Latest / Leaders In Payments / Shai Stern, CEO & Co-Chairman of CheckAlt | Episode 351

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Shai Stern, CEO & Co-Chairman of CheckAlt | Episode 351 · 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: Hello everyone and welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: I'm your host, greg Myers, and on today's show we have a special guest, shai Stern, the CEO and co-chairman of CheckAlt.
• 0:29
  Speaker 2: So, shai, welcome to the show.
• 0:31
  Speaker 3: Thank you, greg, appreciate you having me.
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: Absolutely.
• 0:34
  Speaker 2: So why don't we start off by having you tell a little bit about yourself?
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: Maybe?
• 0:40
  Speaker 3: where you're from, where you grew up, where you went to school, a few things like that.
• 0:42
  Speaker 3: Sure, I grew up in Teaneck, new Jersey.
• 0:43
  Speaker 3: My wife is from Brooklyn.
• 0:44
  Speaker 3: We're married almost 29 years.
• 0:46
  Speaker 3: Big Jewish family, have six children.
• 0:48
  Speaker 3: Another grandchild on the way Very, very blessed A grandson of Holocaust survivors and went to Yeshiva my whole life.
• 0:55
  Speaker 3: Went to Yeshiva University, did not finish college, started my career working at American Stock Transfer and Trust Company.
• 1:02
  Speaker 3: Well, the truth is, I started my career working for my father and grandfather in the jewelry business.
• 1:05
  Speaker 3: A lot of wonderful stories and experiences there.
• 1:08
  Speaker 3: But after what I guess, becoming an adult and being married, having to support my family, I began my career working at American Stock Transfer and Trust Company and then the career evolved and I'm delighted to share whatever parts you would like me to speak about or parts you would not like me to speak about.
• 1:24
  Speaker 2: All right.
• 1:24
  Speaker 2: Well, let's talk about the current company CheckAlt, so tell the audience what CheckAlt does.
• 1:29
  Speaker 3: CheckAlt provide payment solutions to banks, fintechs, credit unions and corporations.
• 1:34
  Speaker 3: What that means is that we recognize now, a decade ago, that the consumer-to-business and the business-to-business payments landscape is going to explode, and who's going to manage a lot of it is going to become somewhat complicated and somewhat the Wild West, with a tremendous amount of needs, and our thesis was that checks are not going to die.
• 1:56
  Speaker 3: They're still going to be very, very prevalent, and the one who provides the complicated, difficult, annoying, nobody-wants-to-do-this-kind-of-work checks-as-a-service solutions who provides the complicated, difficult, annoying nobody wants to do this kind of work checks as a service solutions is the one that will be able to have the seat at the table to provide then what's needed as payments software and APIs.
• 2:15
  Speaker 3: So that is how we began our journey now in 2014.
• 2:19
  Speaker 2: Okay, and you mentioned it, and I think it's something that everyone in the audience is going to wonder is like aren't checks dead?
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: Why should fintechs and banks and financial institutions care about checks?
• 2:44
  Speaker 3: change the name of your company, and I stay pretty firm in that the company was called CheckAlt, because checks are the moat and alt is everything else they were able to go ahead and to do.
• 2:50
  Speaker 3: You see, when you look at today's environment and you look at 24, for example, there are still 10 plus a billion checks that are still being processed in the country.
• 2:58
  Speaker 3: And I'm not speaking about how Target stopped accepting checks or that Uber never built their business to accept checks.
• 3:05
  Speaker 3: We're speaking about consumer-to-business checks, or business-to-business checks that are still rather prevalent.
• 3:11
  Speaker 3: And we'll also be able to speak about the two-plus billion payments that begin online and actually drop to paper checks and get mailed there as well.
• 3:20
  Speaker 3: So we do go ahead and we see that not only are checks being written, checks are being printed, and to the tune of well, those bill pay checks that I just alluded to, that alone was over a trillion dollars annually.
• 3:33
  Speaker 3: That was never actually written, but they were actually printed.
• 3:36
  Speaker 3: So we were very clear in that checks were not going to go away.
• 3:42
  Speaker 3: Checks are here still to stay.
• 3:44
  Speaker 3: Were not going to go away.
• 3:46
  Speaker 3: Checks are here still to stay.
• 3:46
  Speaker 3: And then now, in 2024, they hit the news again because check fraud became such a hot subject and everyone is losing all the banks are losing a lot of money.
• 3:52
  Speaker 3: So suddenly people are like wait one second, what do I need to do to still deal with these annoying pieces of paper that seems so antiquated?
• 3:59
  Speaker 3: So there needs to be a provider, and there needs to be a provider that knows how to do it and do it well.
• 4:04
  Speaker 2: Okay, and you mentioned fraud, so let's talk about that.
• 4:07
  Speaker 2: What's the state of fraud in the check space today?
• 4:09
  Speaker 3: Look, you know, media decides what they want to focus on.
• 4:12
  Speaker 3: So there's always going to be fraud.
• 4:14
  Speaker 3: Whether it be in payments, in card, ach-based payments or check payments, there's always going to be fraud, fraud.
• 4:27
  Speaker 3: But in checks.
• 4:28
  Speaker 3: It now has hit the news as a hot subject because it has exploded, where folks are stealing checks, they're kiting checks, they're taking checks out of post mailbox offices, they're taking things out of.
• 4:34
  Speaker 3: There's stuff happening out of boxes.
• 4:36
  Speaker 3: It became such a big problem and therefore everyone is saying how do we protect against it?
• 4:41
  Speaker 3: So when they asked the question about how to protect it and who can assist us, what technology can we use to protect us?
• 4:49
  Speaker 3: They then ask and say but wait one second, who's our check provider?
• 4:52
  Speaker 3: Are they ahead of the curve?
• 4:54
  Speaker 3: Are they adding on these features?
• 4:55
  Speaker 3: Are they the ones who should be protecting us, or do we have to go out there and find another vendor?
• 5:00
  Speaker 3: So we at CheckAlt, we're very aware that check processing is not as simple as it might sound as taking a piece of paper and going to the bank and asking for cash in return, but it's rather complicated as to what is needed around these different check-based payments, the data around it, the deposit around it, the risk, the security, the fraud, the theft, the compliance.
• 5:21
  Speaker 3: All of that that needs to happen the security, the fraud, the theft, the compliance.
• 5:23
  Speaker 3: All of that that needs to happen Because, at the end of the day, is we at CheckAld we care about the office of the CFO, we care about the office of the treasurer and we care about the AR department and businesses run on receiving their cash.
• 5:36
  Speaker 3: They need it to hit payroll and all the needs that they have.
• 5:39
  Speaker 3: So we're incredibly focused on how do we create efficiencies and how do we enable our businesses, our clients, to sleep better at night.
• 5:48
  Speaker 2: And you mentioned earlier billers.
• 5:50
  Speaker 2: So are billers your main target market?
• 5:53
  Speaker 2: And what about small businesses?
• 5:55
  Speaker 3: So there are those who define billers and small businesses as somewhat the same.
• 5:59
  Speaker 3: There are those who define billers as the horizons of the world and there are those who define small businesses as a different market.
• 6:05
  Speaker 3: So the SMB market is a massive, massive market, whether that's 10, 20 million SMBs that are out there or whether there are billers like Verizon out there.
• 6:16
  Speaker 3: We do target all of them.
• 6:17
  Speaker 3: We have a rather large appetite, let's call it.
• 6:20
  Speaker 3: But we have four target audiences that we are very focused on.
• 6:23
  Speaker 3: Those are the banks, the credit unions, the fintechs and the corporates.
• 6:25
  Speaker 3: Underneath these financial institutions, these banks, we might get a Fortune 100 insurance organization and we might get 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 SMBs out there, because their needs are similar but rather they're very, very different and our job and our uniqueness and our strength is being able to solve for the breadth of that audience.
• 6:49
  Speaker 2: And when we talk about small businesses, like you said, a lot of people see that as a segment in and of itself and in the payments world it's typically served by ISOs and software companies.
• 7:01
  Speaker 2: How do you look at small businesses?
• 7:04
  Speaker 2: How do you serve small businesses differently?
• 7:05
  Speaker 2: When you look at small businesses, how do you serve small businesses differently?
• 7:06
  Speaker 3: When you look at small businesses, small businesses are the ones who get the most checks.
• 7:10
  Speaker 3: They get a tremendous amount of checks and small businesses are the ones who need their cash that much faster.
• 7:16
  Speaker 3: If you go to a small business and say if you have a choice to receive a check in the mail or to pay 3% to American Express or Visa or MasterCard, they would all day say give me the credit cards.
• 7:28
  Speaker 3: I have the money.
• 7:28
  Speaker 3: Today I got payroll, I got to pay bills, I got to whatever the needs are that they have.
• 7:33
  Speaker 3: I got to sponsor a conference.
• 7:34
  Speaker 3: Whatever the needs are that SMBs have, they run their business very, very tight on cash.
• 7:39
  Speaker 3: So we have to offer solutions that get them their money as quickly as possible.
• 7:44
  Speaker 3: So it's not only about can they get a check scanner, but the most important thing is I'll give you a phenomenal two use cases.
• 7:51
  Speaker 3: Let's think about a small business that has folks in the field field technicians.
• 7:56
  Speaker 3: It could be a plumbing organization.
• 7:58
  Speaker 3: It could be a tutoring organization.
• 8:00
  Speaker 3: It could be insurance organizations that have field technicians or guys in the field that are picking up payments or they're signing and they're receiving a payment.
• 8:08
  Speaker 3: 50% of those payments are check-based payments, no-transcript, and there's delays of receiving their payments and things get lost.
• 8:31
  Speaker 3: It happens.
• 8:32
  Speaker 3: We said, well, there can be an API that sits within this business application then to capture the check and create a deposit and sign off that they actually completed the task within their business application.
• 8:43
  Speaker 3: The reason why that's unique, greg, is that if you go into mobile banking and RDC, remote deposit capture and mobile banking, you have to give access to the entire mobile banking experience to that field technician.
• 8:55
  Speaker 3: No business, no CFO, is going to give access to 100 or 50 or 25 or 10 field technicians in the street.
• 9:02
  Speaker 3: That's never going to happen.
• 9:02
  Speaker 3: So we created this beautiful API that says there's a couple of lines of code in your business application, we can capture it, we can complete the task, we can effectuate the deposit.
• 9:12
  Speaker 3: It's very powerful.
• 9:13
  Speaker 3: It has a lot of great use case, a lot of great value for SMBs.
• 9:17
  Speaker 3: The other solution that I was alluding to, greg, about keeping the bill paychecks online for SMBs.
• 9:22
  Speaker 3: That is the most important thing.
• 9:24
  Speaker 3: Checks online for SMBs that is the most important thing, especially because they don't even know there is a solution out there for them to be able to take the bill paychecks out of the system.
• 9:31
  Speaker 3: They don't even know there is an alternative, and why are they getting a check that's printed?
• 9:36
  Speaker 3: Wait one second, I'll pause there.
• 9:39
  Speaker 3: We can break down some of the other difficulties around those use cases, but for SMBs, the needs in receiving their cash quicker is even that much greater.
• 9:50
  Speaker 2: Well, let's talk about some of those other needs of billers and other target markets you have.
• 9:55
  Speaker 3: Industries that we enjoy and that we focus on are property management, healthcare organizations, government municipalities, utilities, higher education foundations, government municipalities, utilities, higher education.
• 10:07
  Speaker 3: These are all high receivers of checks, where the checks that they receive is north of 50%.
• 10:11
  Speaker 3: Now the challenges that they have is not only receiving checks is that historically, they have a check provider, they have an ACPH provider, a card provider, then they have a whole other team reconciling all this AR.
• 10:24
  Speaker 3: And I see as you shake your head.
• 10:30
  Speaker 3: You can only imagine that in businesses the AR department does not get the same love and attention appreciation as the technology team does For sure not as what the sales team does and for sure not what the client experience team does.
• 10:40
  Speaker 3: The AR department is expected to magically have cash appear in the bank, and how that all happens is just.
• 10:46
  Speaker 3: It should just occur.
• 10:48
  Speaker 3: No one's actually taking the time to understand the process sitting inside of it until it's broken.
• 10:53
  Speaker 3: So we think about these things and we think about the different needs of this AR department.
• 10:59
  Speaker 3: We think about how they struggle and we say wait one second, if we can solve remember I alluded to it at the beginning checks are our moat.
• 11:06
  Speaker 3: We just know that checks are the beginning, but if we can give one solution that enables the AR office, the office of the CFO, to have in one place one software that can handle the checks, the different APIs into the ERP systems that they need, ach and card-based payments in one place, that's tremendous value for these organizations.
• 11:28
  Speaker 2: So what would you say?
• 11:29
  Speaker 2: Differentiates your company from your competitors out there.
• 11:33
  Speaker 3: Well, I guess we could begin by asking who the competitors are, but we could.
• 11:36
  Speaker 3: I guess we could leave that out there to who the competitors are, because most folks who are going to be listening to this podcast can imagine who those competitors are.
• 11:44
  Speaker 3: Now, what's unique about us?
• 11:46
  Speaker 3: Because I'm never going to say anything but about our strengths, never about a weakness that might be perceived about somebody else.
• 11:52
  Speaker 3: I only speak about our strengths First.
• 11:55
  Speaker 3: Our strengths are we answer the phone period.
• 11:58
  Speaker 3: We answer the phone on the first ring and as big as our company has become and as big as we would like it to become, and as big as our company has become and as big as we would like it to become, the staff that we have put into this organization and the training that we have and the leadership that we have here.
• 12:11
  Speaker 3: Everyone is aligned about that.
• 12:14
  Speaker 3: Customer service and bespoke customer service is tantamount to this industry Number one, where there are many things that we hope that we can automate or use chat, gbt or AI automation.
• 12:27
  Speaker 3: At the end of the day, we all can agree that businesses are built on people and people buy from people and people enjoy people, and when things work, they don't need to talk to anybody, but when things go south or they need help or they need to understand, or whatever it might be, we need to make sure that our organization has bestowed top-of-the-line customer experience.
• 12:47
  Speaker 3: Now, customer experience, greg, goes across the entire organization.
• 12:53
  Speaker 3: It goes from meeting us through a sales process, continuing to learn about us through a demo, how we engage through contract negotiations and discussions, how we focus very strongly on making the implementation process seamless.
• 13:09
  Speaker 3: It's complicated.
• 13:10
  Speaker 3: We all can agree in payments that implementation processes can become cumbersome, can become tedious, multiple parties involved.
• 13:18
  Speaker 3: Our team is led by a phenomenal leader who has a decade, almost 20 years experience in leading implementations.
• 13:26
  Speaker 3: That looks at how do we automate, how do we take care of the customer we understand that changes are difficult and they're new to client experience to then understanding the different players that we interact with in our sphere of business the core providers, the different banks that we interact with.
• 13:44
  Speaker 3: Everybody is more or less under-resourced today Everybody.
• 13:51
  Speaker 3: So our ability to differentiate by bespoke customer service and experience is going to win.
• 13:55
  Speaker 3: Do I want to be known as the low-cost provider of check processing?
• 14:00
  Speaker 3: Absolutely not.
• 14:01
  Speaker 3: It's no value.
• 14:02
  Speaker 3: There are others who attempted to become the low cost check provider and they are now with $2 billion worth of debt and struggling.
• 14:11
  Speaker 3: So everybody wants to see us succeed.
• 14:14
  Speaker 3: We want to be the right provider that is a true partner for our clients.
• 14:18
  Speaker 3: So I think that our client experience how folks navigate through us, how we navigate through them, how we spend the time to understand what their needs are I think really differentiates us.
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: I think definitely, at least from my experience in this industry.
• 14:33
  Speaker 2: That's an area that is definitely where someone like you guys can obviously differentiate a huge opportunity there, to your point, versus being the low-cost provider which we know.
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: That race to zero is never a winning strategy for anyone.
• 14:50
  Speaker 3: Over the years I used to say to people my cell phone number's on the website.
• 14:53
  Speaker 3: You can email, text me, call me anytime.
• 14:55
  Speaker 3: And then my executive team, they told me I said you can't do that.
• 14:59
  Speaker 3: You're the CEO, but I still love to advertise that I love to be reachable, I love to be available and I love folks to feel they can reach out to me.
• 15:07
  Speaker 3: But the truth is our team has scaled really beautifully with great folks who've come out of the top organizations in this country that I'm incredibly proud of what they are achieving, how our customers are viewing us and how our place in the market is continuing to grow.
• 15:24
  Speaker 2: So when you step back and look at the payments fintech industry, take a broader view.
• 15:30
  Speaker 2: Where do you think it's all headed?
• 15:31
  Speaker 2: Say, maybe the next three to five years?
• 15:37
  Speaker 3: Oh goodness, there's a lot of elements in the payments and fintech industry, so I want to focus on the element that applies to my business.
• 15:41
  Speaker 3: I'm not an expert in crypto, I'm not an expert in AI and I'm not an expert even in my business.
• 15:47
  Speaker 3: I wouldn't consider myself an expert.
• 15:48
  Speaker 3: I'm just trying to build a business and do good by our clients.
• 15:51
  Speaker 3: I think that I stand by my thesis and our thesis that checks are not going to disappear.
• 15:58
  Speaker 3: You know, I started my career building a company called Vintage Filings that was in the SEC filing and financial print space and at that time I recall there was a corporate securities attorney who went to my dad at the synagogue in Teaneck, new Jersey, and said you know, your son dropped out of college.
• 16:13
  Speaker 3: He's going to the SEC filing business.
• 16:15
  Speaker 3: He's competing against Merrill Bound and Donnelly.
• 16:17
  Speaker 3: They're billion-dollar behemoths.
• 16:18
  Speaker 3: Let him go back to school.
• 16:20
  Speaker 3: He's never going to succeed Because one day the SEC is going to wake up and say they don't need Edgar filings anymore.
• 16:30
  Speaker 3: They use Microsoft Word or Adobe PDF.
• 16:30
  Speaker 3: And he's done.
• 16:31
  Speaker 3: And those guys will always succeed.
• 16:31
  Speaker 3: And he's done.
• 16:32
  Speaker 3: So my dad, may he rest in peace.
• 16:33
  Speaker 3: He said look, I can't control him.
• 16:36
  Speaker 3: I would have preferred he stayed in school, but if I was a betting man, he's going to be okay.
• 16:40
  Speaker 3: And fast forward.
• 16:41
  Speaker 3: We had that business for quite some time.
• 16:42
  Speaker 3: We built the 5,000 clients.
• 16:44
  Speaker 3: We sold it in 2007.
• 16:45
  Speaker 3: Fast forward to today, 2024, the SEC.
• 16:49
  Speaker 3: The process is exactly the same.
• 16:51
  Speaker 3: Nothing has changed.
• 16:52
  Speaker 3: So here, what's going to change is not that checks are going to decrease in C2B or B2B.
• 16:58
  Speaker 3: They're not going to decrease.
• 16:59
  Speaker 3: They might go down a little bit maybe, because habits are very hard to break, behaviors are very hard to change, but, most importantly, you have these bill paychecks.
• 17:08
  Speaker 3: That's a trillion dollars.
• 17:09
  Speaker 3: Now what's happening which is why the business is going to be needed more to look at what CheckAlt is offering is that our cloud-based software, the APIs that we have and that we are creating.
• 17:22
  Speaker 3: Our attention to the multiple use cases about how businesses need to deal with their receivables is our focus, the breadth of our solutions.
• 17:32
  Speaker 3: So the market in AR functionality that's the market I'm going to focus on in three to five years is going to demand better APIs.
• 17:41
  Speaker 3: It's going to demand a better user experience.
• 17:44
  Speaker 3: It's going to demand that the technology looks pleasant on the eyes and I promise you they're going to demand one login.
• 17:51
  Speaker 3: If you look at the legacy systems, they have to log in after one and two and three and eight.
• 17:56
  Speaker 3: It's not acceptable.
• 17:59
  Speaker 3: And what's also going to happen in three to five years is that if you look at the treasury organizations at financial institutions and this is just a truth most of these organizations at financial institutions are approaching retirement or, if not, they are retiring.
• 18:17
  Speaker 3: And the way they've done it is not the way it's going to continue to be done and in order for this to be done, well, financial institutions, treasury departments, credit unions, fintechs, corporates are going to have to learn how to engage those who are younger and how to adapt to the way they are comfortable in working, in order for the receivables to come in and the younger generations will not tolerate anything else but wisdom automation, better user experience, cloud-based order for the receivables to come in, and the younger generations will not tolerate anything else but wisdom, automation, better user experience, cloud-based quick moving.
• 18:50
  Speaker 3: Right Now, the unfortunate thing they're going to have to still be stuck dealing with the postal service.
• 18:55
  Speaker 3: But anywhere else that there can be an improvement, they're not going to ask for it, they're going to demand it, and you're going to see that in three to five years, demanding excellence and experience and user interfaces and APIs, that's where this business is going.
• 19:11
  Speaker 3: Whoever delivers that wins.
• 19:13
  Speaker 3: You don't deliver that, you're going to struggle.
• 19:17
  Speaker 2: I would agree with you.
• 19:18
  Speaker 2: We've had several guests on over the last six months or so that have talked about sort of that same kind of philosophy of you know aging employees who are okay with friction in any kind of process to younger millennials who are moving into management and leadership roles.
• 19:36
  Speaker 2: They're not going to allow that.
• 19:38
  Speaker 2: That's just not in their DNA.
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: I mean, you've got people who grew up with nothing but a cell phone and never, hardly even use a computer.
• 19:45
  Speaker 2: What do you think they're going to do when they get into these leadership roles?
• 19:48
  Speaker 2: They're going to expect everything to be simple, frictionless, easy.
• 19:53
  Speaker 2: I mean I think that you kind of hit the nail on the head there.
• 19:56
  Speaker 2: Let's switch gears a little bit and talk about you.
• 19:58
  Speaker 2: You talked a little bit about your sort of first job, but maybe fill in the gaps between then and when checkout came to be.
• 20:07
  Speaker 3: I started my career working at American Stock Transfer and Trust Company, built a business, was instrumental in building a business for them called ASD Stock Plan and administered stock benefit plans.
• 20:16
  Speaker 3: At that time, stock options were the buzzword Many of the startups were willing to.
• 20:21
  Speaker 3: Most of the employees wanted stock instead of cash.
• 20:24
  Speaker 3: So I was traveling from New York to San Francisco every other week and I made a baseball cap that said stock options and inevitably I was sitting next to somebody who was a CFO, a general counsel or a banker, an attorney, going back and forth between New York and the West Coast and I always picked up business.
• 20:39
  Speaker 3: So after 500 clients of growth, that business was sold to Citigroup.
• 20:43
  Speaker 3: All light bulbs went off and I said, if I could just find a service that I can sell into publicly traded companies.
• 20:48
  Speaker 3: So I started Vintage Filings with a partner of mine named Seth Farman and we just hustled.
• 20:53
  Speaker 3: We said we could do this better, faster and cheaper.
• 20:54
  Speaker 3: You see, in that business better, faster and cheaper worked because the incumbents were just charging exorbitant fees.
• 21:00
  Speaker 3: They had set expenses that were just nuts.
• 21:03
  Speaker 3: So we said we could do it and 5,000 clients later we sold it to PR Newswire's parent company, united Business Media.
• 21:09
  Speaker 3: Great experience.
• 21:10
  Speaker 3: We said what's next, went into the entity formation business, realizing that the last mile in entity formation was that folks are going to their attorneys or then outsourcing the last piece to CT Corp or CSE Corp.
• 21:22
  Speaker 3: And we said we can become that agent of service in that last piece.
• 21:26
  Speaker 3: So we took over a small company.
• 21:28
  Speaker 3: We expanded them from three states to all 50 states within 30 days An amazing experience.
• 21:33
  Speaker 3: Eight years later, 40,000 clients, we sold it to Walters Kluwer who was the biggest player in that industry.
• 21:38
  Speaker 3: We said what's next?
• 21:39
  Speaker 3: And we went into the background check business and recognized that in due diligence or background checks on transactions, on deals, everyone is using two incumbents.
• 21:47
  Speaker 3: We said we could do that better, faster and cheaper.
• 21:49
  Speaker 3: We put some technology in there.
• 21:50
  Speaker 3: So we started to go and we hired a great young sales guy and he did very, very well and got our company up a little bit.
• 21:55
  Speaker 3: Covid came and crushed the company, crushed it.
• 21:58
  Speaker 3: We were down 90% overnight.
• 21:59
  Speaker 3: Definitely were afraid what was going to occur.
• 22:01
  Speaker 3: I was sick for 12 days, lost 20 pounds in 12 days, got out of bed and said to my partners we need to make four pivots.
• 22:08
  Speaker 3: Boom, boom, boom, boom.
• 22:10
  Speaker 3: And literally in the next two weeks.
• 22:12
  Speaker 3: After those four pivots, the company exploded.
• 22:14
  Speaker 3: I'm talking about space shuttle growth.
• 22:17
  Speaker 3: We attracted some of the biggest names in the world, like Goldman and KKR and Apollo and Blackstone, blackrock, andreessen, horowitz just some phenomenal names.
• 22:24
  Speaker 3: And then we sold it into that, into a private equity firm in the Bay Area, and one of the main reasons we saw that business was because I had to focus all my attention on CheckAlt.
• 22:33
  Speaker 3: I wanted to go all in on CheckAlt.
• 22:36
  Speaker 3: We made our first acquisition in CheckAlt in 2014, another one in 2016.
• 22:40
  Speaker 3: We bought a cloud-based software platform in 2020.
• 22:43
  Speaker 3: And I said to my wife we were living in Los Angeles then for 15 years and I said, if we move back to New York, I'll be able to hire the best team possible to upgrade and take us from where we are today to our next beautiful stages of growth, but we need the best team to be back in New York.
• 22:59
  Speaker 3: So I came back to New York three years ago, put together an amazing, amazing team that I'm really proud of, first time in my career that I not only have partners, but real colleagues who are just beautifully talented in every element, in every area of the business for us to really excel, take care of our clients and to seize the opportunity in the marketplace.
• 23:19
  Speaker 3: So that's my story and I feel very, very blessed to be here with you, and thank you, mia, for setting this up.
• 23:25
  Speaker 3: But that's so far my journey.
• 23:27
  Speaker 3: I'm looking forward to continuing it.
• 23:30
  Speaker 2: No, thank you for sharing that.
• 23:31
  Speaker 2: I really appreciate it.
• 23:32
  Speaker 2: So what are some things you're passionate about?
• 23:34
  Speaker 2: So, maybe one work-related passion and one personal passion.
• 23:38
  Speaker 3: I love my employees and I love my clients and I love being available to them.
• 23:42
  Speaker 3: So I'm not one who turns off his phone except for Shabbos.
• 23:44
  Speaker 3: I'm an observant Jew so besides some Jewish holidays and the weekends, I don't turn off my phone and I really hope that folks know they can reach me and I care deeply about them and their well-being and their success.
• 23:55
  Speaker 3: So that is the work part of it that I think is the most important thing to me is the folks at CheckAlt and our clients, and I've had just some phenomenally blessed experiences with both employees and clients and being able to cultivate some wonderful relationships.
• 24:11
  Speaker 3: On a personal level, I do love my family very, very deeply and my wife and my children grandchildren are incredibly important to me.
• 24:20
  Speaker 3: My community is very important to me and I'm a staunch supporter of Israel.
• 24:24
  Speaker 3: I'm a grandson of Holocaust survivors.
• 24:26
  Speaker 3: My mom and my siblings, my married daughter, live in Israel.
• 24:29
  Speaker 3: We have an apartment in Israel.
• 24:31
  Speaker 3: My grandfather fought in the war of Independence in Israel after the Holocaust.
• 24:34
  Speaker 3: My nephews fought in the Israeli army.
• 24:36
  Speaker 3: So I just have an incredible desire to see good by all and to see peace and to see calmness reign again.
• 24:45
  Speaker 3: That stuff touches my heart in a very, very big way.
• 24:49
  Speaker 2: Well, I appreciate you sharing that.
• 24:50
  Speaker 2: So if someone came to you maybe they just graduated from college or maybe they're changing careers and they say, hey, Shai, I'm interested in working in the payments or fintech space, what advice would you give them to be successful in payments?
• 25:06
  Speaker 3: Oh, I love that question.
• 25:07
  Speaker 3: I would tell them to be a student.
• 25:09
  Speaker 3: You know, when you begin your career, you need to be a student.
• 25:12
  Speaker 3: There was a wise man who told me when I started my career don't leave your first job for five years, even if it looks really good elsewhere.
• 25:19
  Speaker 3: As long as you are there and you're learning and you have the attention of the executives there in the company and people are helping you learn skills and tools and industry knowledge, don't pick up your head, stay there.
• 25:32
  Speaker 3: It's really, really important that folks today understand the importance of learning.
• 25:36
  Speaker 3: Success can happen any given moment within your career.
• 25:40
  Speaker 3: There's always ample opportunity to be successful.
• 25:43
  Speaker 3: But if you can learn skills and tools, interpersonal skills and knowing how to care for another colleague, knowing how to sense how another colleague is doing, knowing how to support other colleagues on projects, being a true team player, a collaborator, knowing that if you give, you're going to get back that much more over time.
• 26:01
  Speaker 3: Don't worry about your own career at the beginning.
• 26:05
  Speaker 3: Worry about being a contributor and being one who learns.
• 26:08
  Speaker 3: And the last thing I will say is check in early, stay late, know that anybody can come from nine to five.
• 26:16
  Speaker 3: Westwood One was the radio station that ended up becoming worth billions of dollars, that radio conglomerate.
• 26:21
  Speaker 3: They asked the CEO one time how did you go ahead and win versus your competitors?
• 26:25
  Speaker 3: And he said very simply in a day where there were offices, but today where people can check in all the time, he said I made myself present just a drop earlier and a drop later my competitors if they left the office at 5, I stayed until 7 or 5.30 or 6, just a little bit and he goes.
• 26:40
  Speaker 3: I came in a drop earlier because if that phone call came in I answered it.
• 26:43
  Speaker 3: So my advice is work, work, really works.
• 26:46
  Speaker 3: It does pay off.
• 26:48
  Speaker 3: And if you look at all the greatest success stories in business, in sports, in life, it's all those who put in the effort, no free rides.
• 26:58
  Speaker 3: So learn and work and always do good by everybody.
• 27:03
  Speaker 2: That's great advice.
• 27:04
  Speaker 2: Maybe the best I've heard in a long, long time, that's for sure.
• 27:06
  Speaker 2: So, shai, we're coming to the close of the show.
• 27:09
  Speaker 2: It's been an amazing conversation.
• 27:11
  Speaker 2: Just want to make sure we've covered everything.
• 27:16
  Speaker 3: Is there anything else you'd like to cover?
• 27:17
  Speaker 3: Before we wrap up, I'd like to tell you a story about my grandfather Amazing story.
• 27:19
  Speaker 3: It was a life lesson for me.
• 27:20
  Speaker 3: I've shared it at CheckAlt and my children know it and the more I get to share it, I think it helps a lot of folks.
• 27:25
  Speaker 3: So, as I mentioned, my grandfather was a Holocaust survivor.
• 27:28
  Speaker 3: He ended up all four of my grandparents were, but this grandfather.
• 27:32
  Speaker 3: He ended up going to Israel and after getting settled, him and my grandmother became farmers and I guess you weren't expecting to hear that, greg, but here.
• 27:42
  Speaker 3: I was a Jersey kid and my grandparents were farmers in Israel, not all the way up north, where it's very dangerous today, but on the way up north, let's call it Probably two hours to the border, so not, you know, in a good near the town of Netanyahu.
• 27:56
  Speaker 3: They were farmers and included in their farming.
• 27:59
  Speaker 3: They had avocados and oranges and grapefruits and clementines and they at one point had hundreds of chickens.
• 28:04
  Speaker 3: This is an incredible story.
• 28:06
  Speaker 3: They had hundreds and hundreds of chickens and, as a kid from Jersey, we were spoiled.
• 28:09
  Speaker 3: We went to Israel twice a year to visit my grandparents.
• 28:16
  Speaker 3: It's an amazing treat, but going to my grandparents, think a little bit about Little House on the Prairie.
• 28:18
  Speaker 3: We had chores.
• 28:18
  Speaker 3: We had to go to prayers in the morning, early in the morning, and then before breakfast we had to go feed the chickens and collect the eggs.
• 28:23
  Speaker 3: That was the chore.
• 28:24
  Speaker 3: But being a kid from Jersey, I thought it was the coolest thing ever getting to work with my grandfather and doing this.
• 28:30
  Speaker 3: So the way my grandfather's business was was that his business was you have to collect the eggs on a gray tray and after you collected them all, he would then weigh each one and then write in a pencil on each egg how much it weighed.
• 28:44
  Speaker 3: And then a man would come a couple hours later and take the stack of trays and paid him for these eggs.
• 28:50
  Speaker 3: He was the original wholesaler of eggs that ended up then in grocery stores or supermarkets.
• 28:56
  Speaker 3: My grandfather would tell me if you break an egg, just know that you're taking money out of my pocket when you collect eggs.
• 29:02
  Speaker 3: Craig, right, you collect eggs, you break it.
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: You're taking money out of my pocket.
• 29:07
  Speaker 3: It's my livelihood.
• 29:09
  Speaker 3: So the rule was that if you break it you got to eat it, meaning if you break it and you crack the egg in the tray.
• 29:16
  Speaker 3: He's teaching me at a very young age about consequences.
• 29:19
  Speaker 3: You have to know that in life there are consequences.
• 29:22
  Speaker 3: So here I was maybe nine or 10 years old and here I am collecting eggs and the sooner that I finish, the quicker I get to go have breakfast.
• 29:29
  Speaker 3: My grandmother's going to make me a beautiful.
• 29:31
  Speaker 3: You know, grandma's got to.
• 29:31
  Speaker 3: You know going to go to the kitchen and cook me up something.
• 29:34
  Speaker 3: I'm going really fast and the chickens are making a ruckus.
• 29:37
  Speaker 3: Right, it's probably 500, a thousand chickens.
• 29:39
  Speaker 3: It's loud in there.
• 29:40
  Speaker 3: It's a big noise.
• 29:41
  Speaker 3: And here I am going too hastily and I crack one egg and the yolk is in the tray and my grandfather was three rows over.
• 29:47
  Speaker 3: I grandfather was three rows over.
• 29:48
  Speaker 3: I thought there's no chance he's going to hear me.
• 29:50
  Speaker 3: I'll just continue to watch it all up.
• 29:51
  Speaker 3: But I saw his feet coming and he just looked down, looked at me, looked at the tray and he goes and I had to take all the other eggs off, clean them up and walk with the tray with the yolk in it.
• 30:02
  Speaker 3: The walk of shame to grandma in the kitchen, turned on the frying pan and she cooked it up.
• 30:06
  Speaker 3: That was my meal, that was my next meal and that was it.
• 30:11
  Speaker 3: I learned my lesson If you break it, you eat it.
• 30:13
  Speaker 3: So those who are listening, consequences matter, they just do so.
• 30:16
  Speaker 3: Whatever we do for our clients, whatever we do for ourselves, we know that even in today's world, where people try to say that second place receives trophies, I'm a big believer of you got to go for it.
• 30:26
  Speaker 3: You got to really deliver the best that you can every time, and if things happen that you're not able to, it's incumbent upon us to learn how to improve at all times, and improving at all times is a great character trait.
• 30:40
  Speaker 3: It's something that I think helps everybody grow, being able to own up to it, have broad shoulders and say I'm sorry, and then you grow and you continue to go forward.
• 30:46
  Speaker 3: So just wanted to share that with you as well.
• 30:48
  Speaker 2: I guess the next logical question was how many eggs did you break that summer?
• 30:52
  Speaker 3: Well, you could answer that question yourself.
• 30:54
  Speaker 3: That was the last damn egg that I broke.
• 30:57
  Speaker 3: That was so shameful.
• 30:59
  Speaker 3: Think about it.
• 31:00
  Speaker 3: I turned 50.
• 31:00
  Speaker 3: That was 40 years ago and I still tell this story.
• 31:03
  Speaker 3: Not only that, I literally cannot stand the smell of a fried egg anymore, can't do it.
• 31:09
  Speaker 3: Because of that moment of shame 40 years ago I did not break any more eggs, and it wasn't because I quit, I went right back.
• 31:19
  Speaker 3: I didn't quit, so I went right back.
• 31:21
  Speaker 3: I learned my lesson, didn't break any more.
• 31:24
  Speaker 2: Awesome, awesome.
• 31:25
  Speaker 2: Well, thanks for sharing that.
• 31:26
  Speaker 2: Well, shai, I know your time is very valuable.
• 31:28
  Speaker 2: I really appreciate you being here.
• 31:30
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much again.
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: Really appreciate you being on the show and thank you so much.
• 31:35
  Speaker 3: It's an honor.
• 31:36
  Speaker 3: Thank you, greg.
• 31:36
  Speaker 3: Thank you, have a good day, thank you.
• 31:38
  Speaker 2: You too, and to all you listeners out there.
• 31:39
  Speaker 2: I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story.
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders.
• 31:46
  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.
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: If you enjoyed listening, please share on your social channels as well.