Latest / Leaders In Payments / Henry Helgeson, CEO of BlueSnap | Episode 358
Transcript
- 0:01Welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast, where we talk to C-level leaders from across the payments landscape.
- 0:06We'll be discussing the products and services that impact the payment space today, as well as trends and predictions for the future of payments.
- 0:14We will also hear stories from our guests about their journeys to the top.
- 0:18Greg Myers: Hello everyone and welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast.
- 0:21Greg Myers: I'm your host, greg Myers, and on today's show we have a very special guest, henry Helgeson from BlueSnap.
- 0:27Greg Myers: He's the CEO recently named a CEO, I think, I say, recently, earlier this year.
- 0:31Greg Myers: So, henry, thank you for being here and welcome to the show.
- 0:34Greg Myers: Thank you, thanks for having me, jack, absolutely so.
- 0:40Greg Myers: Just to level set with everyone, we had your predecessor on, but it was in February of 2020.
- 0:43Greg Myers: So, just a tad bit of things have changed in the world.
- 0:45Greg Myers: A few things have changed.
- 0:46Greg Myers: I would assume some things changed at BlueSnap, so I look forward to the conversation.
- 0:50Greg Myers: Sure.
- 0:51Henry Helgeson: Yeah, absolutely.
- 0:52Henry Helgeson: There's been a lot going on here in the last year, let alone the last four years.
- 0:56Greg Myers: Right, so let's go ahead and dive in, if you don't mind.
- 0:57Greg Myers: Tell our audience a little bit about yourself, maybe where you're from, where you grew up, where you went to school, a few things like that, yeah, so.
- 1:04Henry Helgeson: I've been in payments quite a while.
- 1:05Henry Helgeson: Actually.
- 1:06Henry Helgeson: I'm from New York.
- 1:07Henry Helgeson: I actually dropped out of college in 97 to go sell credit card terminals door to door when that was still a thing Founded a company it originally was called Merchant Warehouse and that company we based it out of Boston.
- 1:18Henry Helgeson: I moved up to Boston in 99.
- 1:19Henry Helgeson: Evolved that company and we did a brand change and eventually it became a company named Cayenne.
- 1:24Henry Helgeson: Cayenne our main product was the Genius platform, which is actually now, if you look through the acquisition.
- 1:30Henry Helgeson: Cayenne was acquired by Tesis and then Tesis was acquired by Global and I think Global announced yesterday or the day before that is their go forward payments platform.
- 1:38Henry Helgeson: So Genius lives on, even though Cayenne is no more.
- 1:42Henry Helgeson: We sold in early 2018, january of 2018, atesis worked on the integration there for a few years and then stepped away, retired and said I was never going to work in payments again.
- 1:52Henry Helgeson: And here I am.
- 1:54Greg Myers: Great.
- 1:54Greg Myers: So let's go ahead and talk about BlueSnap, so tell our audience what BlueSnap does.
- 1:58Henry Helgeson: BlueSnap is a really interesting company.
- 2:00Henry Helgeson: Actually, to go back to my failed retirement there, I said I was never going to work in payments but I was doing a lot of Series C, series A, investing, sitting on the boards of a lot of these companies in the industry and had a couple of investment theses around payments.
- 2:16Henry Helgeson: I stayed pretty closely engaged with the payments community and I really thought that there was a few opportunities left, and that was global payment providers, payment facilitation.
- 2:26Henry Helgeson: And then I thought B2B was one of the last bastions of growth in payments I shouldn't say last bastions of growth, but that seemed to be where the growth was.
- 2:35Henry Helgeson: Those three things.
- 2:37Henry Helgeson: And lo and behold, some friends I knew in the private equity community had a company in Boston that they needed new leadership for.
- 2:44Henry Helgeson: That was a global payment facilitator with a B2B twist.
- 2:48Henry Helgeson: Things worked out.
- 2:49Henry Helgeson: I stepped in late last year, early this year it was really when we announced but BlueSnap does exactly that.
- 2:56Henry Helgeson: We are a global payment facilitator.
- 2:58Henry Helgeson: We work in 47 regions around the world that can give you local acquiring, contracted with many banks around the world, and can provide everything from card processing to bank-to-bank transfers, ach, pad, those types of things, as well as a number of alternative payment methods.
- 3:15Henry Helgeson: So if you're a global card-not-present or e-commerce provider looking for a solution, loosesnap is really the fit there.
- 3:24Greg Myers: Are there certain verticals that you go after more so than others?
- 3:29Henry Helgeson: There's a number of them.
- 3:30Henry Helgeson: Really, our go-to-market has been refocused around partnerships and ISV partnership, and in my last world that's mostly what we did at Cayenne.
- 3:39Henry Helgeson: We focused on ISVs who touched payments or had the merchants that really needed payment processing capabilities, and we would be the back-end payment processing and, to some degree, the front-end with the Genius platform, and we would allow them to bring best-in-class payments to their customer base, and right now BlueSnap is doing that as well, and we're going to market with large ISVs and ERP systems Our typical customers.
- 4:06Henry Helgeson: There's a number of verticals, everything from schools to manufacturing, direct to consumer but most of our customers are usually multinational customers that are domiciled in multiple countries around the world.
- 4:17Henry Helgeson: Think about a business in the US that's headquartered here and then has an office in Canada and the UK and somewhere in the EU or Israel or a number of places around the world, and their payments needs can get pretty complex and we can solve those.
- 4:33Henry Helgeson: So that's really where we're playing is in, not only e-commerce and card not present, but we're especially good with customers that are using one of our ISVs or have global needs.
- 4:44Greg Myers: So how does sort of that you talked about, I think, global payment, orchestration, embedded payments and B2B how does that all kind of come together?
- 4:52Greg Myers: It seems like those are sort of your three lines of business, for lack of better words.
- 4:57Henry Helgeson: Well, I'll start by saying it's really complicated, and the goal of BlueSnap is to make that very simple.
- 5:02Henry Helgeson: So if you have customers in different jurisdictions or different regions around the world, you generally have a number of problems, and that is you may get lower checkout rates because you're not presenting in the right currencies and consumers may fall off because they can't do the currency conversion in their head or it just looks like a foreign entity that they're doing business with, and all of these questions and doubts will arrive when you're not presenting in the local currency.
- 5:27Henry Helgeson: In addition to that, you have cross border fees.
- 5:30Henry Helgeson: You have authorization rights.
- 5:32Henry Helgeson: Fall off a cliff if you try to use an American card for an Israeli transaction or a French card in Canada or something like that.
- 5:42Henry Helgeson: So when these merchants have local entities, we can actually set up local acquiring and that French card will get authorized in France, for example, and bring the authorization rates back up.
- 5:52Henry Helgeson: And when you think about it, these merchants spend a lot of money on marketing, on site optimization, everything else trying to get their conversion rate up and their shopping cart abandonment rate down.
- 6:02Henry Helgeson: Then they'll just use a standard old payments provider that will take 10 to 20% off their sales in a lot of cases by just not optimizing these payments, and we can help with that.
- 6:13Greg Myers: Okay, how big is BlueSnap?
- 6:15Henry Helgeson: now.
- 6:15Henry Helgeson: We're not the size of these big global payfax, but we have about 250 employees globally.
- 6:21Henry Helgeson: We have offices in the EU, the UK, israel, the US.
- 6:27Henry Helgeson: We process for hundreds of ISVs doing about $12 billion annually of volume throughout the world.
- 6:35Greg Myers: Well, what, would you say, differentiates you from your competitors out there?
- 6:39Henry Helgeson: First of all, there's less than a handful of global payment facilitators.
- 6:43Henry Helgeson: When I say global payment facilitators, a lot of companies will claim to have a global footprint but really that's a collection of acquisitions that just have the headquarters brand all over them.
- 6:54Henry Helgeson: But when you get down to it, you have a single integration, single sign-on, single account really throughout the world.
- 7:00Henry Helgeson: There's very few of those and I think BlueSnap is the one that's most focused on these partnerships and can really lean in with partner and help them with their customers, actually have humans to talk to in the mid-market.
- 7:14Henry Helgeson: A lot of our competitors you look at the big names, the big trillion-dollar processors won't lean in on the mid-market.
- 7:20Henry Helgeson: They won't lean in with partnerships.
- 7:21Henry Helgeson: Our play has been for the last year is to go to market with our partner ISVs and e-commerce platforms and ERP systems and give them a combined solution with end-to-end support for their customers and for them themselves.
- 7:37Greg Myers: So their end customers are sometimes small businesses.
- 7:39Greg Myers: But you're partnering at the partnership level or the ISV level.
- 7:43Greg Myers: Is that right?
- 7:44Greg Myers: That's right.
- 7:45Henry Helgeson: We do service small businesses.
- 7:46Henry Helgeson: We do that really well.
- 7:47Henry Helgeson: I've always found that the gap in payments and really software has been in the mid-market, where the smaller merchants don't have a lot of needs.
- 7:56Henry Helgeson: They can usually I'll take retail, for example, an out-of-the-box payments terminal, or we've moved away from payments terminals, these Android-based devices, but a lot of them the out-of-the-box solution is just fine.
- 8:08Henry Helgeson: You move up to the enterprise where you look at a Walmart and everything is very custom for them and they have very specific needs.
- 8:16Henry Helgeson: The mid-market has always been the part of the market that's been neglected.
- 8:20Henry Helgeson: That does have big payments needs but it always seems to be shoehorned into the SMB solution or close to it and doesn't want to do a custom full stack payment system of their own.
- 8:32Henry Helgeson: And we've found that's a hole here as well, especially in e-commerce.
- 8:36Henry Helgeson: The SMB plus right really that M and SMB never seems to be properly serviced and BlueSnap has found a real niche for those and these companies doing tens of millions and now we're talking to a lot of companies in the low billions in volume do not get serviced well and do not get the right payments products that they need, and that's a lot of where we're playing right now.
- 8:59Henry Helgeson: Great.
- 9:00Greg Myers: Where do you see the payments industry headed, say, in the next three to five years?
- 9:04Greg Myers: That's a big question.
- 9:06Henry Helgeson: A lot of answers.
- 9:07Henry Helgeson: There's different parts of the market that I think have different opportunities and challenges.
- 9:13Henry Helgeson: Just starting at a very high level, I think the legacy processors that weren't willing to invest for the long term over the last few years or the last decade are going to be really challenged.
- 9:24Henry Helgeson: The acquisition role at play without doing good technical integrations and the ones that are living with a lot of technical debt will be challenged.
- 9:32Henry Helgeson: And these are the payment processors we talked about 15 years ago.
- 9:36Henry Helgeson: Some have done an excellent job, pivoting, I will say.
- 9:39Henry Helgeson: There are some companies I'll even give an example of Fiserv.
- 9:43Henry Helgeson: I think everybody has been very impressed with what they've done with Clover.
- 9:46Henry Helgeson: They've been doing a tremendous amount of work on their backend products and they've invested for the long term.
- 9:52Henry Helgeson: So I don't want to give any examples of the companies who are challenged by not doing that, but I will give that as an example of one that did that.
- 9:58Henry Helgeson: So that's the first part.
- 10:00Henry Helgeson: And the new age tech companies and when I say new age, what used to be a startup, the stripes and audience of the world that are now doing a trillion dollars in business are real threats to those legacy players that didn't invest, and I think we'll see market share shifting over to them within the next three to five years.
- 10:17Henry Helgeson: For sure.
- 10:18Henry Helgeson: Within that, I mean, we're still going to see the move to card not present.
- 10:22Henry Helgeson: It's now a world where we see a lot of consumer present but card not present where these wallets, and there's just a shift towards away from the card and into digital, and I think that's great for BlueSnap and I think we're going to continue to see that.
- 10:37Henry Helgeson: And then there's a lot of other trends within the industry.
- 10:40Henry Helgeson: Right now, merchants are getting much more savvy and hiring people from payments Again, in the mid market, top of the market.
- 10:47Henry Helgeson: You're starting to see these merchants are so much more savvy with payments than they have been in the past and the ability for them to do integrations, be it through gateway or direct processor integrations.
- 10:58Henry Helgeson: We're seeing the skill set at these merchants and these platforms.
- 11:02Henry Helgeson: It's just getting better and better and they're going to be able to bring more of that in-house and do it very competently.
- 11:07Henry Helgeson: Bring more of that in-house and do it very competently.
- 11:10Henry Helgeson: And then the one thing that I think has to be in every conversation in September of 2024 is AI and how that's going to impact us.
- 11:16Henry Helgeson: And I think we talk a lot about authorization, optimization and fraud on the back ends and even things engineering assistance like co-pilot, but one thing that we chat a lot about here is it's not just the good guys that are going to have access to these systems.
- 11:29Henry Helgeson: Ai is becoming so prevalent that I really do think it's not a threat to take down the whole system.
- 11:36Henry Helgeson: It's not the global threat.
- 11:37Henry Helgeson: I really think it is going to be painful for us as we start to deal with these AI fraud systems on the bad side that are going to get better and better and causing problems.
- 11:47Henry Helgeson: Some of those might be related to actually using the card numbers, but others we're going to see more day zero breaches and day zero vulnerabilities, I think, now than we have in the past, as the bad guys get better and leverage the AI tools.
- 12:00Henry Helgeson: So something we talk a lot about with our InfoSec and our security teams here is where that is going as well.
- 12:06Greg Myers: Do you hear much in the market or do you feel like the whole crypto side is on its way back?
- 12:12Greg Myers: It felt like a couple of years ago, every conversation I had crypto was mentioned and then sort of went dark for a while.
- 12:18Greg Myers: Now it's starting to bubble up a little more.
- 12:20Greg Myers: Any thoughts on crypto?
- 12:22Henry Helgeson: You know, we've spent a lot of time as an industry talking about this over the last 10 years.
- 12:26Henry Helgeson: I still don't think it is in a place where small ticket consumer transactions are really going to be threatened by that.
- 12:32Henry Helgeson: If I was Visa or MasterCard any of the big card brands I wouldn't be threatened by the consumer transaction aspect of crypto at the moment, and for a number of reasons.
- 12:42Henry Helgeson: There are some really neat technologies out there.
- 12:45Henry Helgeson: For example, if you look at Circle and what they're doing with USDC the stablecoin tied to the dollar and actually trying their best to work through non-existent regulations and inventing regulations, they've done a really good job of solving some of these problems.
- 12:58Henry Helgeson: But outside of that, there's still a number of problems.
- 13:01Henry Helgeson: One is transaction throughput.
- 13:03Henry Helgeson: These are still very expensive.
- 13:05Henry Helgeson: Transactions to run require a tremendous amount of compute.
- 13:08Henry Helgeson: We're talking I don't even want to quote the number I heard the other day of the percentage of the world's energy is being used for crypto, but that makes it very expensive to transact on the crypto rails.
- 13:18Henry Helgeson: Second is volatility, and if you look at a business, for example, like Target or a grocery store, they're not crypto speculators and they don't want a 5% turn in the value of their sale the next morning.
- 13:32Henry Helgeson: So that makes it very difficult for merchants, especially low-margin merchants, to accept.
- 13:37Henry Helgeson: They're just not crypto speculators.
- 13:39Henry Helgeson: They want to know a dollar's worth of dollar the next day if they accept it.
- 13:43Henry Helgeson: And then, finally, the big thing and especially in e-commerce card not present is the lack of a dispute resolution system.
- 13:50Henry Helgeson: The chargeback system is really in our business.
- 13:53Henry Helgeson: What creates trust between two parties who don't know each other and really shouldn't trust each other and we know if there was a problem in that transaction.
- 14:01Henry Helgeson: We have an out as consumers and the crypto system as it sits right now.
- 14:07Henry Helgeson: I know there are some systems right now being tested and you do have things like digital contracts, but I don't think anything is in place that would replace the current chargeback system and without that, I think it makes it difficult to really solve some of the issues that consumers would have.
- 14:23Henry Helgeson: I don't mean to harp on that.
- 14:24Henry Helgeson: I'm giving you longer answers here.
- 14:26Henry Helgeson: No, it's great, and a lot of the crypto bulls here will say, well, there's already this technology out there.
- 14:31Henry Helgeson: We're seeing some adoption, it's great.
- 14:34Henry Helgeson: But if you scale this across all the millions of merchants in the US, inevitably the bad guys find this very quickly and you'll start to see fraud tick up and consumer adoption pull back without a good chargeback or dispute resolution system in there, which is a real value that the card brands bring to us.
- 14:51Greg Myers: Yeah, Do you think that the shakeout in the BNPL world is over?
- 14:57Greg Myers: And it's kind of a two-part question that, and then I hear about BNPL for B2B transactions.
- 15:04Greg Myers: Any thoughts on that?
- 15:05Henry Helgeson: These systems are usually good until they're not and I think in 2009, going into 2009, for those of us in the industry we saw a lot of merchant lending products.
- 15:15Henry Helgeson: It was essentially factoring very expensive factoring, and if you look at the BNPL stuff, a lot of times it's not always the consumer paying, sometimes the merchant, but these are expensive products.
- 15:24Henry Helgeson: It's typically the subprime customers that will use them In a down cycle.
- 15:28Henry Helgeson: I think we really see a lot of washout in that space, Maybe not complete decimation, like we saw in the 2009 era of merchant funding, merchant cash advance.
- 15:38Henry Helgeson: Until we survive a cycle, I don't think we can say that the shakeout's done.
- 15:43Greg Myers: Okay, well, let's change gears a little bit and talk about you and your background.
- 15:46Greg Myers: You've talked a little bit about starting Cayenne selling that, so maybe let's shift the question to why did you come out of retirement and why BlueSnap?
- 15:56Henry Helgeson: It's a great question and I'd be lying if I don't say I don't hear it all the time.
- 15:59Henry Helgeson: Things were pretty good and the running joke is that my kids are in school all day and I had nothing to do all day because all my friends work.
- 16:05Henry Helgeson: Really, I figured out that I was more comfortable as an operator and I needed to be part of a team and the Series C, series A investing unless you're part of a venture capital firm, it's really an individual sport.
- 16:18Henry Helgeson: It's not a team sport.
- 16:18Henry Helgeson: I really felt like my fit personally was more being part of a good team and going out and doing things together.
- 16:27Henry Helgeson: I also saw a ton of opportunity in the space.
- 16:31Henry Helgeson: You have only a handful of real competitors to what Blue Snap does and they are all massive companies.
- 16:38Henry Helgeson: There's not much fun in taking a massive company and making them slightly more massive, but taking a small to mid-sized company and making it big, that can be a lot of fun.
- 16:47Henry Helgeson: So when I looked at BlueSnap, there was enough opportunity here, enough I thought I could contribute to the team and the company that it was worth stepping back in and it was the center of the bullseye as far as where I think the industry is going.
- 17:01Henry Helgeson: So all of those things, and it was also so fortuitous.
- 17:04Henry Helgeson: I'm Boston-based and here this company is Boston-based, with some familiar faces from Cayenne with amazing talent here.
- 17:12Henry Helgeson: It had all the ingredients that I was looking for.
- 17:15Henry Helgeson: It didn't take me much, once I dove into the company, to say, yes, I want to jump on board and be part of this team.
- 17:22Greg Myers: Well, what are some things you're passionate about?
- 17:24Greg Myers: So, maybe one work-related passion and one personal passion.
- 17:27Henry Helgeson: I think we've already established payments as one of those in this conversation here where a lot of us it's more than a job.
- 17:34Henry Helgeson: I mean, we really nerd out on this stuff and when anything comes up, be it crypto, buy now, pay later, international payments we dive into this and we just chew it up.
- 17:45Henry Helgeson: So I love the payments aspect and I love the product aspect.
- 17:48Henry Helgeson: Where we started in this industry in 1998, being able to build a technology company and a platform it wasn't accessible for the average person who wasn't willing to risk at all, raise a ton of VC money, get super diluted all those things.
- 18:03Henry Helgeson: We're kind of in a new world from where we were 20 years ago and building product with the team, and we even really haven't gotten our feet under us yet.
- 18:11Henry Helgeson: At BlueSnap, since I've been here, the company has had a great trajectory, great product, but as far as being able to really dig in and change the future direction, we're just starting to get really good at that.
- 18:23Henry Helgeson: I would say.
- 18:24Henry Helgeson: So love that part of the job and then love working with the team On the side.
- 18:28Henry Helgeson: Not to use the corny answer, but I got two kids.
- 18:31Henry Helgeson: That's completely changed life.
- 18:33Henry Helgeson: We spend a lot of time skiing, although as they get deeper into the school years here, teachers will not allow us to do that as much as we used to.
- 18:41Henry Helgeson: For the last 20 years, or the 20 years before I sold Cayenne, I spent a lot of time as a private pilot doing some exciting things with some very exciting people some of which were in payments as well and really enjoyed that, and kind of hung that up in COVID when there was really not as many places to go, one because I didn't have a job and two because we had kids that had to go to school, and three, there was COVID.
- 19:04Henry Helgeson: So getting back into that's a lot of fun as well.
- 19:07Greg Myers: Great.
- 19:07Greg Myers: So obviously you've been in payments for quite a while.
- 19:10Greg Myers: So if someone came to you and they said Henry, I'm graduating next year or maybe I'm changing jobs and they look at the payments industry and they want to build a career in this industry what jobs?
- 19:20Greg Myers: And they look at the payments industry and they want to build a career in this industry, what would you?
- 19:23Henry Helgeson: tell them they need to do to be successful?
- 19:24Henry Helgeson: It's a great question.
- 19:25Henry Helgeson: In some ways, this industry like I just mentioned building product it's just so much more accessible to us than it was in the past, but in other ways it's gotten more complex because there's so much more competitors across there.
- 19:39Henry Helgeson: I think, first of all, having a technical or engineering background is going to be helpful now, more helpful than it ever has been before.
- 19:45Henry Helgeson: But that's useless without a good sales mindset.
- 19:48Henry Helgeson: And if you build stuff that nobody's going to buy, it's useless.
- 19:52Henry Helgeson: And having that balance of what my customers want and what can I build is really challenging and it requires somebody to be really inquisitive and ask a lot of questions.
- 20:02Henry Helgeson: So technical background and then understanding what the customers need is probably, I'd say, what has to happen here.
- 20:09Henry Helgeson: The knowledge itself in payments you can pick up.
- 20:11Henry Helgeson: It's not as easy as going to Amazon and ordering a book on C-sharp coding or anything like that, but you can pick it up if you hang around the right people.
- 20:20Henry Helgeson: But understanding the art of the possible on the technology side and then what the customer wants and thinks is valuable, you really need to learn to put those two things together.
- 20:30Greg Myers: All right.
- 20:30Greg Myers: Well, henry, we've covered a lot of ground, obviously, about you and the industry and what Blue Snap is doing these days, so is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up the show?
- 20:37Greg Myers: I don't think so.
- 20:39Henry Helgeson: We're having a good time over here at BlueSnap.
- 20:40Henry Helgeson: We got a lot of good things coming.
- 20:42Henry Helgeson: You'll see a lot of great things at this company.
- 20:44Henry Helgeson: It's growing like a weed right now.
- 20:45Henry Helgeson: We're really happy with the team and what we're doing.
- 20:48Henry Helgeson: So I think if you check back in a year or two hopefully not four years this time we'll be able to give you a lot more good news and share a lot of things we've done in that timeframe.
- 20:57Greg Myers: Great.
- 20:58Greg Myers: Well, Henry, thank you so much for being on the show today.
- 21:00Greg Myers: I know your times are invaluable, so I really appreciate you being here.
- 21:03Henry Helgeson: Thank you, I appreciate it.
- 21:04Henry Helgeson: Greg Really enjoyed it.
- 21:06Greg Myers: Yeah, me too, and to all you listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story.
- 21:11Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments podcast.
- 21:14Make sure you visit our website at leadersinpaymentscom, where you can subscribe to the show and where you'll find our show notes.
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