Latest / Leaders In Payments / Amit Sagiv and Vova Tsukur, Co-Heads of Wix Payments | Episode 397

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Amit Sagiv and Vova Tsukur, Co-Heads of Wix Payments | Episode 397 · 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.
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: I'm your host, greg Myers, and on today's show we have two very special guests the co-heads of Wix Payments, vova Sukhar and Amit Sajeev.
• 0:29
  Speaker 2: So thank you both for being here and welcome to the show.
• 0:32
  Speaker 3: Hi, greg, thank you for having us.
• 0:34
  Speaker 2: Absolutely so, vova.
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: We'll start with you.
• 0:36
  Speaker 2: Tell our audience a little bit about yourself, maybe where you grew up, where you went to school, where you currently live, a few things like that.
• 0:41
  Speaker 4: Okay, currently live a few things like that.
• 0:42
  Speaker 4: Okay, so we'll start with non-professional stuff, right?
• 0:44
  Speaker 4: Basically, I'm based in ukraine.
• 0:46
  Speaker 4: I was born in a small town which is called pokrovsk.
• 0:49
  Speaker 4: Like in the age of 10, I moved to another city, so that was on the east, so we moved to the very west.
• 0:54
  Speaker 4: That's where I've ended my kind of finished my studies and education and then, when I was looking for great opportunities, the obvious choice was to go to the capital.
• 1:03
  Speaker 4: So, so I went to Kiev, and this is where I'm based at right now.
• 1:06
  Speaker 4: I used to call it the best city in the world.
• 1:08
  Speaker 4: Yeah, so I have.
• 1:10
  Speaker 4: I have a boy three years old, living with my wife over here.
• 1:14
  Speaker 4: You know, really enjoying the time, even though the times are harsh in a way.
• 1:17
  Speaker 4: You know what's going on in our country, but we develop our resilience and move forward.
• 1:21
  Speaker 4: That's the only way to go.
• 1:29
  Speaker 3: That's a little bit about myself, awesome.
• 1:30
  Speaker 3: So, amit, same question for you.
• 1:31
  Speaker 3: So very nice to meet you all.
• 1:32
  Speaker 3: My name is Amit Sagiv, 44, out of Tel Aviv, israel, father of three beautiful daughters.
• 1:36
  Speaker 3: I grew up in the South, very much engineering product guy at heart, always took apart whatever I could and brought it back together as something new.
• 1:45
  Speaker 3: So everything electric around the house started off as a TV and ended up as a guitar and kind of that's what I've been doing ever since.
• 1:54
  Speaker 3: You know, imagining new things, looking at the world from my own perspective.
• 2:00
  Speaker 3: I studied at Technion, which is like Israel's MIT, and very quickly went into entrepreneurship.
• 2:09
  Speaker 3: I had a small startup dealing with collaborative creation and worked.
• 2:15
  Speaker 3: Shortly after I went into fintech and worked in various different places building all kinds of solutions for stock trading, digital banking, payment solutions, and was really privileged to work with some really talented people along the way and to learn the tech and fintech revolution from the inside out.
• 2:39
  Speaker 3: And for the past seven years I've been co-heading with Vovahir payments at Wix and bringing the fintech revolution to all of our Wix users.
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: So, amit, let's stick with you If you don't mind.
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: Before we jump into the Wix payments part, maybe for those in the audience that doesn't know exactly what Wix does, maybe just give us that high level definition of Wix what Wix does.
• 3:05
  Speaker 3: Maybe just give us that high level definition of Wix.
• 3:06
  Speaker 3: So Wix is basically a platform to bring all of your dreams online, businesses desires.
• 3:14
  Speaker 3: We have over 282 million, if I'm not mistaken, registered users across the world.
• 3:27
  Speaker 3: Millions of them are premiums.
• 3:28
  Speaker 3: We've been building the most extensive operating system, basically to build any dream online and physical.
• 3:32
  Speaker 3: So Wix has been supporting 190 countries, so many different languages, and byproduct of that is the finance aspect and everything that you need to support in payments.
• 3:45
  Speaker 3: But if you want to imagine, any kind of business that wants to go online can basically use the operating system that is Wix.
• 3:53
  Speaker 3: And Wix is built in a really special way and similar to how an operating system has different components that are independent but actually work together.
• 4:03
  Speaker 3: Wix is built in a similar way.
• 4:05
  Speaker 3: So we have an e-com set of capabilities and we have services and we have our website editors and we have marketing tools and we have a payment and fintech suite.
• 4:15
  Speaker 3: So all of these various components are basically allowing the small, the medium kind of businesses to build their presence online.
• 4:27
  Speaker 3: We provide endless flexibility in terms of visual and capabilities.
• 4:34
  Speaker 3: But it also translates to apps.
• 4:37
  Speaker 3: It translates to web apps.
• 4:39
  Speaker 3: It translates to responsive websites.
• 4:42
  Speaker 3: We have physical POS, so you will find in our super diverse portfolio of users from mom and pop shops to hotels, to a kid at school doing a project.
• 4:56
  Speaker 3: So we cater to a lot of use cases.
• 5:00
  Speaker 2: Okay, so maybe, Vova, you could explain the payments and fintech portion of that.
• 5:05
  Speaker 2: What solutions you provide there?
• 5:07
  Speaker 4: Of course, I would gladly do that.
• 5:08
  Speaker 4: So basically, in the Wix ecosystem, we provide basically two suits of solutions for our customers.
• 5:15
  Speaker 4: One of them is basically you can go and use a third-party payment provider on your site Amit spoke about e-commerce experience or bookings experience, services, events, restaurants and all those kind of verticals so you can connect a third party like stripe or or paypal and process through them within the wix site.
• 5:35
  Speaker 4: Or we also give the native embedded payment experience which is called wix payments, and I have to say this is like this is what our users prefer.
• 5:43
  Speaker 4: This is what our users prefer.
• 5:44
  Speaker 4: This is what our users are actually choosing, and it's been a challenging game to get to this point, but we can definitely right now say that it's a default solution and there are big pros in our Wix payments offering by giving them better experience.
• 6:01
  Speaker 4: Those pros are think about it like if Wix is a place where the user is creating online presence, managing their day-to-day editing products, managing inventory, also doing the SEO promotion or marketing promotion Google ads and Facebook ads we kind of positioned in the way that we can also maximize success for these users, no matter whether they're big or small from the financial perspective, and this is exactly what we do, and it starts with payments, of course, and it kind of continues in the way we also onboard the customer.
• 6:34
  Speaker 4: Because we know about the customer a lot, we can say that we have a frictionless experience in the onboarding where the user can engage and start accepting payments as fast as possible.
• 6:43
  Speaker 4: We, to compare us and actually we are we're probably the one in the industry, or one of the one of the few, who are providing this uh kind of deferred mode when customers can start accepting payments without being fully verified.
• 6:58
  Speaker 4: Of course, they will get verified when, uh when, they will need to receive their payouts, but the way to start in a frictionless way is super simple and seamless.
• 7:07
  Speaker 4: So this is like, in a nutshell, and this business that we have built here together with Amit and our amazing team all kudos go to the team, of course.
• 7:16
  Speaker 4: Right now, in terms of like revenues, we are bringing around 215 million.
• 7:22
  Speaker 4: That's the data for 2024 out of 1.76B for the overall weeks.
• 7:28
  Speaker 4: So this is like a big portion of the revenues and what is really close to my heart, it's real value for our customers.
• 7:37
  Speaker 2: So, amit, are there other fintech products beyond payments that you're offering or maybe will be offering soon?
• 7:44
  Speaker 3: So yes, there are a few products tech products beyond payments that you're offering or maybe will be offering soon.
• 7:47
  Speaker 3: So, yes, there are a few products that we've been providing along the years, whether they're integrations to external accounting or the ability to receive invoice and kind of charge through payment links and all kinds of different checkout and AI experiences that we're constantly enhancing our platform with to engage with the buyers and the merchant in such a deeper way.
• 8:18
  Speaker 3: We have all kinds of engines that we've built inside our system throughout the years because we see the data of the user in a very holistic way, we can understand in a really profound and, unlike other payment providers, because we see the end-to-end all the way from the moment you logged into the first time registration into the Wix account, we know who you are and we understand your identity really well.
• 8:44
  Speaker 3: We can understand the risk that is involved with processing your business.
• 8:49
  Speaker 3: So, definitely, areas of financial services are very relevant because of that intimate and, I would say, direct knowledge of the user and the risk that they bring.
• 9:03
  Speaker 3: We have various financial products coming down soon.
• 9:06
  Speaker 3: We can't be too explicit, but you can connect the dots and our users are very happy with those solutions we've seen Throughout the years.
• 9:15
  Speaker 3: We've introduced POS as well.
• 9:18
  Speaker 3: That opened up the whole physical experience and that's POS on quite a wide range, whether you're a small pop-up shop that just needs a tap to pay on your phone, or as a dongle extension all the way to full POS systems with card readers and cash drawers and everything that comes together with that.
• 9:40
  Speaker 3: So, yes, payment is the core, but it evolves and extends as much as the user needs it.
• 9:48
  Speaker 3: We're very much following the user requests and their own growth.
• 9:56
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 9:56
  Speaker 2: So, amit, sticking with you for a second.
• 9:59
  Speaker 2: So would a typical use case be hey, I'm a small business, could be a retail shop, and I want to have an e-commerce presence and sell online.
• 10:07
  Speaker 2: I go to Wix, I build my website.
• 10:10
  Speaker 2: Payments are automatically integrated.
• 10:12
  Speaker 2: I mean, is that typically the use case that Wix has?
• 10:17
  Speaker 3: So I'd say it splits into basically two use cases.
• 10:21
  Speaker 3: One is the classic DIY, as you've mentioned, pretty similar to the way you described it.
• 10:28
  Speaker 3: Users may go in various paths but eventually they would have a live website with their products or services, with their payment system, connected with the catalog, with everything that needs to be done in order to have a good interaction with your buyers.
• 10:46
  Speaker 3: That's one path.
• 10:47
  Speaker 3: The other path is through what is partners and agencies.
• 10:52
  Speaker 3: These are do it for me, not DIY, but do it for me, which is a big portion of the presence online is being built by professionals.
• 11:02
  Speaker 3: If I'm a baker, I'm really good at making bread.
• 11:05
  Speaker 3: I might not be as good as setting up my photo gallery and the right messaging and the right tone of voice, and I would need somebody to help me with branding, with marketing, with establishing my presence.
• 11:20
  Speaker 3: So we have a very vast relationship with partners and agencies across the world who build websites for all kinds of users.
• 11:28
  Speaker 3: So, if you want to imagine that experience, that is even kind of more complicated for the payment system, because I'm not onboarding the website builder, I'm onboarding his customer.
• 11:41
  Speaker 3: So we have quite a very extensive point of view over who does what, the roles, responsibilities.
• 11:51
  Speaker 3: To enable that experience that Vova mentioned in the past about that smooth onboarding, frictionless, something that sees the user in a very he's the center she's the center right and not the website or Wix, but the user who is trying to establish their solution we programmatically constantly collect data and then transfer it to create those stable accounts right.
• 12:17
  Speaker 3: So we know the names, we know the emails.
• 12:20
  Speaker 3: We can use that information programmatically behind the scene to establish what we need.
• 12:26
  Speaker 3: So those are the main two sets of experiences.
• 12:30
  Speaker 3: There are also others.
• 12:32
  Speaker 3: Wix is also very developer-oriented, so you might have developers that are building.
• 12:38
  Speaker 3: They would build their own client and would just connect to the Wix back office and use our functionality through our headless capabilities and our publicly documented APIs.
• 12:51
  Speaker 3: So there are various entry points into creating your Wix site and your Wix app and we support all of them.
• 12:58
  Speaker 3: So, from a payment and a financial perspective, we have multiple types of users.
• 13:05
  Speaker 2: Okay, great.
• 13:05
  Speaker 2: And a financial perspective we have multiple types of users Okay, great.
• 13:07
  Speaker 2: So, vova, what would you say differentiates Wix payments from your competitors out there?
• 13:11
  Speaker 4: I have a few things to mention on this one.
• 13:13
  Speaker 4: So basically, I started deliberating on it when I was giving a previous answer.
• 13:19
  Speaker 4: But because we know the customer really well, because Wix is the place where the user is performing their day-to-day and because this customer is also paying for Wix services, which we call premium.
• 13:31
  Speaker 4: So if you want to create a site with a domain and have an ability to accept payments, you also need to buy premium.
• 13:38
  Speaker 4: We kind of know more about the customer and that gives us an opportunity to onboard him in the easiest way.
• 13:44
  Speaker 4: So the path from the intent I want to accept payments to actually getting the first payment is super frictionless and this is definitely the know-how and it's actually very hard to build.
• 13:56
  Speaker 4: And we designed it together with our partners, with our payment partners, so that it's going to be super solid and also manage all types of risks that such an experience might introduce.
• 14:08
  Speaker 4: So that's number one.
• 14:10
  Speaker 4: Number two, in terms of the variety of payment methods that we give to our customers, we provide a lot.
• 14:18
  Speaker 4: Just recently we've launched also PayPal.
• 14:20
  Speaker 4: So we have the cards, we have PayPal, we have Apple Pay and Google Pay.
• 14:24
  Speaker 4: Of course, amit mentioned before that we have POS device, which is also accepting.
• 14:29
  Speaker 4: Like, we have a POS device for managing the catalog and then also the actual POS payment device and on top of that I didn't mention local payment methods.
• 14:39
  Speaker 4: So, in terms of, like, the full coverage of the pay in channels, we definitely check the box.
• 14:44
  Speaker 4: So this is number two.
• 14:47
  Speaker 4: Number three, which is not related to functionalities but to, I can call it, enablement, and I want to continue the story that Amit started before.
• 14:56
  Speaker 4: We're all following the user's desire and the user's path and we have worked really, really hard and still working, on making sure that the user is going to be enabled.
• 15:09
  Speaker 4: Making sure that the user is going to be enabled, okay, we have seen a lot of cases when users turn to third party payment providers and they, you know, get a bump in the journey and either the onboarding is not frictionless or they're completely you know, they're completely not accepted, but it's a valid business.
• 15:23
  Speaker 4: Okay, it's not a fraudster, it's a fully compliant and valid business and because we have many customers who are really tiny, small SMBs, for them it's really important to get on this journey and feel that they are enabled.
• 15:37
  Speaker 4: So giving this experience from the product perspective and from the service perspective is something that I can say, definitely differentiates us from the rest of the solutions.
• 15:49
  Speaker 4: And, again, it was really hard to do and we also had we ourselves had bumps on the journey.
• 15:55
  Speaker 4: Building this trust took time and at this point we can say you know, we have advanced.
• 16:01
  Speaker 4: So those three things I would say right now are the key differentiators, from the embedded payments perspective, on how our solution is better than others.
• 16:13
  Speaker 2: Okay, Amit, anything you'd add to that?
• 16:15
  Speaker 3: I'd add one thing we combine and they compete.
• 16:19
  Speaker 3: So the way we look at our payment providers that are working with us, we are working in a multi-processor mode.
• 16:30
  Speaker 3: Wix Payment sits on top of multi-processors and we facilitate the best experience out of everyone's offering, all consolidated into one flow so you wouldn't feel the friction but we would bypass a lot of hiccups along the way.
• 16:46
  Speaker 3: So, while individual payment providers compete with each other, because we are at the platform level and we're integrated into all of them, we actually combine, so we don't need to compete, and that brings elevated performances across all metrics and it gives us a really in-depth point of view to risk, to compliance, to user experience and once you understand that you can leverage the best out of all worlds, it really opens up this path to a really good product.
• 17:25
  Speaker 4: And the one who is really winning in this story is the final user right.
• 17:29
  Speaker 4: Also look at it, let's say, from the compliance perspective.
• 17:31
  Speaker 4: One payment partner may not necessarily accept certain type of business right, but the other one can, and it's our job to guide it, to guide in the process and the way and actually do it behind the scenes so that the user is enabled at the end of the day and has frictionless experience in an ongoing fashion at the end of the day and has frictionless experience in an ongoing fashion.
• 17:51
  Speaker 4: So this multiprocessor setup is by design and for the benefit of the user.
• 17:56
  Speaker 2: So, amit, let's talk about the future a little bit.
• 17:59
  Speaker 2: Where do you see the industry headed in, say, the next three to five years?
• 18:03
  Speaker 3: So I see us actually building the future as we speak.
• 18:07
  Speaker 3: There are so many shaping and forming technologies and platforms around us, and I'm not meaning it in the buzzword-y sense of the way.
• 18:17
  Speaker 3: I think Gen AI has changed dramatically the way many things have been perceived.
• 18:22
  Speaker 3: We've built our own AI strategy five years ago.
• 18:33
  Speaker 3: We have in-house data science and agentic systems and we've been running our compliance and risk and many, many things in this way for a very long time now, because we knew we need to be laser sharp and not very headcount heavy.
• 18:45
  Speaker 3: We've created models and classification tools and risk assessments and all these things that now I see flooding LinkedIn in these diagrams of this is how you build agentic systems.
• 18:59
  Speaker 3: I just had a conversation today with our data science lead that it's really beautiful that we actually have it running for a long time now and we see that evolving.
• 19:10
  Speaker 3: We see the agentic e-commerce coming into life slowly.
• 19:14
  Speaker 3: We do understand that the way people engaged with information is changing.
• 19:21
  Speaker 3: The way you approach search engine is changing.
• 19:24
  Speaker 3: So the way you find products, the way you find services, the way you expose your brand is changing and it's obvious that, while it's an uncharted path, right, we see these products that are coming up now.
• 19:39
  Speaker 3: You know, claude Biontropic has this massive abilities with the new MCP layers.
• 19:45
  Speaker 3: We see Google's protocol of the A2A.
• 19:48
  Speaker 3: There's a lot of things that are coming.
• 19:50
  Speaker 3: They're very raw in nature and we understand and we've been inside this kind of fluctuation as Wix for a few times and adapted to new levels of technology.
• 20:03
  Speaker 3: We've had our first AI editor at 2018, I think Wix.
• 20:09
  Speaker 3: So we've had a few runs at this and we see the progression being more and more personalized.
• 20:16
  Speaker 3: Experience now is expected to be almost in a singularity point, because if we used to speak about segmentations and user funnels coming in various segments, we understand now that as you type into your chat GPT or any one of those LLMs, you're expecting a specific contextual answer out of your entire multiple threads that you may have.
• 20:46
  Speaker 3: If I'm looking for a shirt right now, I'm expecting it to already know my size because I've engaged with it in the past and there's a question of how that experience would look like.
• 20:58
  Speaker 3: I think many companies now are forming this new approach.
• 21:03
  Speaker 3: How does payment look in this new world?
• 21:06
  Speaker 3: I've been a big advocate for stablecoin for many years as infrastructure move, less from a cryptocurrency replacement point of view for the fiats, but more as the ability to do things faster in a more efficient way, where the compliance level might be embedded into the way the smart contracts are written.
• 21:31
  Speaker 3: So there's a lot of progression that we can do with smarter currencies.
• 21:37
  Speaker 3: They might have the same monetary value but in essence, as a protocol, they enable different things.
• 21:46
  Speaker 3: So I think we're asking ourselves how do we take our users, our SMBs, into this new world?
• 21:53
  Speaker 3: What do we give them?
• 21:54
  Speaker 3: What kind of access we give into the capabilities of Wix for this new world?
• 22:01
  Speaker 3: Because I think a lot of the gates that were closed are being opened now and certain assumptions that certain companies had along the way that this is the only way to use my product, that's if you log into my CRM and you start working, and now you see more and more of those bridges starting to be built between the Zapiers, the Wix, all these platforms of the world, into those LLMs, and then you have tools sitting on top of those LLMs, creating access again to those platforms.
• 22:39
  Speaker 3: So it's very much forming path right now.
• 22:43
  Speaker 2: Volvo.
• 22:43
  Speaker 2: Anything you would add to that?
• 22:45
  Speaker 2: I mean, we talked about AI and crypto a little bit.
• 22:47
  Speaker 2: Are there other things that you'd like to mention there about the future?
• 22:51
  Speaker 4: Actually, I have a lot to add and I will not repeat the right things that Amit said.
• 22:56
  Speaker 4: On the AI front, I think there is a tactical change, but there is also the strategic change to the way payments are performed, and I will try to explain how I envision it.
• 23:07
  Speaker 4: On the tactical front, we will see payments being embedded in this new type of interfaces, into chat GPTs of the world, into new mediums, and also the platforms like Stripe or commerce builders like Wix will also continue pursuing exposing their functionality to these new kind of mediums.
• 23:29
  Speaker 4: So this is going to be to me, this is a tactical step.
• 23:32
  Speaker 4: It's a really important one, but the strategic step I would say it's act.
• 23:37
  Speaker 4: Two is something else.
• 23:39
  Speaker 4: I see, at the end of the day, payments being kind of naked, kind of free from UX.
• 23:46
  Speaker 4: Okay.
• 23:46
  Speaker 4: So I see agents talking to each other and performing payments without necessarily user being in the flow.
• 23:53
  Speaker 4: We kind of have a simplistic way to do it these days with typical subscriptions right, when the user doesn't have to be there, when he's charged for the subscription.
• 24:00
  Speaker 4: But I mean in a really different way, when a user may have a CFO as an agent that may perform payments on his behalf according to the goal.
• 24:11
  Speaker 4: So I think this strategic change is coming with more enablement of A2A and also further power-ups in what LLMs are doing, and this is really exciting times to be, I have to say.
• 24:25
  Speaker 4: So this is on AI front.
• 24:27
  Speaker 4: On non-AI front, I actually want to go back down to earth for a second and mention a few things which are also really important, regardless of AI.
• 24:36
  Speaker 4: One of them, which I see them changing in the next two, three and also five years, I think, embedding payments and embedding banking and all kinds of financial functionalities into non-financial institutions is going to continue, and this is definitely the path forward.
• 24:52
  Speaker 4: I think these days we're also seeing platforms exposing their business management capabilities together with payments, so that it's not embedded within the platform but actually in an outside web application.
• 25:04
  Speaker 4: So I think this trend will continue with the platforms, but also with the standalone web applications.
• 25:09
  Speaker 4: That's number one.
• 25:10
  Speaker 4: Number two that I would call out is I would call it real-time everything.
• 25:15
  Speaker 4: Look at PIX in Brazil, pix payment method this is the way to instantly pay in Brazil, which is already there for a few years and has been really, really successful, and I can say the rest of the world is not really there, and what we'll see over time is that things like FedNow or, you know, corresponding real-time payments in other geographies will be dominant.
• 25:37
  Speaker 4: But real-time everything includes not only real-time payments but also includes an ability to receive that payment on the merchant side, on the user accepting the payment side, to have the settlement also instant and to have the payout in an instant way.
• 25:52
  Speaker 4: So I see the change that this kind of experience will become a commodity.
• 25:58
  Speaker 4: There are more things about which I see is coming, but I think we've covered, you know, the Pareto of the change.
• 26:05
  Speaker 4: We didn't speak about regulation and regulation.
• 26:07
  Speaker 4: It's also going to become more automated, more modular, because RackTag is advancing, by the way.
• 26:13
  Speaker 4: Going back to AI, just one small point we already see how onboarding, support, underwriting and content monitoring and risk management is being performed by AI in a much better way, in a much more efficient way.
• 26:30
  Speaker 4: We see what our people were doing six months ago and what they're doing now.
• 26:36
  Speaker 4: It's a completely different story.
• 26:38
  Speaker 4: Okay, so I definitely see streamlining that piece happening.
• 26:43
  Speaker 4: It's already happening, we see it happening.
• 26:45
  Speaker 4: We make it happen also through our actions.
• 26:48
  Speaker 2: Do you think it's almost?
• 26:49
  Speaker 2: I mean, maybe we're not there yet, but getting pretty close to where sort of that front end using AI and using AI for fraud.
• 26:57
  Speaker 2: So I'm thinking like the onboarding compliance, Is it close to becoming table stakes now with AI?
• 27:02
  Speaker 2: I mean, aren't most payments companies doing that?
• 27:05
  Speaker 2: I would say you know they are, maybe they're not doing it well, but I think a lot of them are doing it right.
• 27:09
  Speaker 2: I would say they are.
• 27:10
  Speaker 2: Maybe they're not doing it well, but I think a lot of them are doing it right.
• 27:11
  Speaker 4: I would say they start doing it, they can label it, they do it through the AI, but sometimes that's not necessarily the case I can say we're really good at I will try to answer in a more generic way.
• 27:24
  Speaker 4: So, look, I think we did really well in utilizing structured data to make decisions and when it comes to utilizing unstructured data on top of structured data to make decisions, we still develop that skill.
• 27:40
  Speaker 4: For example, I will not talk about risk of payments, but, for instance, risk of credit decision making.
• 27:47
  Speaker 4: By the way, alex Johnson had a great article recently which is called Can LLM Manufacture Better Credit Decisions, and one of the things he said is which I fully agree with there is an opportunity to improve credit decision making from the perspective of unstructured data, because structured data is kind of a solved problem.
• 28:06
  Speaker 4: So I think in the payment space, in the credit space and in other subsegments of financial space, there is a way to go.
• 28:14
  Speaker 4: Some companies are doing it really well already.
• 28:16
  Speaker 4: Some companies are still learning it, still learning how to do it.
• 28:20
  Speaker 4: We still have, I think, a long path there to make it super solid.
• 28:24
  Speaker 4: I have to say it also brings new challenges because if you are exposing it to more, you know ai-based creation platforms.
• 28:32
  Speaker 4: You have more and more type of users that you do not necessarily know well enough on how they perform, so there are extra opportunities, but also extra challenges admit you had something you wanted to add there.
• 28:43
  Speaker 3: Yeah, my perspective comes from the fraudsters, I.
• 28:47
  Speaker 3: I think the question needs to be in reverse.
• 28:50
  Speaker 3: Can it not be table stakes?
• 28:53
  Speaker 3: It cannot.
• 28:54
  Speaker 3: It's table stakes for the fraudsters now.
• 28:57
  Speaker 3: So if you look at fraud patterns, if you look at risk emerging, those who create the risk don't wait.
• 29:04
  Speaker 3: They don't take time to adapt.
• 29:06
  Speaker 3: They adapt fast, faster than anyone, right?
• 29:09
  Speaker 3: If I'm out there to do harms in any way or to create fraud, I will not wait.
• 29:18
  Speaker 3: I will test whatever technology comes down my path, and that will be in identity theft.
• 29:25
  Speaker 3: It will be in any kind of threat that we've seen so far in our many years of moving funds around the world.
• 29:35
  Speaker 3: We will just see more of more sophisticated, more using AI with less trail behind them.
• 29:45
  Speaker 3: So you can't really fight that off with the old tools.
• 29:50
  Speaker 3: So you have to adapt Literally, you have to.
• 29:55
  Speaker 3: So I think that for those who are not seeing this as table stakes, they need to adapt fast, because I think the threat is already here.
• 30:05
  Speaker 3: I think the really interesting questions is what kind of threats are we not aware of that have been generated through these new technologies already and we're behind, and we will only understand them once we will see 10, 20, 30 fraud rings using state-of-the-art money laundering techniques that we haven't yet experienced, and we know that that's going to come.
• 30:30
  Speaker 3: That's a part of the business.
• 30:31
  Speaker 3: This is why you're constantly vigilant and you're trying to have the right controls and the right understanding of what's happening inside your platform.
• 30:38
  Speaker 3: And that has to go hand in hand with new technology, and the technology right now is specifically AI and Gen AI, but it's been around since forever.
• 30:51
  Speaker 3: Every time there has been a technology change, the first to adopt it were the fraudsters, and then you try to fight off the threat that you just discovered and you try to automate it and you try to be better than it, and by the time you're better, they're already doing something else.
• 31:09
  Speaker 3: So it's kind of a constant race.
• 31:13
  Speaker 3: So we have to be there.
• 31:15
  Speaker 2: Right, so let's switch gears a little bit.
• 31:17
  Speaker 2: Let's talk about you, maybe, walk us through your professional journey and why you picked to work at Wix Payments.
• 31:25
  Speaker 3: Kind of right after college.
• 31:27
  Speaker 3: I was working at Intel as a student and I came out of college I wanted to run my own startup.
• 31:34
  Speaker 3: It took me a while to find the right idea, find the right focus.
• 31:40
  Speaker 3: At the time I worked for Teva the pharmaceutical, and I was working on product leadership of medication.
• 31:45
  Speaker 3: Working on product leadership of medication While in the night, as startup people do, you burn through the midnight oil trying to make your idea work.
• 31:58
  Speaker 3: And when we raised the first round, I was free to go devote my entire time to that and my startup was around collaborative creation, kind of similar to what we see now in Google Drive, where you have multiple contributors on a single document with viewers and commenters, and we were trying to create like a platform that was more literature oriented.
• 32:19
  Speaker 3: It wasn't very successful and while me and my CTO were building it with our team, there was an opportunity to help a friend who was establishing one of Israel's biggest e-com online.
• 32:33
  Speaker 3: So at that point I got really exposed to the e-commerce world.
• 32:37
  Speaker 3: We built everything on Magento.
• 32:39
  Speaker 3: We did the first shipping kind of efforts and how do you procure from manufacturers in China and in Thailand and all across the world and it was a very successful e-commerce.
• 32:56
  Speaker 3: After that I joined my first fintech endeavor.
• 33:01
  Speaker 3: I was leading a platform to trade options in a brokerage platform, basically selling brokerages all across the world on fully regulated brokerages and really getting to understand trader psychology, trader state of mind, risk management, crm, risk tools and basically going deep into the stock and options world.
• 33:27
  Speaker 3: After that, israel's first digital bank, pepper, was established and I had an opportunity to lead there the stock market solutions.
• 33:39
  Speaker 3: So we built a lot of new things back then for Israel fractional shares and a very interesting platform that was basically looking at e-com user patterns and bringing them into the stock market world for non-investors, for the savers who are looking to get engaged into the stock market world.
• 34:07
  Speaker 3: And then I was the director of banking products for a while, only to get a call from Wix that Wix is looking for somebody to join their premium team.
• 34:17
  Speaker 3: Had a very interesting two-hour walk on the port with VP product of Wix, which is a great guy Shout out to Daddy and you know he was an entrepreneur at heart and I asked him how come you were here for 12 years, you've had all these startups that you did, and how come you're inside this organization?
• 34:42
  Speaker 3: And he said to me.
• 34:43
  Speaker 3: We're constantly evolving, constantly changing and I was very skeptical.
• 34:48
  Speaker 3: I thought I'm going to join for a year and maybe rest a little bit after my startup adventures.
• 34:53
  Speaker 3: And ever since it's just been an uphill run and everything is challenging and you get the scale and you get the exposure to helping people in Brazil or working with a commerce person in the UK or with a child in the US who was building his school class website.
• 35:13
  Speaker 3: So you get to touch a lot of people and that really rung a bell with me this ability to do good, but at a really large scale.
• 35:24
  Speaker 3: Not that there is anything wrong to do good with your own surrounding, but when you get this reach of millions and millions, it's quite a wow factor.
• 35:33
  Speaker 3: And inside Wix, I was very fortunate to be in the right place in the right time and shortly after I joined it was decided to form a new company at Wix that handles payments and fintech.
• 35:48
  Speaker 3: That's when Vova and myself got connected and ever since it's been an amazing, creative, innovative effort.
• 35:58
  Speaker 3: Again, constantly uphill, constantly challenging.
• 36:02
  Speaker 3: You know we've had.
• 36:03
  Speaker 3: The beginning was rocky, because it takes a while to fix what you're building and to make sure it's good, and by the time it was good, covid struck and then everything changed.
• 36:17
  Speaker 3: Because COVID went, everything went hockey stick up, tons of users, everybody needed an online presence.
• 36:24
  Speaker 3: Payment has became super basic and then it was like three years of COVID uphill only to get to another change in the market.
• 36:35
  Speaker 3: There was a bit of a slowdown and then again with all the AI, so this fluctuation keeps happening.
• 36:42
  Speaker 3: And Wix, because it's so widespread.
• 36:46
  Speaker 3: We're very close to all of these changes, so work is always fascinating.
• 36:52
  Speaker 2: Okay, so Vovo same question for you.
• 36:55
  Speaker 2: Maybe a little about your career background, and then why Wix?
• 36:59
  Speaker 4: Basically I have a software engineering background.
• 37:01
  Speaker 4: When I went to studies to my high school I knew that I wanted to do software engineering.
• 37:06
  Speaker 4: I was always interested in engineering, but not in mechanical engineering, but more related to the software.
• 37:12
  Speaker 4: And it's actually since school and I was lucky to meet a person who really instilled this deep interest in how software works and how to build great software.
• 37:23
  Speaker 4: So then when I went to university it was very clear for me that I want to apply for the job right away and this is what I did on my first grade, on purpose.
• 37:33
  Speaker 4: And actually my professor was my first manager and we were doing accounting software, which was amazing.
• 37:40
  Speaker 4: I never was interested in algorithmic piece of software engineering, but more in applying software to solve real problems, and for 25 years I have been building systems and platforms of different kinds.
• 37:56
  Speaker 4: It was related to accounting, it was related to project management software, bi, insight software, even the TV media management software, which was also like a lot of fun.
• 38:10
  Speaker 4: And at a certain point I understood that I want to bring value in a different way, not through impact on engineering, but through broader business impact.
• 38:20
  Speaker 4: I joined Wix, started an e-com journey and one year working on e-com, as Amit said, was a decision to create a company within Wix that is focused on the fintech developments.
• 38:32
  Speaker 4: At that point, I started co-heading that company together with Amit, so I can say my payment experience over here at Wix is actually the first and the only one so far.
• 38:42
  Speaker 4: I cannot say it's an upside.
• 38:44
  Speaker 4: I cannot say it's a downside, but it's been really great on this journey.
• 38:50
  Speaker 4: I enjoyed it until this time and I'm sure I'm going to enjoy it for a longer time while being here with so many things happening, and I love the fact that we built a really strong team with which we can take the next challenge and address it, which started happening with AI, and we started it a little bit earlier than the rest of the hype.
• 39:10
  Speaker 4: Yeah, that's about it.
• 39:11
  Speaker 4: Now I'm much less involved in engineering, but way more on the business side of things on creating the right culture in AI, of course, and all the things that are needed to actually run.
• 39:24
  Speaker 4: You know, the big company on scale.
• 39:26
  Speaker 2: Well, what are some things you're passionate about?
• 39:29
  Speaker 2: So, maybe one work-related passion and one personal passion.
• 39:32
  Speaker 4: So, on the work one I love, on making product and service feeling seamless.
• 39:38
  Speaker 4: Okay, so I'm talking right now from the user perspective, from the final customer perspective.
• 39:42
  Speaker 4: I really love giving value and I love to give that value in the way that user is just, you know, receiving it as something they breathe.
• 39:50
  Speaker 4: They don't necessarily think about it, it's just there and it works.
• 39:53
  Speaker 4: So this is on the work side.
• 39:55
  Speaker 4: I understand it's very generic, but this is kind of the, you know, the North Star guideline that I'm aiming to.
• 40:01
  Speaker 4: On the personal side of things, there are two things which I'm really into these days.
• 40:05
  Speaker 4: You know I was always focused on bringing value, value which was not like the financial value, but more value for which you know you can.
• 40:13
  Speaker 4: You can actually touch and feel, and this is usually not about money, I have to say so, and at some point I decided I want to understand how to make money out of money.
• 40:21
  Speaker 4: So I immersed myself into trading and investing and how to do it right, and it's it's also very, very important for me right now these days.
• 40:30
  Speaker 4: And the second thing that I'm really fond of, which is completely different from the stuff that we have discussed, I'm really into cars, you know and aesthetics of the cars and I own a few of completely like different styles and I love to ride them, usually in the night before we have a curfew before 12 pm.
• 40:46
  Speaker 4: I'm always taking a ride through the city which is almost empty, for 15, 20 minutes.
• 40:51
  Speaker 4: I was even Ubering for a while and stopped that just for fun.
• 40:56
  Speaker 2: So that's a little bit about that Nice.
• 40:58
  Speaker 2: So, Amit, same question for you Maybe a business passion and a personal passion?
• 41:03
  Speaker 3: My business passion ties very much to my personality.
• 41:09
  Speaker 3: That is, being creative I hate saying thinking outside of the box, because there is no box.
• 41:17
  Speaker 3: But for me, the team that I love a lot they joke and they call me the mixer, because where they will come with one perspective and my perspective would very likely be a different one in my own way where I can take my understanding of one world and apply it to another.
• 41:36
  Speaker 3: That, combined with my great passion to lead people through deep understanding, not through rank or power, my team, as I like to call it, I'm their resource.
• 41:50
  Speaker 3: They're not my resource, I am their resource, and if they use me well, we succeed together.
• 41:57
  Speaker 3: So the combination of the two, you know, bringing creativity but effective creativity, not just for the sake of creativity alongside with really profound leadership, is what I love about what we do.
• 42:12
  Speaker 3: When it comes to personal passions, I love cooking.
• 42:15
  Speaker 3: I cook all the time, especially for my friends and family, but I've been cooking since I can remember myself with a black belt in barbecue, in barbecue, so if it's to smoke it or put it on a rotisserie or grill it, or yeah, you're always welcome to a really good steak at my house.
• 42:38
  Speaker 2: Sounds great, sounds great.
• 42:39
  Speaker 2: So, hey, we've covered a lot of ground, obviously, about the company, the industry, you guys as professionals and a little personal.
• 42:45
  Speaker 2: Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up the show?
• 42:46
  Speaker 2: And a little personal.
• 42:47
  Speaker 2: Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up the show?
• 42:49
  Speaker 3: I just want to say that I think Vova and myself we represent a lot of people.
• 42:53
  Speaker 3: We're lucky enough to be the ones that actually get to be vocal about it, but behind us there are thousands of people at Wix and they're really amazing people and they're devoting themselves and their dedication, their knowledge, their time to doing something very meaningful, and I think it's a really wonderful culture to be a part of.
• 43:18
  Speaker 3: So I know it's not FinTech and I know it's not specifically under any one of those questions, but it is, in my point of view, one of the most important things.
• 43:26
  Speaker 3: But it is, in my point of view, one of the most important things the people, the way we work, the culture, the deep understanding between people that may have been fighting a moment ago over resources, but now they understand they need to move together.
• 43:42
  Speaker 3: It's a really beautiful culture.
• 43:43
  Speaker 3: I'm really happy to be part of it.
• 43:51
  Speaker 4: Volvo.
• 43:51
  Speaker 4: Any final comments from you?
• 43:52
  Speaker 4: I wanted to add something which is like connected to not connected to what Amit said, because I fully agree with him.
• 43:55
  Speaker 4: I want to value add on the things we talked before.
• 43:59
  Speaker 4: I think and maybe I will sound like Captain Obvious, but I'm very confident that right now we are in the pivotal stage.
• 44:06
  Speaker 4: We I mean, like you know, people in payments, humanity, whatever in the pivotal stage where we need to embrace, you know, agility and flexibility and understand what is changing around us right now because of AI and because of the follow-up steps, is something that we need to, we definitely need to embrace.
• 44:25
  Speaker 4: If, in the past, we talked about, you know, about agility and flexibility, it was always useful but was not actually needed on that degree.
• 44:33
  Speaker 4: Right now, I think it's a must have.
• 44:35
  Speaker 4: So, whether you are starting the journey in payments or not in payments, in fintech, not in fintech I think it's important to pay attention to that, and not only pay attention to that, but actually become a part of the change and make the change.
• 44:49
  Speaker 4: Yeah, that's what I wanted to end up with.
• 44:51
  Speaker 4: From my point of view, we are going into, through that transition right now and we're going through that transition personally, the ones who understand.
• 45:01
  Speaker 4: I just wish everyone to understand that and in addition to having a strategic decision, also have the strategic action in that regard.
• 45:10
  Speaker 2: Okay, I think that's a great way to close out the show.
• 45:12
  Speaker 2: So I know both of you, tom, yours is very valuable, so I want to thank you for being here.
• 45:16
  Speaker 2: I really appreciate it.
• 45:18
  Speaker 3: Thank you for having us.
• 45:19
  Speaker 2: It's been a pleasure and, to all your listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story.
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 45:28
  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.
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: If you enjoyed listening, please share on your social channels as well.