Latest / Leaders In Payments / Financial Inclusion Series: Paul Kesserwani, CEO of Cushion | Episode 264

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Financial Inclusion Series: Paul Kesserwani, CEO of Cushion | Episode 264 · 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: I am a fan of Buy Now, Pay Later when it's used responsibly.
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: I just do worry about the consumers who are not fully aware of what they're signing up for or extending themselves without understanding the impact on the rest of their finances.
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: I do hope regulation of the space catches up quickly, but in the meantime I'm just very, very proud of the work that we're doing to give consumers more visibility and help them get more out of every bill payment that they make.
• 0:43
  Speaker 3: at this point, that was Paul Kesserwani, the CEO of Cushion.
• 0:52
  Speaker 3: He is my special guest on this episode, episode 264 of the Leaders in Payments podcast, and I'm your host, Greg Myers.
• 0:59
  Speaker 3: This is the fourth and final episode in our series on financial inclusion.
• 1:02
  Speaker 3: Every year, we dedicate four or more episodes to highlight what leading companies in our industry are doing to help serve the underserved, underbanked and unbanked.
• 1:11
  Speaker 3: Paul and I talk about how Cushion is helping consumers organize all of their monthly bills, including their Buy Now, Pay Later bills, and also helping them increase their credit score.
• 1:21
  Speaker 3: Cushion issues a virtual card and at the end of every month, they add up all of the purchases and payments made with the card and report them to the credit bureau.
• 1:30
  Speaker 3: We've got a great episode ahead, so let's get started.
• 1:32
  Speaker 3: Hi Paul, Thank you for being here and welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast, especially this special episode during Financial Inclusion Month.
• 1:44
  Speaker 3: So thank you so much for being on the show today, Excited to be here.
• 1:47
  Speaker 3: Thank you, Tell our audience a little bit about yourself, maybe a little personal and professional background, as well as your role at Cushion.
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm happy to dive into my story.
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: I am originally from Lebanon.
• 1:56
  Speaker 2: Trust me, banking there it's an adventure, to say the least.
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: So when I came to the US for college, like 20 years ago, I didn't expect to find myself graduating in the middle of a financial crisis.
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: 2008 was a huge, huge wake-up call and really, I guess, revved up my already existing curiosity about consumer finance, and I graduated with a degree in computer engineering.
• 2:19
  Speaker 2: But I didn't want to write code for a living.
• 2:22
  Speaker 2: That's not what I was excited about.
• 2:23
  Speaker 2: So I ended up finding my niche in roles where tech meets the business side of things like revenue, operations and product management, and over the years, I navigated everything from two-person startups all the way through to Twitter during its hypergrowth phase.
• 2:38
  Speaker 2: But after eight years of working super hard and being part of three successful exits, I felt a huge pull to focus on a passion of mine, which is the consumer finance side, and that led to the birth of Cushion and my role at Cushion.
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: As Cushion's CEO, I have a few main objectives, which are similar to many other CEOs, which is set the vision, make sure there's money in the bank and hire the best talent to make it happen.
• 3:03
  Speaker 2: But if you ask me what I'm best at, what I love doing the most, the answer is undeniably on the product side.
• 3:09
  Speaker 2: So product vision, product strategy and turning those visions into reality.
• 3:15
  Speaker 3: Great.
• 3:15
  Speaker 3: So let's talk about Cushion.
• 3:16
  Speaker 3: Let's talk to the audience what Cushion does.
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: Add its core cushion is a bill pay company, for consumers were all about simplifying how you pay your bills.
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: What we do is offer a one stop shop to manage, pay and even build credit with your existing bills and by now pay later payments, and so from the consumer side is like a three step approach.
• 3:36
  Speaker 2: We organize all of your recurring expenses for you with an streamlined the payment process so you can make those payments for the bills and by now pay later.
• 3:44
  Speaker 2: And as a bonus, we report the payments made through us to the credit bureau is helping you build your credit history my understanding is that this wasn't necessarily the vision of cushion when you started.
• 3:56
  Speaker 3: Can you tell us that background story?
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: yeah, that's right.
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: So initially, cushion was all about negotiating bank fees.
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: So way before the days of opening a I or chat gpt, we built bots to negotiate with banks on behalf of our customers and get their overdraft fees refunded.
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: In twenty twenty, we successfully put fifteen million dollars back into consumers bank accounts thanks to those refunds.
• 4:18
  Speaker 2: And while that was super exciting, we do it deeper and realize that those refunds were just a temporary fix, kind of the band aid.
• 4:26
  Speaker 2: So we analyze our data.
• 4:27
  Speaker 2: It was clear that a ton of people were struggling to pay their bills because they had more bills than ever before.
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: They were having cash flow problems and the nature of bills has gone way more complicated over the years.
• 4:38
  Speaker 2: Spoiler alert, you know, one of the major players in that complexity was by now pay later.
• 4:43
  Speaker 2: That's because you know what started off is financing for big things like your couch or tv.
• 4:47
  Speaker 2: Over time became financing for everyday expenses like your uberide, your groceries, even a door dash meal, and consumers were stacking a lot of those loans.
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: So when we saw the growth of this trend and how consumers were leaning on by now pay later, we decided to pivot to this much bigger area and need so.
• 5:06
  Speaker 2: Now our mission is to offer consumers better bill pay for the by now, pay later era let's dive a little deeper into cushion and how it works.
• 5:14
  Speaker 3: So tell us, like a typical use case, what does a consumer do?
• 5:19
  Speaker 3: How do they engage with cushion?
• 5:21
  Speaker 2: happy to.
• 5:21
  Speaker 2: So everyone's got bills to pay and about half american adults have jumped on the by now pay later train at this point.
• 5:27
  Speaker 2: But the people drawn to cushion are those juggling quite a few bills and actively using by now pay later.
• 5:33
  Speaker 2: So these are people that are not chasing rewards points.
• 5:36
  Speaker 2: They want clarity.
• 5:37
  Speaker 2: They want to handle on the five to ten by now pay later loans that they've stacked on top of all their additional subscriptions and bills.
• 5:45
  Speaker 2: So for them, using cushion is pretty straightforward.
• 5:47
  Speaker 2: They link their bank accounts the same way they would with any other fintech app.
• 5:51
  Speaker 2: Then our system goes through, finds all of their recurring bills and expenses, sets up the dashboard for them and they're all set.
• 5:58
  Speaker 2: They can start tracking their bills in one place.
• 6:00
  Speaker 2: If they want to start paying through us and building their credit score, we have a solution for that too.
• 6:04
  Speaker 2: We issue those consumers a virtual card from cushion which they can use like any debit card, and when they pay their bills with our card, we front the bills costs and report the payment to the credit bureaus, helping our customers build their credit history, and then we later collect the payment from the consumer after the fact okay, what would you say?
• 6:24
  Speaker 3: makes cushion unique in the marketplace today?
• 6:27
  Speaker 2: yeah.
• 6:27
  Speaker 2: So this is the area I'm like most proud of and excited about.
• 6:30
  Speaker 2: So we recognize that by now pay later payments aren't just some fleeting trend, their actual bills that need a spot in your monthly budget.
• 6:38
  Speaker 2: So while other companies might organize your recurring bills with a heavy emphasis on your subscriptions, for example, we take that a step further.
• 6:46
  Speaker 2: We've really pioneered incorporating all the by now pay later loans into your monthly budget, and the way we did this was building the first ever by now pay later aggregator, what we like to call plaid for bnpl.
• 6:59
  Speaker 2: Essentially took our team of machine learning engineers two years to build a system that will pull, organize and store all by now pay later loan data across all by now pay later providers.
• 7:10
  Speaker 2: So we have loan ideas, payment schedules, interest rates, anything that has to do with someone's loans for by now pay later.
• 7:15
  Speaker 2: We have that information and thanks to that data set infrastructure, we're then able to offer consumers kind of a one stop solution for their by now pay later loan data, so they no longer have to jump from clarinata after pay to zip checking it on each loan.
• 7:29
  Speaker 2: Status cushion brings everything under one roof.
• 7:32
  Speaker 2: The cherry on top is we're paving the way by reporting the bnpl payments made through cushion to the credit bureaus.
• 7:39
  Speaker 2: This is a game changer for consumers who want to get more out of their loan payments.
• 7:43
  Speaker 2: To kind of sum it all up, we've tackled and solve challenges that no one else did, to make sure that we're offering a unique bill pay and credit building experience focused on both your existing bills, but also your by now pay later payments so the reality is, you probably know more about people's by now pay later schedules and payments than they do.
• 8:05
  Speaker 3: We know too much.
• 8:06
  Speaker 3: It's actually terrifying how much we've learned and seeing people financing everything from a couch to a hamburger and everything in between kind of scary in some ways, but you're obviously, having been so deep in the bnpl space, you know you have a lot of knowledge.
• 8:20
  Speaker 3: Maybe give us the history of by now, pay later, sort of what it originally was started for and then kind of where we are today.
• 8:27
  Speaker 3: You've alluded to it a little bit, but can you go a little bit deeper there?
• 8:31
  Speaker 2: I will try to do a quick and simplified version because it's evolved quite a bit.
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: As you know, by now pay later has pretty much become a checkout staple, especially online.
• 8:40
  Speaker 2: When you're buying something you'll get all those colorful buttons to pay through clarinah or pay.
• 8:44
  Speaker 2: But it all kind of started with the traditional pay in for setup.
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: So companies like affirm and clarinah offered consumers instant financing for something that they were buying right at the checkout screen and this was known as point of sale financing.
• 9:00
  Speaker 2: Imagine wanting to buy an $800 mattress from Casper.
• 9:03
  Speaker 2: Many people would probably abandon the cart because $800 is a lot of money.
• 9:08
  Speaker 2: But with by now pay later, you have the option to split that up into four $200 payments over two months, making it feel doing well.
• 9:14
  Speaker 2: Because of this, casper wins the sale.
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: They're happy that by now pay later company gets a merchant free from Casper anywhere from 3 to 8% because they made the purchase happen, and the consumer gets the mattress without paying the full price up front.
• 9:29
  Speaker 2: So kind of everybody wins.
• 9:30
  Speaker 2: And keep in mind that the original point of sale financing classic pay in for were designed to be no fee, no interest, short term loans.
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: But over the years the landscape evolved quite a bit and kind of several things converged, forcing some change.
• 9:45
  Speaker 2: The first is competition grew and merchant fees became a pretty big battle ground for these providers.
• 9:51
  Speaker 2: So if Casper was paying a firm, let's say, 6% for that, mattress clarinah might say I'll do it for 5%.
• 9:58
  Speaker 2: Then, after pay, will say I'll do it for 4%, and that's just a race to the bottom.
• 10:02
  Speaker 2: In addition to that, consumers started using multiple buy-in-out-pillator companies at the same time, so they were stacking their loans when many of those loans were not reported to the bureaus because they're not interest-bearing.
• 10:13
  Speaker 2: So there's a very high chance buy-in-out-pillator company two issued you a loan because they had no idea that you may have a big loan with buy-in-out-pillator company one.
• 10:22
  Speaker 2: To add to this I know it's like a cocktail of like just all this crazy stuff happening at one time.
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: Then the market started to turn and interest rates went up, so the cost of providing those loans increased quite a bit.
• 10:33
  Speaker 2: And lastly, because of loan stacking and whatnot, consumers started to default on some of their loans.
• 10:39
  Speaker 2: They had no visibility.
• 10:40
  Speaker 2: They were like it's very hard to jump to 50 different apps trying to stay on top of what you've borrowed.
• 10:45
  Speaker 2: So with all these challenges, buy-in-out-pillator providers they had to change their strategy.
• 10:50
  Speaker 2: The unit economics stopped working and they did a few classic things.
• 10:54
  Speaker 2: The first was they started charging consumers fees like late fees a very bank-ish move.
• 10:59
  Speaker 2: They also decided that paying for and not getting interest is not a great long-term strategy.
• 11:04
  Speaker 2: So they started to introduce long-term loans with interest, so pay-in-6, pay-in-12 with pretty high interest rates, and so consumers would pay that extra money for the convenience of financing over six months or over a year.
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: But that didn't solve the whole problem.
• 11:18
  Speaker 2: So, yes, they were finding ways to make money from the consumer, but they still had a merchant problem on the other side.
• 11:23
  Speaker 2: So if you have to go to each merchant and get them to sign up for your service, and then you're negotiating against 10 other buy-in-out-pillator companies for a fee that's getting smaller and smaller, that's just too painful and not scalable.
• 11:36
  Speaker 2: So what they end up doing is, instead of underwriting the purchase, they start to underwrite the consumer.
• 11:42
  Speaker 2: So a company like Clarina might say I'm going to underwrite you, joe, for $300.
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: I'm going to give you a virtual card, buy whatever you want with it and I will then finance that over.
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: I can say in a pay-in-4 schedule.
• 11:55
  Speaker 2: And that's really clever because it expanded their revenue sources to all merchants and they're now making money off of the debit card interchange.
• 12:03
  Speaker 2: So that's a very, very clever way to get the fee in a completely different way and not be beholden to the merchants that they were partnered with.
• 12:11
  Speaker 2: And then, lastly, to add to all of this, the big banks jumped in.
• 12:15
  Speaker 2: So Chase is offering pay-over-time, american Express is offering this thing called Planet, and what they're doing there is saying you already purchased this thing on your credit card.
• 12:25
  Speaker 2: Would you like to split that up and pay for it over a period of time?
• 12:28
  Speaker 2: And that's allowing them to generate extra interest.
• 12:31
  Speaker 2: And I know that's a lot, but in a nutshell by now, later went from a simple paying for no fee, no interest system that was mostly online to something now that's applicable to any purchase anywhere, online or in-store, and that practically any time.
• 12:45
  Speaker 2: So it's morphed quite a bit.
• 12:48
  Speaker 3: And meanwhile, consumers are continuing to use it, and sometimes for reasons they probably shouldn't, which leads to then a lot of loans and a lot of payments they have to make and a lot of confusion and probably a lot of mispayments.
• 13:04
  Speaker 3: And that was part of the opportunity you saw and helped solve.
• 13:08
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 13:10
  Speaker 2: I mean, what we ended up doing is, when we decided this is a space we want to get into, the entire team started making purchases through Buy Now, pay Later, and after each of us had two or three loans that we were juggling at the same time, we all looked at each other and said this is completely unmanageable.
• 13:25
  Speaker 2: This is Pay In 6, that's Pay In 4.
• 13:27
  Speaker 2: This is due weekly, that's due semi-monthly.
• 13:29
  Speaker 2: This has interest that it doesn't.
• 13:30
  Speaker 2: And as we felt the pain as the customer ourselves, we realized we absolutely have to drop everything and build a tool for this, because no one was ready for Buy Now, pay Later's adoption to explode the way it did, and so we realized we have to build this tooling and it was urgent.
• 13:46
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and the community that you're building this tool for.
• 13:49
  Speaker 3: In a lot of ways, I think you could call them underserved as far as having the ability to manage all of this.
• 13:56
  Speaker 3: Can you speak to what your typical customer is like and how you're helping those what I'm calling underserved customers?
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: I kind of joked about this at a conference recently where I have a computer engineering degree.
• 14:07
  Speaker 2: I run a tech company.
• 14:08
  Speaker 2: I hired a team of PhDs in machine learning and I was still having a hard time staying on top of these loans.
• 14:14
  Speaker 2: So, yes, we're definitely going for an underserved market, but pretty much anyone who stacks a few loans is going to start having a hard time staying on top of them.
• 14:22
  Speaker 2: But the concern you bring up is very real.
• 14:25
  Speaker 2: So the way we think about it is many, many companies genuinely want to help consumers, but a lot of the solutions they're offering are short term.
• 14:32
  Speaker 2: So a consumer who's in a bind is going to gravitate toward quick fixes, thinking something like more money is going to answer their problem.
• 14:40
  Speaker 2: But this often is just deepening the debt pit that they're already in.
• 14:43
  Speaker 2: So our approach to cushion is different.
• 14:46
  Speaker 2: Our primary focus is to provide clarity for our users about their financial situation.
• 14:50
  Speaker 2: We are shedding light on their spending habits and want to help them build their credit scores over time.
• 14:56
  Speaker 2: Not a quick boost, but everything takes time to do it properly.
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: But if we do a good job there, we're going to help them get access to better financial products and even refinance their existing rates.
• 15:06
  Speaker 2: Our goal is not to throw money at the problem, but to provide the tools and the knowledge that the consumer needs, especially in this world where there's so many cash advance and payday loan services.
• 15:16
  Speaker 2: There's just a lack of emphasis on financial visibility and guidance, and that's the void that we're trying to address with our customers.
• 15:23
  Speaker 3: How do you reach these customers?
• 15:25
  Speaker 3: I mean, you're talking about potentially millions of people and their consumers.
• 15:30
  Speaker 3: So you've solved the technology part, but now you have to get consumers onto the platform and signed up.
• 15:36
  Speaker 3: So how do you do that?
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: Obviously, there's a lot of classic ways to do this, and most companies go through the same arc of you start with running ads and then you do a bunch of SEO and content, then you set up affiliate partnerships and so on and so forth.
• 15:49
  Speaker 2: I think a lot of what we're trying to do is lean into our superpower, which is we know way too much about the binoculator space.
• 15:55
  Speaker 2: So we're trying to educate the consumer through our blogs, through content, through our social.
• 16:00
  Speaker 2: That builds a lot of credibility with the consumer who is like okay, these folks do know more about this tool that I'm using, that I do.
• 16:07
  Speaker 2: I should probably sign up and use their service.
• 16:09
  Speaker 2: Is that something we're leaning on very heavily?
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: And then we have some partnerships in the works where we can then use other people's megaphone credible sources in the space.
• 16:17
  Speaker 2: Help us get the word out to many more.
• 16:20
  Speaker 2: Also, we have been getting approached by quite a few financial institutions and credit unions who really, really want to help their customers Better navigate the world of bills and by now, but have nothing to offer and, as they see what we built the asking for there's a way to get our system in front of their customers.
• 16:39
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I was curious if that would be sort of a channel the banks, and especially community banks, that often struggle to have the kind of tools like you guys have built, so curious if that was definitely a channel for, like, a better words.
• 16:52
  Speaker 2: That's something we're definitely exploring right now.
• 16:53
  Speaker 2: Our focus is on the consumer.
• 16:55
  Speaker 2: We're building products and services to make their lives better.
• 16:58
  Speaker 2: If there's a better distribution angle through, let's say, the credit unions and community banks were absolutely going to explore it so if you had any pushback from the bnpl or any merchants about this tool, For the binaupilator side.
• 17:13
  Speaker 2: To be honest, we're doing them a huge favor.
• 17:15
  Speaker 2: We are making sure that the consumer can see and knows about the loans that they owe and what payments are due next.
• 17:22
  Speaker 2: Without our system, the process is very, very painful and noisy Painful because you have to log into five, six, seven different apps to track your loans and figure out which payment is due next, and noisy in the sense that every single by, not a company, is texting you and emailing you individually About each loan and so, before you know, it's so noisy that you just started to ignore those messages.
• 17:44
  Speaker 2: So with cushion, by consolidating all into one place, making it much easier to digest and more actionable, we're actually helping the binaupilator companies get paid back.
• 17:53
  Speaker 2: So we have zero pushback from the bnpl providers because we're technically doing them and the consumer favor, and that's what I love about what we built.
• 18:00
  Speaker 2: It's a win, win.
• 18:01
  Speaker 2: Cushion wins because we're adding value.
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: The consumers happy because they're on top of it and building credit.
• 18:06
  Speaker 3: The binaupilator is happy because they're getting paid I love that win, win, win, part of it for everyone.
• 18:11
  Speaker 3: So where do you see this going, say, in the next three to five years?
• 18:15
  Speaker 3: How do you continue to build momentum?
• 18:17
  Speaker 3: Do you have a product roadmap that you can share anything of your vision of the future of this?
• 18:22
  Speaker 2: I wanna make sure that we don't get confused as being a credit building company or just a tool for by now pay later.
• 18:30
  Speaker 2: I think by now pay later is not going anywhere.
• 18:32
  Speaker 2: It's not a fat.
• 18:33
  Speaker 2: It's a payment method that consumers expect To see is an option when they pay and credit building is a necessity.
• 18:39
  Speaker 2: Sure that we are, at our core, a payments company.
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: We want to make sure that, as bills continue to evolve because the bill landscape does evolve constantly that we are providing consumers the best set of tools to help them navigate those changes and pay their bills on time.
• 18:54
  Speaker 2: So in terms of our roadmap, we are credit building is a commodity, but we offer it because consumers want that.
• 18:59
  Speaker 2: A lot of our roadmap is going to center around building better tooling for how you pay your bills, and I don't want to obviously give away too much of what we have on the roadmap, but I think a lot of folks feel like their bills are running their lives and not the other way around.
• 19:13
  Speaker 2: I wanna give consumers more control over how their bills are paid, earn when their bills are paid and not just see that comcast charge them $18 more than they expected and then they just in this fit of frenzy and being upset.
• 19:26
  Speaker 2: We need to give the consumer more control over all of that.
• 19:29
  Speaker 2: So that's, I guess, from the cushion side.
• 19:31
  Speaker 2: In terms of the landscape, yeah, it's gonna be fascinating to see what happens with by now pay later, because it is evolving so fast.
• 19:38
  Speaker 2: Traditional banks have jumped in.
• 19:40
  Speaker 2: Existing by now pay later companies are diversifying their offerings.
• 19:44
  Speaker 2: Like a firm, for example, has a debit card, you can just use a traditional debit card when you want to and then finance purchases with it with the click of a button through the app, which is fascinating.
• 19:55
  Speaker 2: But I'd say the most important thing on the buy now pay later side is regulation.
• 19:59
  Speaker 2: It is absolutely necessary at this point.
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: Things like standardizing disclosures, mandating that buy now, pay later companies furnish their loan data to the Bureau's, setting caps on fees.
• 20:10
  Speaker 2: Some states, like California, are ahead of the game, but we can't continue to function in this wild wild west of buy now, pay later.
• 20:16
  Speaker 2: This is not good for the consumer.
• 20:18
  Speaker 3: You said that people can come get their bills organized and then the virtual card is kind of another option.
• 20:25
  Speaker 3: What's the take rate on the virtual card?
• 20:27
  Speaker 3: Is that something, or did I misunderstand how you explained that we will?
• 20:32
  Speaker 2: organize all of your bills, your buy now, pay later.
• 20:34
  Speaker 2: All of that for free.
• 20:35
  Speaker 2: So if somebody just wants a budgeting tool that can help them plan ahead, get visibility, they can do that all for free within Cushion today.
• 20:42
  Speaker 2: But if folks want to pay their bills to us, and specifically if they want to build their credit score, the mechanism for paying those bills has to be the Cushion virtual card, because essentially what's happening is we are fronting the cash to the merchants and then paying ourselves back from the consumer and because we're taking balance sheet risk, we are able to report those payments to the Bureau's, and so most consumers who sign up love the idea of build credit with my existing bills, build credit with my existing buy now, pay later payments.
• 21:09
  Speaker 2: So the adoption on the actual bill paying using the virtual card is very high.
• 21:14
  Speaker 2: That makes a lot of sense.
• 21:16
  Speaker 3: We jumped around a little bit here.
• 21:17
  Speaker 3: But back to the BNPL regulations.
• 21:20
  Speaker 3: Do you foresee the government jumping in and really trying to regulate it like they do banks, or do you see it state by state?
• 21:30
  Speaker 3: Or is it just, like you said, the Wild, wild West and it's kind of who knows what's going to happen next from a regulatory perspective?
• 21:38
  Speaker 2: I mentioned the Wild Wild West maybe being a little bit dramatic, I'm just a little bit scared of some of the things we're seeing in our customers data.
• 21:43
  Speaker 2: But the reality is, first of all, certain states have already gotten moving like this, like California is ahead of the game.
• 21:49
  Speaker 2: But the CFPB put up a huge report on the state of buy now, pay later.
• 21:53
  Speaker 2: They're definitely driving some initiatives on getting it more regulated.
• 21:56
  Speaker 2: So it will definitely not continue as is and it is now only a matter of time before there is regulation in place, because it just doesn't make sense.
• 22:06
  Speaker 2: If two companies are issuing a very similar loan, you need to have standardization on the terms of the loan and the fee schedules and all of that.
• 22:14
  Speaker 2: That's why, when you sign up for a credit card with Chase versus Amex versus Discover, you're expecting a very standard format schedule.
• 22:21
  Speaker 2: This is what you're signing up for, these are your interest rates, this is when you get billed, and so on and so forth, whereas in the buy now, pay later world, you're kind of at the whim of how they want to disclose these things or if they want to disclose them to you, and that's just not okay.
• 22:33
  Speaker 2: Consumers need to know what they're signing up for, and if by now pay later, companies are not going to voluntarily do this.
• 22:40
  Speaker 2: That's where the regulation needs to kick in and standardize the process.
• 22:44
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
• 22:45
  Speaker 3: Paul, we've covered a lot of ground about you and your background and, obviously, cushion and your purpose and how BNPL plays into it.
• 22:53
  Speaker 3: Is there anything else you'd like to cover before we wrap up the show?
• 22:56
  Speaker 2: I just want to reiterate this point.
• 22:58
  Speaker 2: I'm sorry if I sound like a broken record here, but I want to make clear that I am a fan of buy now, pay later when it's used responsibly.
• 23:04
  Speaker 2: I just do worry about the consumers who are not fully aware of what they're signing up for or extending themselves without understanding the impact on the rest of their finances.
• 23:13
  Speaker 2: So I do hope regulation the space catches up quickly, but in the meantime I'm just very, very proud of the work that we're doing to give consumers more visibility and help them get more out of every bill payment that they make at this point.
• 23:27
  Speaker 3: Well, Paul, thank you so much for being on the show today.
• 23:30
  Speaker 3: I know your time is very valuable, so I want to be sensitive to that.
• 23:33
  Speaker 3: So again, thanks for being on the show and sharing the story of cushion.
• 23:36
  Speaker 3: Thanks for having me, Greg Appreciate it.
• 23:38
  Speaker 3: And to all you listeners out there.
• 23:40
  Speaker 3: I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story.
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 23:47
  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.
• 23:54
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