing this podcast has just opened my eyes to the amount you know when you add fintech into it, which, when I started there fintech the word didn't even exist.
• 25:56
  Speaker 3: So you have FinTech companies and payments companies and they're all money movement companies and it's just, it's a fascinating industry.
• 26:03
  Speaker 3: And all this is a great kind of segue into the final question which, joe, I'm going to start with you.
• 26:09
  Speaker 3: And you know, maybe use an example of someone's joining your team and maybe they're coming right out of college and they look at payments or fintech and they're like you know, hey, this is a great company to work for.
• 26:21
  Speaker 3: I want to learn more about this industry.
• 26:23
  Speaker 3: I want to be successful in payments.
• 26:24
  Speaker 3: You know, what kind of advice would you give them to be successful?
• 26:28
  Speaker 4: Great question.
• 26:29
  Speaker 4: I'll frankly use myself right, because I'm a newer entry into the industry.
• 26:34
  Speaker 4: Right, I came from a non-traditional payments background.
• 26:36
  Speaker 4: Obviously, I had cursory understanding of payments, but not really not deep knowledge, and I've learned a lot since 2019 when we started the business and kind of leading up to it.
• 26:47
  Speaker 4: Payments is interesting.
• 26:48
  Speaker 4: I think for a lot of outsiders there can be a negative stigma with payments, primarily because it's kind of opaque, it's complex, it's a little esoteric, right, and I think you know, especially like you know, folks that you know see payments as like traditional merchant services, right, I think a lot of times they maybe feel misled or may have a misunderstanding of payments because it's complex and I think a lot of the folks on the front line selling it I don't think it's a malicious intent.
• 27:16
  Speaker 4: I don't think there's a bunch of snake oil salesmen on the front line selling it.
• 27:18
  Speaker 4: I don't think it's a malicious intent.
• 27:19
  Speaker 4: I don't think there's a bunch of snake oil salesmen.
• 27:20
  Speaker 4: I think, because it's complex, it's hard for them to explain exactly what's happening with payments.
• 27:24
  Speaker 4: So what served me very well and I think I'll pass this on to anybody entering is really try and understand the payments value chain, really try and understand payments economics well and honestly, for me the best way to do that was selling a merchant account right, literally, even if you're not kind of in the sales world, if you're in finance, if you're in operations, try and go sell a merchant account and interact with the merchant and try and articulate what it is, how you're providing value to that merchant.
• 27:55
  Speaker 4: I think if you're able to do that you get one a better appreciation for the end merchants.
• 28:00
  Speaker 4: We sell through ISVs but we're still interacting with end merchants all day long and we're ultimately providing solutions and capabilities for those businesses.
• 28:09
  Speaker 4: So my recommendation is really try and understand the industry really well, understand, kind of, how the cookie crumbles across the different stakeholders in the value chain and if you can go sell a merchant account.
• 28:21
  Speaker 4: We always joke that at some point we're going to do a certification process for team members where if you're an engineer you got to go sell kind of a pizza shop or a car dealership or something right.
• 28:31
  Speaker 4: At least get out there and try.
• 28:33
  Speaker 4: So that would be my recommendation for folks getting started.
• 28:36
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that's great Will.
• 28:37
  Speaker 3: Any thoughts, any advice you'd give?
• 28:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely.
• 28:41
  Speaker 2: I think having a good mentor in the space that can teach you really the inner workings of all the different parties, relationships that are needed to really be able to understand how the industry works, I think is a really good foundation.
• 29:03
  Speaker 2: I also think that it's very valuable if you want to be in the payment space to learn a vertical.
• 29:09
  Speaker 2: Right, pick a vertical that you're interested in, because the payment landscape is so vast that you can kind of get lost in all the different opportunities and not necessarily build anything special for anyone, right?
• 29:24
  Speaker 2: So if you really learn a vertical, I think that's a really good start and start thinking about how you can bring value to that vertical in the payment landscape.
• 29:33
  Speaker 2: That would be my second piece of advice, right, that would be my second piece of advice, right.
• 29:36
  Speaker 2: So pick somebody that knows the space and learn the inner workings of the industry and pick a vertical that excites you and you think you could bring some good value to that vertical.
• 29:47
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's some great advice.
• 29:49
  Speaker 3: So, Joe Will, we've covered a lot of ground obviously about the company and about your background and sort of the story there, so is there anything else either one of you would like to bring up before we wrap up the show?
• 30:02
  Speaker 3: First, off.
• 30:03
  Speaker 2: Thanks again for giving us the opportunity to have a nice conversation.
• 30:07
  Speaker 2: I always like to take the opportunity on these conversations for any listeners out there If they're thinking about building a business or starting something, to just go out there.
• 30:18
  Speaker 2: If they're thinking about building a business or starting something, to just go out there and jump in.
• 30:22
  Speaker 2: I think the world needs more entrepreneurs and I think the fintech industry is an incredible area for disruption and I hope more and more people venture out to do special things and take that risk to bring a lot of value to the world.
• 30:42
  Speaker 3: Great Joe.
• 30:42
  Speaker 3: Anything to add there?
• 30:44
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I'd echo that.
• 30:45
  Speaker 4: I also just would want to thank our team.
• 30:47
  Speaker 4: I think Will and I are just extremely blessed.
• 30:50
  Speaker 4: We've got an extremely talented, passionate group of amazing humans that we get to kind of go into battle with every single day.
• 30:58
  Speaker 4: I'm not sure when this will be released, but we got some very exciting news coming down the pike over the coming weeks and we were going to be hiring for a lot of new team members.
• 31:07
  Speaker 4: So if you are in the payment space or you're trying to get in this payment space, we've got a lot of amazing opportunities that we're starting to promote today and we're growing rapidly.
• 31:17
  Speaker 4: I think we got an incredible culture.
• 31:19
  Speaker 4: We're a highly values-driven and mission-driven organization.
• 31:22
  Speaker 4: So if you hear this podcast and are interested in what we're doing, we highly encourage you to reach out to Will or myself or any of our team members, and we'd love to chat with you about what's in store for Payably and we'd love to have you jump on this train with us and Greg, thanks again for having us.
• 31:40
  Speaker 4: We really enjoyed the conversation and really appreciate what you're doing for the industry.
• 31:45
  Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely Well.
• 31:46
  Speaker 3: Thank you both for being on the show today.
• 31:48
  Speaker 3: I know your time is very valuable, so I really appreciate you being here.
• 31:51
  Speaker 4: Thank you, Greg.
• 31:52
  Speaker 4: Thanks so much.
• 31:53
  Speaker 3: And to all your listeners out there.
• 31:54
  Speaker 3: I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story.