Latest / Leaders In Payments / Dave Glaser, CEO of Dwolla | Episode 270

Transcript

Dave Glaser, CEO of Dwolla | Episode 270 · 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: It's going to become easier and easier for payments to happen.
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: So, whether it's at a real estate closing, which we still use a lot of paper checks and a lot of buyer transmissions, we think those types of face-to-face transactions will go away and become more virtual and seamless.
• 0:34
  Speaker 2: We think that A-to-A transactions will start to take the place of credit card transactions, even at retail.
• 0:50
  Speaker 3: That was Dave Glazer, the CEO of DuWalla.
• 0:52
  Speaker 3: He is my special guest on this episode, episode 270 of the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 0:56
  Speaker 3: I'm your host, greg Myers.
• 0:58
  Speaker 3: Duwalla's modern API simplifies account-to-account payments, empowering businesses to automate money movement, significantly reduce processing times and improve profitability.
• 1:07
  Speaker 3: Dave and I talk about DuWalla and what makes it unique, as well as their recent strategic shift to focus on mid-market and enterprise clients and, of course, the growth and future of A-to-A payments.
• 1:18
  Speaker 3: Dave goes on to talk about his professional journey, as well as what he's passionate about, both professionally and personally.
• 1:24
  Speaker 3: We've got a great episode ahead, so let's get started.
• 1:26
  Speaker 3: Hi, dave, thank you for being here and welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: Thanks, greg, great to be with you.
• 1:38
  Speaker 3: So let's dive right in.
• 1:39
  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, and we'll jump into your professional career in just a minute.
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: Sure, sure, my name is Dave Glazer.
• 1:50
  Speaker 2: I grew up in a small town south of Pittsburgh, pennsylvania, a town called Waynesburg.
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: I'm known for coal mining pretty much.
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: I went to school there and then went to university at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, which is a small liberal arts college east of Pittsburgh, and I thought I wanted to be a math teacher, a high school math teacher.
• 2:11
  Speaker 2: But it was during my last year of studying that I went and did my student teaching and realized I didn't want to be a math teacher.
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: So I had a few months to scramble before I graduated and was lucky enough to have some computer science background and I landed my first job with EDS Electronic Data Systems back in 1991 and learned to be a systems engineer with them and spent about 10 years in that mode, being a consultant or project manager at EDS and then IBM and then Silicon Graphics, and then I found the payments industry in the year 2000 with Cyber Source, and now I work for Duwala as CEO.
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: I live in Bluffton, south Carolina, with my wife and two dogs.
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: I've got two daughters.
• 2:50
  Speaker 2: They're 23 and 28.
• 2:51
  Speaker 2: They're off on their own.
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: I should mention that I'd spent a lot of time in Duwala, iowa, where we're Duwala's headquartered, so I visit our team here pretty regularly.
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: I'm coming from Duwala today, as a matter of fact.
• 3:01
  Speaker 3: Great, let's talk about the company, so tell the audience what Duwala does.
• 3:06
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: So Duwala provides electronic payment infrastructure for innovators.
• 3:11
  Speaker 2: So we've been around for a while and made a couple of pivots over the last decade or so, but our focus now is providing world-class interface for what we call A to A payments, or account-to-account payments, leveraging the banking system in the United States.
• 3:27
  Speaker 3: And are there certain verticals that you focus on?
• 3:31
  Speaker 2: Well, our customers are typically been software platforms, so these are what we'd call fintech or financial technology innovation platforms.
• 3:39
  Speaker 2: They do fall into a number of categories that we see or verticals that we see regularly, some of which are property management and real estate investing.
• 3:48
  Speaker 2: We see a number of our customers in the insurance vertical.
• 3:52
  Speaker 2: We have a number of marketplaces or retail marketplaces, but really it could be any software infrastructure companies that are building out and trying to disrupt a particular industry that need to embed payments as part of their application.
• 4:06
  Speaker 3: We had your predecessor on the show back in June of 2021.
• 4:11
  Speaker 3: So maybe Phyllis in?
• 4:13
  Speaker 3: I know that you have launched a new product recently called Dualla Connect, so maybe Phyllis in on that product and any other.
• 4:21
  Speaker 3: Maybe strategic shifts the company's made Terrific.
• 4:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so Brady and I have been partners for the past few years here at Dualla and he's moved on recently to greener past years, I think but we've seen a lot of growth sort of post-pandemic, I'd say right.
• 4:33
  Speaker 2: So, just as many fintechs and payment companies have seen, there was a lot of growth happening with the lower interest rates and high valuations coming from venture capital firms.
• 4:42
  Speaker 2: Now over the last year, year and a half, that slowed down those investments as interest rates have gone back up.
• 4:48
  Speaker 2: So that has impacted a lot of our smaller customers and that led us to a realization that our solutions are just as relevant for larger enterprises as they are for smaller startup fintechs.
• 5:02
  Speaker 2: And so we started to develop a new product, as you mentioned, called Dualla Connect, and we launched it earlier this year.
• 5:09
  Speaker 2: That allows companies larger companies, medium large and enterprise companies to what we call bring their own bank.
• 5:15
  Speaker 2: So these are companies that may already have treasury relationships with some of the US's largest banks, like JPMorgan Chase or Wells Fargo and others, where they can continue to have their banking relationships with those treasury management firms but leveraged.
• 5:30
  Speaker 2: Dualla's technology infrastructure are modern API interfaces for innovators to embed payments in their existing applications, and that's a bit of a shift.
• 5:39
  Speaker 2: Traditionally, dualla acted and felt like a bank, even though we weren't a bank.
• 5:43
  Speaker 2: We looked and felt like a bank to brand new companies that were being funded by those venture capitalists let me make sure I have the picture painted correctly.
• 5:52
  Speaker 3: So a little bit less emphasis on the smaller companies and more on the mid-market and enterprise.
• 5:58
  Speaker 3: And then what about the bank relationships?
• 6:00
  Speaker 3: Because I know in the past you did a lot of business through your bank relationships.
• 6:04
  Speaker 3: Does that pretty much stay the same, or is there a change there?
• 6:07
  Speaker 2: Well, our existing platform, the platform that we're well known for, called wall of balance, we do have a number of existing banking relationships to provide the services that we provide to those customers.
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: We have more than 650 customers on that platform.
• 6:21
  Speaker 2: So we continue to seek to preserve those relationships and build features on that platform for the customers that we have and those larger customers that make a month of the platform and then to all connect similarly, we expect will be more attractive to existing companies that have those existing bank relationships that I mentioned.
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: So we have these two platforms with similar banking relationships as we've had in the past, plus the new ones for the future.
• 6:45
  Speaker 3: Gotcha and you mentioned something that I do wanna double click on.
• 6:48
  Speaker 3: You said kinda the bring your own bank concept, so can you explain that a little more detail?
• 6:53
  Speaker 2: So what we've seen is, as we were working with the smaller innovators over the years, they were building applications from scratch say, property management applications are new insurance applications, as I mentioned earlier and of course, they need to embed payment processing in those applications.
• 7:08
  Speaker 2: What they were seeking to do is disrupt larger organizations, and so what we realize is that, especially post pandemic, larger organizations are starting to digitally transform themselves.
• 7:18
  Speaker 2: So large, well known, maybe name brand insurance companies, for instance, they built their payment systems maybe ten, twenty, thirty or even forty years ago and they leverage the banking system in the united states, which we call the a, c, h network, but they do so with more legacy systems and processes, so they may have manual processes, they still may write a lot of paper checks or receive a lot of paper checks, and they may have file based or mainframe based systems that connect to the banking system.
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: And so it's these existing larger companies that already have treasury relationships with the large banks in the us that they want to modernize their applications such that they're app enabled in their cloud based and their mobile first.
• 8:01
  Speaker 2: Similar to those innovators that were trying to disrupt them, large companies already digitally transform themselves and they're looking for the most modern tools, the most modern interfaces and api's the walla provides to gain access to the systems that their legacy banks Always provided them.
• 8:17
  Speaker 2: So in essence, they can continue to use the banks that they have great relationships for all the treasury management, maybe their benefits management, etc.
• 8:25
  Speaker 2: But they can leverage walla to provide the most modern technology interfaces to the banks perfect.
• 8:31
  Speaker 3: Thanks for that explanation.
• 8:33
  Speaker 3: What would you say differentiates to all of your competitors out there?
• 8:37
  Speaker 2: I think it's the fact that we offer the most flexible APIs to allow these innovators, both the small ones and the larger ones, to create to their hearts content.
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: They have lots of ideas on how they can innovate inside their systems, whether it's leveraging a combination of payment methods or funds flows or both in lots of different ways, to create these really unique applications that we see.
• 9:02
  Speaker 2: Maybe I should break that down a little bit.
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: When I talk about payment methods, and when I talk about A to A payment methods, I mean ACH transactions, which typically take three to five days to move money in the banking system.
• 9:15
  Speaker 2: There's also same day ACH, which is exactly that where the money moves the same day it's requested.
• 9:20
  Speaker 2: There's traditional wires.
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: There's also a newer form of faster payments that we call RTP or real-time payments.
• 9:27
  Speaker 2: The Federal Reserve launched a similar platform earlier this year called FedNow.
• 9:31
  Speaker 2: Those are a number of the payment methods that we support.
• 9:34
  Speaker 2: Then I mentioned funds flow as the other combination.
• 9:37
  Speaker 2: We can support all sorts of funds flows, whether it's payments being made to a company, or a company making payments, or a company that enables their customers or business customers to pay each other.
• 9:48
  Speaker 2: We call those pay-ins and pay-outs.
• 9:50
  Speaker 2: There's lots of combinations and permutations of how we can marry up those payment methods with those funds flows.
• 9:56
  Speaker 2: That's what's special about Dwella we provide the most modern interfaces for these companies to create the most modern payment systems within their customer-facing applications.
• 10:08
  Speaker 3: In the payments and fintech industry.
• 10:09
  Speaker 3: Merchants and their customers have increased expectations around omnichannel commerce.
• 10:14
  Speaker 3: In collaboration with NMI, the fully integrated payment solution built to scale, we've launched the Be Solid campaign where, in this series, we'll explore the ability to accept payments anytime, anywhere, using any device.
• 10:26
  Speaker 3: We'll dive deep into mobile acceptance via contactless tap-on phone, QR codes, wallets and more.
• 10:32
  Speaker 3: We will hear from companies like Othvia, Canalope, Google and more.
• 10:35
  Speaker 3: To listen to the latest episodes, visit leadersandpaymentscom or nmicom.
• 10:41
  Speaker 3: Slash resources, slash podcasts.
• 10:43
  Speaker 3: In a world full of squares and stripes, Be solid.
• 10:47
  Speaker 3: Where do you see this whole payments industry headed, say, in the next I don't know three to five years?
• 10:54
  Speaker 2: Wow, this was boring for a long time.
• 10:56
  Speaker 2: I started in the payments industry in the year 2000.
• 10:59
  Speaker 2: It wasn't probably until the year 2010 when payments started to get sexy.
• 11:03
  Speaker 2: We started to see companies like Square and Stripe really start to make the payment system in the US and really around the world a lot more easier to use, more friendly for businesses and consumers.
• 11:14
  Speaker 2: I think we're just going to see more and more of that electronification of payments, but also the embedding of payments in the systems and applications that we leverage.
• 11:23
  Speaker 2: I think there was a big turning point years ago when Uber launched.
• 11:27
  Speaker 2: We've all had that experience now.
• 11:29
  Speaker 2: We've all probably told the story many times.
• 11:31
  Speaker 2: But the idea of getting out of your Uber or getting out of a taxi without actually having that credit card dance or the cash dance at the end with the driver to exchange payment information and credentials and to get a receipt and have all of that disappear, to have the payment experience disappear just get out of the Uber or walk away that was pretty transforming.
• 11:48
  Speaker 2: It's that experience that developers in all industries now innovators across all industries are trying to achieve when payments just disappears.
• 11:57
  Speaker 2: It's part of the system or part of the experience Once you've shared your payment credentials with your business that you work with, whether you're a consumer or another business.
• 12:07
  Speaker 2: The payment should just happen.
• 12:08
  Speaker 2: It should just work.
• 12:09
  Speaker 2: We should all trust that the money's going to be there.
• 12:11
  Speaker 2: That's where we're going to go.
• 12:12
  Speaker 2: It's going to become easier and easier for payments to happen, whether it's at a real estate closing, which we still use a lot of paper checks and a lot of buyer transmissions.
• 12:23
  Speaker 2: We think those types of face-to-face transactions will go away and become more virtual and seamless.
• 12:28
  Speaker 2: We think that A to A transactions will start to take the place of credit card transactions, even at retail.
• 12:37
  Speaker 2: That's important because retailers today are merchants.
• 12:40
  Speaker 2: They pay maybe upwards of 3% or even 4% of every item they sell towards credit card processing.
• 12:47
  Speaker 2: If they're able to leverage bank account payments from consumers or businesses for retail sales, they could reduce that to only pennies per dollar transacted as opposed to a percentage of dollar transacted.
• 12:59
  Speaker 2: We think there's going to be a big shift as A to A transactions start to gain traction in the same way that credit cards have gained traction in the retail space.
• 13:08
  Speaker 3: Are you seeing or hearing companies wanting to make that shift from credit cards to A to A at a retail?
• 13:15
  Speaker 3: Is that really way out in the future or is that starting to happen behind the scenes already?
• 13:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we're starting to see it happen behind the scenes already, and wall is at the heart of a lot of the innovations that are starting to take place, with a couple customers that are building very unique retail experiences for these merchants.
• 13:33
  Speaker 2: So, for instance, what about innovative clients is taking the wall a processing and then combining it with the services of what we call a data aggregator that can verify a person's bank account and verify that they have money in the bank account, and so the before they accept the payment at the point of sale whether it's online or retail shopping experience physically they can make sure that money's in the account so that if I say I wanna pay with my checking account, they double check that I've got money in my account.
• 14:02
  Speaker 2: They take the payment, they know they're gonna get that money and they can leverage the faster payment route like RTP or same day to do that.
• 14:09
  Speaker 2: In the past, retailers didn't like to take checks or electronic forms of checks because they knew that I might have a non-sufficient funds or that check could be returned.
• 14:18
  Speaker 2: But because we're building this real time check verification into the system, innovators can actually guarantee that that money will move, and so we're seeing a lot of companies experiment right now with that Still couple challenges.
• 14:32
  Speaker 2: Even though we can verify the consumer and we can verify their account data, we see that there needs to be a way for consumers to be Incentive to use their checking accounts.
• 14:42
  Speaker 2: Are they're saving accounts to pay at retail environments?
• 14:45
  Speaker 2: What I mean by that?
• 14:46
  Speaker 2: I mean a lot of us are used to pay with our credit cards where we get our points or miles or rebates.
• 14:50
  Speaker 2: We don't get those rebates or miles or points when we use our checking account today.
• 14:54
  Speaker 2: So we think there's gonna be some really interesting loyalty programs.
• 14:58
  Speaker 2: Are incentive programs that start to pop up from retailers Is part of this and then on the back side, if there's a dispute, disputes are handled really easily.
• 15:06
  Speaker 2: If we use our credit cards and we see a charge on our statement that we don't recognize, we simply call the 800 number on the back of our card, I think, take it off and they take that charge off our account and we don't worry about it, right.
• 15:18
  Speaker 2: But that doesn't work exactly the same way.
• 15:20
  Speaker 2: It's not quite a streamline in the banking system.
• 15:22
  Speaker 2: So we think there's gonna be some innovations on dispute side as well.
• 15:25
  Speaker 2: There's a number of innovators that are working on all of these problems.
• 15:29
  Speaker 2: Make banking at retail, or bank payments or a payments at retail as simple and as compelling.
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: For consumers and merchants, and yeah, so it's happening right now, and I think over the next three to five years, we're gonna see a big shift there.
• 15:43
  Speaker 3: That's something very interesting to me because it's totally replacing the way that we pay today.
• 15:48
  Speaker 3: So I'm following that one closely and hope that you guys are in the middle of that.
• 15:53
  Speaker 3: So you mentioned fed now is that affecting your business or is it sort of just viewed as another kind of payment method from your perspective?
• 16:01
  Speaker 2: Right now it's real new right.
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: So I think fed now launched in July.
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: There's a number of banks that have launched on the platform and a number of innovators that started to experiment with it a little bit, and that's the place that we're in.
• 16:13
  Speaker 2: We're in sort of experimentation mode right now with our customers that are interested in that.
• 16:17
  Speaker 2: We think that, as customers experience it and understand when fed now make sense for them to leverage, no, use it more and more.
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: I think what we're seeing right now is that there is just a lot of testing happening.
• 16:29
  Speaker 2: There's not a lot of shift of money in that direction of fed now, similar to what we saw with real time payments or the rtp network that was launched a few years ago.
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: There was a lot of hype about it when it was launched.
• 16:40
  Speaker 2: Then business is started to experiment when does it make sense to use that platform versus a ch?
• 16:46
  Speaker 2: Because there are higher costs associated with the real time payment and there's different processes for returns as well and disputes, as I mentioned.
• 16:54
  Speaker 2: So merchants and businesses are just trying to figure out when is it make sense to use Any of those payment methods, when is it right and when does it feel good?
• 17:03
  Speaker 2: I think we're seeing a lot of b to b transactions start to happen in real time on the rtp payment network and the fed now network.
• 17:09
  Speaker 2: We're seeing a number of use cases like earned wage access, where businesses want to pay their employees quickly, as soon as they finish a job.
• 17:17
  Speaker 2: That's a popular use case for fast payments.
• 17:20
  Speaker 2: Another one is in supply chain.
• 17:22
  Speaker 2: As a cargo ship unloads its goods, they can be paid immediately when the containers are unloaded.
• 17:29
  Speaker 2: When those containers go on to a truck, that truck driver can be paid immediately.
• 17:33
  Speaker 2: When those are delivered, the deliverer Be paid immediately.
• 17:37
  Speaker 2: So supply chain earn wage access are a couple really interesting use cases for rtp and fed now but we'll see it grow over.
• 17:44
  Speaker 2: Time is more and more of these industries experiment with what do you think works best right?
• 17:49
  Speaker 3: okay.
• 17:49
  Speaker 3: Well, let's switch gears a little bit and talk about you, and let's talk about your professional journey, and you kind of mentioned after school eds for a few years and you mentioned joining the payments industry in two thousand.
• 18:00
  Speaker 3: Maybe walk us through your payments industry journey from two thousand to how you got to be the ceo there.
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: Sure, yeah, it's a long journey and it's almost 24 years in the payments industry already.
• 18:11
  Speaker 2: It's gone by in a flash.
• 18:13
  Speaker 2: It's crazy how it happens.
• 18:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so I joined Cyber Source right at the top of the NASDAQ, right in the top of the heyday of the internet craze, the dot-com craze, and unfortunately, within a month that craze ended.
• 18:27
  Speaker 2: We watched our stock options rise and fall pretty dramatically, right there at sort of April, may 2000.
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: It was an amazing journey.
• 18:35
  Speaker 2: So Cyber Source launched into mid-90s and it actually started as the first online software company.
• 18:41
  Speaker 2: So they were selling software packages online on the internet and as part of that initiative, they needed to take payments, and so Cyber Source was spun out to actually be the payment service offering online for the original company, but then for other software vendors and other internet e-commerce companies that were starting to launch in the mid-late 90s.
• 19:00
  Speaker 2: So basically, we became the de facto payment gateway for credit card processing online.
• 19:06
  Speaker 2: So it was great.
• 19:07
  Speaker 2: I ran our consulting division at Cyber Source from 2000 to 2014 and worked with very large e-commerce merchants in the United States and then also globally.
• 19:17
  Speaker 2: Over time, as we expanded internationally, we solved all sorts of problems, from traditional credit card processing to alternative payment methods, as well as fraud processing, where we had to always keep up and stay ahead of the fraudsters.
• 19:30
  Speaker 2: And then, of course, pci was launched by the credit card industry in 2006, 2007, I believe and so our teams were at the forefront of PCI, implementing solutions to secure credit card data and car holder data for all of our companies and merchants.
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: It used to be that in the early days it was companies had all their servers in data centers or in their own data center, or maybe managed hosted data centers, and so PCI was a big burden for those companies.
• 19:58
  Speaker 2: Then, of course, aws and Google Cloud and others were launched in the late 2000s, early 2010s, and we were able to start to shift a lot of that processing to the cloud.
• 20:09
  Speaker 2: So cloud has made a dramatic change in the industry.
• 20:12
  Speaker 3: So I got to see all that right when it was at the forefront, with my teams innovating in those spaces.
• 20:16
  Speaker 2: Visa bought Cyber Source then in 2010, and that allowed us to really expand internationally, leveraging the existing Visa footprint and the Visa brand.
• 20:24
  Speaker 2: So that was a great opportunity for me and my teams, where we worked more with international retailers all over the world to help them grow and build out their payment platforms using the best practices that we had learned over the years.
• 20:36
  Speaker 2: And then, after almost 15 years there, I decided it was time for a change.
• 20:40
  Speaker 2: My family and I decided to take a role in London.
• 20:43
  Speaker 2: So I went to work for World Pay and was based in London for three and a half years.
• 20:46
  Speaker 2: This was right before World Pay IPO'd on the FTSE Stock Exchange there in London.
• 20:51
  Speaker 2: So we were building out similar global acquiring strategy and I was part of the global e-commerce group leading customer excellence and strategy and marketing and product groups.
• 21:01
  Speaker 2: Like I said, we IPO'd on the FTSE and then we also were sold then to Vantif in late 2017.
• 21:08
  Speaker 2: And that was one of the biggest payment acquiring acquisitions ever.
• 21:11
  Speaker 2: And then a year later after that or maybe two years later, of course FIS bought the new World.
• 21:16
  Speaker 2: Pay.
• 21:16
  Speaker 2: So there was a lot of consolidation there and I got to be part of that integration and got to watch that really exciting times.
• 21:22
  Speaker 2: But after three and a half years there, I came back to the US, spent some time at MasterCard, where I really shifted gears.
• 21:29
  Speaker 2: I joined their global acceptance group and even though I'd always been working on acceptance, my focus, as mentioned, has been mostly card acceptance as it relates to global e-commerce.
• 21:39
  Speaker 2: But at MasterCard shifted gears a little bit and worked more on the face-to-face commerce side of things.
• 21:45
  Speaker 2: So I was in charge of working with teams around the world as we developed the new tap on phone standards.
• 21:50
  Speaker 2: So taking contactless technology that was embedded in cards and starting to emerge and Europe and around the world and moving it into mobile phones.
• 21:58
  Speaker 2: We worked with Apple and Android providers to enable the new standards that were launched about a year ago so that merchants could actually accept payments on phones.
• 22:06
  Speaker 2: We're used to using Apple Pay as consumers to pay for things with our phones, but now merchants can actually accept payments on their phones.
• 22:14
  Speaker 2: We called that tap-to-phone before.
• 22:15
  Speaker 2: Now they call it tap-on phone, so that was a lot of fun.
• 22:18
  Speaker 2: I also looked after our global QR product at MasterCard.
• 22:21
  Speaker 2: So I worked with a lot of merchants and governments around the world, especially in emerging markets Southeast Asia and at least Africa, south America, where we were helping countries and banks that weren't card-based yet but did have a lot of mobile phone penetration, leveraged QR codes to exchange banking information and make payments.
• 22:39
  Speaker 2: So great experience there.
• 22:42
  Speaker 2: And then finally, I landed here at Duala just almost three years ago as COO to really help the business scale, and while I worked in Europe at World Pay and even at MasterCard in the US, I was watching these trends happen with open banking and money movement with bank accounts.
• 22:58
  Speaker 2: In Europe, the concept of open banking was really being led by the regulators and, of course, in the US we're seeing innovation led by innovators, but the same trends were taking hold in.
• 23:08
  Speaker 2: Duala has been right at the heart of that in terms of providing these very modern interfaces on top of the existing banking system in the US.
• 23:15
  Speaker 2: When I got the opportunity to come to Duala, I thought it was the right place at the right time and came here to really help scale the business using all the practices that I've learned building these businesses over the last 20 plus years.
• 23:26
  Speaker 2: So Duala was a much smaller business about 100 people when I started and we were growing at about 40%.
• 23:33
  Speaker 2: So we were building out very scalable processes and systems inside for our sales teams and our customer service teams and our marketing teams and our engineering teams.
• 23:42
  Speaker 2: So it's just been a great opportunity to bring a lot of that sort of scaling experience from big companies to a small company.
• 23:48
  Speaker 2: And, as we mentioned earlier, ray, we've had some changes in the last several months and I've been lucky enough to be asked by our board to take over as CEO, so it's kind of the journey.
• 23:57
  Speaker 3: Awesome, a lot of deep payments experience there.
• 23:59
  Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure, absolutely.
• 24:01
  Speaker 3: So what are some things you're passionate about?
• 24:04
  Speaker 3: So maybe one work related passion and one personal passion.
• 24:07
  Speaker 3: Well, gosh right now.
• 24:08
  Speaker 2: I'm passionate about AI.
• 24:09
  Speaker 2: I'm so excited about what's happening in this space.
• 24:12
  Speaker 2: I personally, probably, am in poking around with ChatGPT at Google bar every single day, exploring the art of the possibility there for personal growth and solving problems in my personal life or family life, but also trying to think about how we can solve problems in the payment space.
• 24:28
  Speaker 2: So our engineering team here they're doing some really fun experiments and we're working with some exciting innovative partners on the AI front.
• 24:35
  Speaker 2: So we're really excited how that can change the payment space.
• 24:38
  Speaker 2: I won't give it away any secrets just yet.
• 24:40
  Speaker 2: We're really excited about what we're going to do with AI.
• 24:42
  Speaker 2: And on the personal front, I started golfing about a year ago and I'm super excited about it.
• 24:47
  Speaker 2: My handicap is still pretty high, but it's coming down slowly and it's a new passion that I think I'm going to really enjoy.
• 24:53
  Speaker 3: I've been golfing since I was 10 and my handicap is still real high, so don't worry about it.
• 24:58
  Speaker 2: I'm just trying to breathe and enjoy the views.
• 25:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we moved to South Carolina about a year ago, and so we can golf you around now.
• 25:04
  Speaker 2: It's pretty nice.
• 25:05
  Speaker 3: Awesome.
• 25:06
  Speaker 3: Well, final question If someone comes to you and obviously with all your payments experience, I feel like you'll have a good answer to this If they come to you and say hey, dave, I'm looking at getting into the payments industry as a career.
• 25:19
  Speaker 3: I just graduated from college or university and I'm looking at building a career and I want to go into payments or fintech, what would you tell them they need to do to be successful?
• 25:28
  Speaker 2: First, of all, I think nobody goes to college thinking that they're going to be a payments industry expert or a payments person.
• 25:35
  Speaker 2: It's just, for whatever reason, we don't grow up with that in mind.
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: But if you come out of school and you realize there's an opportunity, I would say go for it.
• 25:42
  Speaker 2: There is an amazing opportunity.
• 25:43
  Speaker 2: There's so many opportunities now.
• 25:45
  Speaker 2: The space is so big.
• 25:46
  Speaker 2: I explained it.
• 25:46
  Speaker 2: The payments industry is like a balloon that keeps expanding and as it expands there's more and more surface area for innovators to do new things between each other and to help each other.
• 25:57
  Speaker 2: I'd say pick a topic and go after it.
• 25:59
  Speaker 2: There's so many aspects to the payment space, whether it's acceptance, whether it's e-commerce or retail, whether it's issuing from a bank perspective or a fintech perspective.
• 26:08
  Speaker 2: There's the A to A perspective.
• 26:10
  Speaker 2: There's the card perspective.
• 26:11
  Speaker 2: There's so many angles.
• 26:12
  Speaker 2: Pick one that you're passionate about, pick something that you know and that you love, and then go as deep as you can, as fast as you can, especially if you're starting out.
• 26:20
  Speaker 2: I give the same advice to my daughter who graduated college a couple years ago Say yes to everything.
• 26:24
  Speaker 2: If you're lucky enough to be part of a fintech, then participate in every project.
• 26:29
  Speaker 2: If you're lucky enough to be part of a global enterprise, like a Visa or a MasterCard, then the world is your oyster.
• 26:34
  Speaker 2: Say yes to every opportunity to travel, for international expansion, for participating in different projects in different areas of the payment space.
• 26:42
  Speaker 2: You can have a really rich and interesting and compelling career.
• 26:47
  Speaker 2: You can make a lot of money, you can learn a lot of things, you can meet a lot of people, find something that you're passionate about and then expand from there.
• 26:54
  Speaker 3: Awesome.
• 26:54
  Speaker 3: We've covered a lot of ground about you and Dualla and your background and the payments industry as a whole.
• 27:00
  Speaker 3: Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up the show?
• 27:03
  Speaker 2: I think that's probably it.
• 27:04
  Speaker 2: It's been great spending time with you, Greg.
• 27:06
  Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you so much.
• 27:07
  Speaker 3: I really appreciate you being here today.
• 27:08
  Speaker 3: You're welcome, and to all you listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story.
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: Make sure you visit our website at leadersinpaymentscom, where you can subscribe to the show and where you'll find our show notes.
• 27:25
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