Latest / Leaders In Payments / Marwan Forzley, Co-Founder and CEO of Veem | Episode 73

Transcript

Marwan Forzley, Co-Founder and CEO of Veem | Episode 73 · Leaders In Payments

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the leaders in payments podcast, where we talk to C-level leaders from across the payments landscape, 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: We do this in 110 countries, 50 plus currencies.
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: We have about a quarter million accounts on the platform.
• 0:24
  Speaker 2: We do both domestic and international payments.
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: And again, it's all around the same premise.
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: We've got to make it really simple for businesses to pay and get paid.
• 0:34
  Speaker 2: It's a wire replacement type service is simple way to describe it.
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: It's like Venmo for businesses globally, domestic and international.
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: [inaudible]
• 0:48
  Speaker 2: Our one fours Lee, the CEO of Veem.
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: And he is our special guest this week.
• 0:53
  Speaker 2: This is episode 73 of the leaders in payments podcast.
• 0:56
  Speaker 2: And I'm your host, Greg Meyers.
• 0:57
  Speaker 2: And Hey, before we get started, if you happen to office in Houston, Austin, or North Texas, check out FI's workspace where their mission is to help others do more, check them out@fuseworkspace.com.
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: Back to the show, Marwan grew up and went to school in Canada and is now based in San Francisco where he started Veem in 2014 prior to starting beam, he ran e-commerce for Western union after having sold his prior company to them, the theme is the simplest way for businesses to pay and get paid around the world.
• 1:28
  Speaker 2: All you need is an email address.
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: They operate in 110 countries with 50 plus currencies and have a quarter of a million accounts on their platform.
• 1:38
  Speaker 2: Their goal is to make paying and getting paid as simple as possible.
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: A simple way to think about it is that they're the Venmo for businesses, both domestically and internationally.
• 1:49
  Speaker 2: They use six different rails to move money, including things like MasterCard and visa, rails, Swift and blockchain technologies, as well as several others.
• 1:57
  Speaker 2: What makes Veem different is their simplicity, cost savings and timing of the payments.
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: Marwan has a passion for using technology to create a great customer experience and loves to make a difference in the lives of his business customers.
• 2:11
  Speaker 2: We've got a great episode today.
• 2:13
  Speaker 2: So let's get started.
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: [inaudible]
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: Thank you for being here and welcome to the leaders and payments podcast.
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: Thank you for having me.
• 2:25
  Speaker 2: Absolutely.
• 2:25
  Speaker 2: So let's dive right in.
• 2:27
  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.
• 2:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so I'm based in San Francisco.
• 2:35
  Speaker 2: I grew up in Canada.
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: I went to school in Canada, computer engineering and MBA, and from Canada to New York and from New York to San Francisco, I've been in the payment space for a long time.
• 2:47
  Speaker 2: I started late 2014.
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: I used to run e-commerce for senior Western union through an acquisition of a company called[inaudible], which I found them insulted them. And then prior to I wasn't another
• 3:00
  Speaker 3: Startup that ended up with Nokia.
• 3:01
  Speaker 3: So I spent a good chunk of my life going back and forth between startups and big companies, but I've been in the payments space for awhile.
• 3:09
  Speaker 2: Okay, well, let's discuss Veem.
• 3:11
  Speaker 2: So tell our audience a little bit about what Veeam does
• 3:14
  Speaker 3: The simplest way for businesses to pay and get paid around the world.
• 3:17
  Speaker 3: All you need is email.
• 3:18
  Speaker 3: So for example, if you're a business in California and you want to send money to Germany or to another company that you work with in New York, all you do is you enter the email address of the party you're sending money to, and the amount that you you'd like to send, and that's it, you hit pay.
• 3:33
  Speaker 3: And the message goes out to the receiver, the receiver onboards themselves on the platform.
• 3:39
  Speaker 3: We then pick up money from one country deposit money into another country.
• 3:43
  Speaker 3: We do this in 110 countries, 50 plus currencies.
• 3:46
  Speaker 3: We have about a quarter million accounts on the platform.
• 3:49
  Speaker 3: We do both domestic and international payments.
• 3:52
  Speaker 3: And again, it's all around the same premise.
• 3:54
  Speaker 3: We got to make it really simple for businesses to pay and get paid.
• 3:59
  Speaker 3: It's a wire replacement type service is simple way to describe it.
• 4:03
  Speaker 3: It's like Venmo for businesses globally, domestic and international.
• 4:07
  Speaker 2: Are there certain verticals that you participate in more than others or is that across the board?
• 4:13
  Speaker 3: As I mentioned, we have quarter million accounts.
• 4:15
  Speaker 3: So we had a lot of industries and verticals.
• 4:18
  Speaker 3: We do have quite a bit of startups, technology companies, e-tail online business solutions and online business services.
• 4:27
  Speaker 3: So we do all with that segment.
• 4:29
  Speaker 3: We also have some importers exporters, a little bit of retail, and we probably have quite a bit of indexing into that startup technology startups in particular e-tail online business services.
• 4:43
  Speaker 3: These are segments that we do very well with.
• 4:45
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 4:45
  Speaker 2: And are there different like alternative payment methods that are used?
• 4:49
  Speaker 2: I mean, like is Bitcoin part of this?
• 4:52
  Speaker 2: So we have a
• 4:53
  Speaker 3: Called multi-racial, which essentially enables us to route transactions on different rails.
• 5:01
  Speaker 3: There's six of them that we use.
• 5:02
  Speaker 3: We have our own bank accounts and a number of countries.
• 5:05
  Speaker 3: We call that treasury.
• 5:07
  Speaker 3: So for example, in that model, if I'm sending money to Germany, there's nothing that I sent to Germany.
• 5:13
  Speaker 3: I have balance euros and my German bank account, and I use my balance to move money to the recipient.
• 5:20
  Speaker 3: So that's method, number one, we integrate into visa and MasterCard and can route transactions to bank accounts associated with debit cards.
• 5:29
  Speaker 3: So that's for real-time payments.
• 5:30
  Speaker 3: We use blockchain and crypto for markets that are emerging like India, Philippines, Mexico, Brazil.
• 5:36
  Speaker 3: These are like really good markets where we use.
• 5:39
  Speaker 3: We use a lot of crypto and the way we do it is we essentially go from fear to crypto, to crypto, to Fiat.
• 5:46
  Speaker 3: The cryptos are basically a way to cross from one currency to another.
• 5:51
  Speaker 3: In most of the cases we end up using Bitcoin, cause that's the most liquid protocol in the world of cryptos.
• 5:57
  Speaker 3: So that's method.
• 5:58
  Speaker 3: Number three, we also plug into third-party providers in countries that are regulated like China.
• 6:04
  Speaker 3: For example, we send the money to our partners in these countries and they do local processing for us.
• 6:12
  Speaker 3: We have access to Swift and then all this is organized around the method where money goes into a wallet and then other for wallet, this is a commercial grade multicurrency wallet that enables businesses to have access to the best way to move money into an account and the best way to move money out of an account it's like designed around simplicity around delightful experiences, giving optionality to the user.
• 6:38
  Speaker 3: And then we do the payment routing on the backend, optimize the delivery of the payment, depending on what the user likes to pay with or get paid with.
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 6:46
  Speaker 2: And are most of your clients, small businesses, medium, large.
• 6:50
  Speaker 2: What's sort of the makeup of the portfolio.
• 6:52
  Speaker 3: It's across the board.
• 6:53
  Speaker 3: The bulk of the accounts are small and mid, but we have micro businesses are like tiny.
• 6:59
  Speaker 3: And then we have few that are the largest side, but this we spot is really SMBs.
• 7:05
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 7:06
  Speaker 2: We read and hear a lot.
• 7:07
  Speaker 2: And we have for years about companies helping to take friction out of the whole pay and get paid area within small business.
• 7:14
  Speaker 2: So how do you guys help small businesses take that friction out?
• 7:17
  Speaker 3: It's really based around key organizing principles.
• 7:21
  Speaker 3: Number one, they experience ought to be something very different than what you have access to today.
• 7:27
  Speaker 3: So today businesses use bank wire.
• 7:29
  Speaker 3: They got frustrated with that experience.
• 7:32
  Speaker 3: They come to Veem because they're looking for something simpler.
• 7:35
  Speaker 3: So let me walk you through that.
• 7:37
  Speaker 3: If you have, let's say$5,000 that you're sending to a business partner that you're doing business with.
• 7:43
  Speaker 3: When you do it on bank wire, you have to gather all the information on the receiver, their Swift codes, or the currency pairs, their bank account information in intermediary bank codes.
• 7:54
  Speaker 3: And you got to fill that information on the wire form.
• 7:58
  Speaker 3: Some of that is online so that you have to show up to the parish and do it at the bank.
• 8:02
  Speaker 3: Then you have to pay a bunch of fees to send money.
• 8:05
  Speaker 3: So this is the bank wire fee.
• 8:07
  Speaker 3: And then you have to figure out what foreign exchange you have to do it before cutoff times.
• 8:11
  Speaker 3: And when you do it, you don't really don't what happens to your money because you have to wait until the receiver tells you, Hey, I have your money.
• 8:17
  Speaker 3: Same thing on the receiver.
• 8:18
  Speaker 3: And the receiver doesn't know when they're going to get paid.
• 8:21
  Speaker 3: So they have to constantly check the bank account and refresh it to make sure that there is money.
• 8:27
  Speaker 3: And when money shows up in the bank account, they have a hard time figuring out what money belongs to the invoice because they send the invoice out.
• 8:35
  Speaker 3: They're expecting a certain, you know, it starts in the mail and when the money shows up, it's different than what they were expecting because of the fees that were deducted from the money deposited.
• 8:44
  Speaker 3: They also don't know how to close these transactions in the accounting systems that they use.
• 8:49
  Speaker 3: So that's generally how it works today in the world of bank wire, the experience of NVMe is the opposite of that.
• 8:55
  Speaker 3: So the center, they set up an account on Veem takes like a couple of minutes and you log in, you have two things you can do.
• 9:02
  Speaker 3: You can send payments or you can get paid, get paid, meaning you can request or invoice.
• 9:08
  Speaker 3: All you need to do is have an email address of the receiver and the amount of money that you're sending.
• 9:14
  Speaker 3: The whole thing takes 10 seconds because these are the two fields you need email and the amount.
• 9:19
  Speaker 3: So then when you send the payment, the receiver gets the message that there's money coming to them.
• 9:25
  Speaker 3: They choose the currency.
• 9:25
  Speaker 3: They want, they enrolled on cells on the system.
• 9:29
  Speaker 3: And when that's completed, we them start payment routing.
• 9:33
  Speaker 3: But the experience here what's different about it is, Hey, it's really simple.
• 9:37
  Speaker 3: All you need is the email.
• 9:38
  Speaker 3: And that bound be you attract the payment like FedEx, you know, both the sender and the receiver see where the payment is at.
• 9:46
  Speaker 3: That receiver is only five.
• 9:48
  Speaker 3: When the payment is deposited in their bank account.
• 9:51
  Speaker 3: And then they have all the documents necessary to take that information and plugging it into accounting systems that they use.
• 9:58
  Speaker 3: We're integrated into QuickBooks, zero net, suite, Magento savior.
• 10:03
  Speaker 3: We are integrated into a bunch of systems that customers use today to make it really simple for them to integrate payments into the environment that they use.
• 10:12
  Speaker 3: So that's a fundamentally different experience than what you get today from bank wire.
• 10:17
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 10:17
  Speaker 3: That's a,
• 10:18
  Speaker 2: That's a lot of friction when you talk through exactly what you have to do with the bank wire solutions.
• 10:24
  Speaker 3: Yes.
• 10:24
  Speaker 3: And that's our job in the market is to eliminate the friction.
• 10:29
  Speaker 3: We'd use it, make it really simple for businesses to paying it paid.
• 10:34
  Speaker 3: So you don't have to think about it when you do it.
• 10:36
  Speaker 3: And that's really the entire vision of Veem.
• 10:38
  Speaker 3: It's like when you buy coffee in the morning, you don't think of how you pay.
• 10:41
  Speaker 3: You just do it.
• 10:42
  Speaker 3: Your mind is on emails and calendars and everything else in life.
• 10:47
  Speaker 3: When you pay, you just, it's habitual, you pull up your cash card, whatever you have, you pay and you move on.
• 10:53
  Speaker 3: We want the same experience for payments, domestic and international.
• 10:58
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 10:58
  Speaker 2: So beyond removing friction from the pay and get paid solutions that are out there today, what else differentiates your company from your competitor?
• 11:07
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I'd say the simplicity of the user experience, the cost savings compared to the bank, the timing of the payments.
• 11:14
  Speaker 3: We have the ability to do payments any way.
• 11:17
  Speaker 3: You'd like from really fast, to really slow.
• 11:19
  Speaker 3: We support real-time payments.
• 11:22
  Speaker 3: We support ACH, which is the next day service.
• 11:25
  Speaker 3: We support checks, which takes like five days to send the payment.
• 11:29
  Speaker 3: So whatever speed you want, we support.
• 11:32
  Speaker 3: So we talk along the simplicity of the experience comes first, cost savings next in line timing, depending on what the timing you want to give you a choice of far solutions to work with all this is wrapped around concepts, where you can track the payments, just like you track your shipment on FedEx and you integrate into the experience that you use today when you're doing your day-to-day business.
• 11:57
  Speaker 3: So if you're in QuickBooks or Xero or net, suite, or Magento or wherever you're doing business from, we've plugged in into that environment.
• 12:05
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 12:06
  Speaker 3: So let's talk about the payments industry as a whole.
• 12:09
  Speaker 3: Where do you see the payments industry heading in say the next two to three years?
• 12:14
  Speaker 3: I think there's a movement towards more real-time systems in the U S and around the world.
• 12:20
  Speaker 3: I think you'll see a lot more movement in that direction.
• 12:24
  Speaker 3: I think you'll see the emergence of a lot of solutions that are centered around wallet systems to make the experiences simpler for all parties on the system.
• 12:34
  Speaker 3: Given the happened with COVID, we're starting to see there's an impact on check volume.
• 12:40
  Speaker 3: And I think that is the start of a bigger decline in Czech use over time.
• 12:46
  Speaker 3: I think anything that is digital is going to continue to skyrocket.
• 12:51
  Speaker 3: I think the experiences in pre COVID were a lot more in the store and a lot more retail, like they experienced as post COVID are going to be more centered around virtual e-commerce online, shopping, doing transactions digitally.
• 13:07
  Speaker 3: That's when this is going to continue for a long time.
• 13:10
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 13:10
  Speaker 3: I asked this question at least a lot lately is how far so much has moved to digital.
• 13:16
  Speaker 3: And e-commerce just because of the pandemic.
• 13:19
  Speaker 3: How far back, once we're out of the pandemic, do you think that pendulum swings to where people are going into stores more and buying more mature sort of card present rates and things like that?
• 13:30
  Speaker 3: Do you feel like that pendulum is gonna swing all the way back or most of the way back or halfway back?
• 13:34
  Speaker 3: What's sort of your feeling on that?
• 13:36
  Speaker 3: I mean, it's hard to tell.
• 13:38
  Speaker 3: I think my God there's like probably like halfway back.
• 13:41
  Speaker 3: I think habits are set.
• 13:42
  Speaker 3: We've been doing this for like almost a year now, pre COVID customers used to start in the store and if they need something that they can't find in the store, they call online.
• 13:52
  Speaker 3: Now it's the other way around.
• 13:55
  Speaker 3: You really started online.
• 13:56
  Speaker 3: And if there's something that you can't find or you need it urgently, you can wait for shipping.
• 14:02
  Speaker 3: You try to go to a store to find it and pick it up.
• 14:05
  Speaker 3: But the habits are set like online is a big thing.
• 14:09
  Speaker 3: It'll remain to be a big thing.
• 14:11
  Speaker 3: Maybe you'll see some swinging back to more store given that post pandemic people will be back in offices and back on the street, but habits are set.
• 14:21
  Speaker 3: I mean, I think online is a safer bet at this stage.
• 14:27
  Speaker 4: Hey, everyone, as you know,
• 14:29
  Speaker 3: I've worked in the payment space for a long time.
• 14:31
  Speaker 3: A lot has changed over the years.
• 14:33
  Speaker 3: And we talk about those changes a good bit on the show, but some things in this industry never change.
• 14:38
  Speaker 3: For example, attrition is always a concern.
• 14:41
  Speaker 3: And so is your bottom line.
• 14:43
  Speaker 3: And PCI noncompliance fees will always be a part of the industry driving that bottom line, but also keeping us up at night, worrying that attrition, especially when the inevitable PCI noncompliance fee hike is underway.
• 14:57
  Speaker 3: That's why I'm excited to bring in company.com as a sponsor, right?
• 15:01
  Speaker 3: When you're increasing fees, give your merchants something of value to the company.
• 15:06
  Speaker 3: Dot com security suite is the perfect way to add value by offering a real time security dashboard with antivirus expert tech support in Thai fishing software, dark web scanning, and more company.com offers various product assortments and solutions that have proven to reduce merchant attrition for years now.
• 15:26
  Speaker 3: And this new security suite that compliment your current PCI program will be a game changer for you.
• 15:32
  Speaker 3: Learn more@www.company.com or email security suite at company dash Corp com.
• 15:39
  Speaker 3: The link is also on our website.
• 15:42
  Speaker 3: And now back to my interview with[inaudible],
• 15:46
  Speaker 2: [inaudible], we've mentioned a couple of things around the pandemic and how it's affected, and you know, you guys have
• 15:56
  Speaker 3: Large part of your portfolio being small business, small business obviously have been hit hard during the pandemic and the U S government has provided these PPP loans.
• 16:06
  Speaker 3: Are you guys doing anything around the PPP loans to help your small businesses?
• 16:10
  Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely.
• 16:11
  Speaker 3: We enable businesses to process BBP applications on the Veem platform.
• 16:18
  Speaker 3: We did that during round one.
• 16:20
  Speaker 3: We were fairly early providing that capabilities.
• 16:23
  Speaker 3: We were all of the earlier payment processors to do this, and we did it because it's a service to the customers that need help.
• 16:31
  Speaker 3: If you think of COVID, they created two different worlds.
• 16:34
  Speaker 3: One world is doing really well and that's like anything virtual and one world that is struggling and that's anything that requires physical exchange of goods and services.
• 16:45
  Speaker 3: So for that world, we felt like we need to support them with something that helps their business and BBP was perfect.
• 16:53
  Speaker 3: So we enabled the customer to submit their application Levine.
• 16:58
  Speaker 3: We take this application, we process it, we send the tower bank partners, they then file it with the government and the loan is issued and they are able to work with the loan.
• 17:07
  Speaker 3: They have to run their business.
• 17:09
  Speaker 3: So that's something we are proud of.
• 17:11
  Speaker 3: We're helping our customers to leverage the PPP program to the best we can and to weather the storm so that they can ride that out and get back to hopefully get their business back on track.
• 17:25
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 17:25
  Speaker 3: And we talked earlier about some of the trends, and I like to ask this question just to get people's sort of vision of the future future.
• 17:32
  Speaker 3: If you get your crystal ball out and look, say 10 years down the road, what do you think payments starts to look like in that longer period of time?
• 17:40
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it'll be hopefully all digital, very little cash or checks or anything paper.
• 17:48
  Speaker 3: I you'll see the rise of crypto as well.
• 17:52
  Speaker 3: And blockchain use cases that's hopefully become more prominent.
• 17:58
  Speaker 3: And I think you'll see a model where today there are domestic payment systems and when you do international, international is a, is a lot more headache and a lot more work to get the payments done.
• 18:13
  Speaker 3: We're going to see a model where the world becomes less borderless, less borders, more global.
• 18:20
  Speaker 3: And I think you're going to find that e-commerce and remote labor use cases are going to be the way of life.
• 18:29
  Speaker 3: That's like default methods of operations on a day-to-day basis.
• 18:34
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: Let's switch gears a little bit and talk about you.
• 18:37
  Speaker 2: You've talked a little bit about your background, but tell us a little more about your journey and how you got to your role there as the CEO of IEM.
• 18:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 18:45
  Speaker 2: This is
• 18:46
  Speaker 3: The second time.
• 18:47
  Speaker 3: I mean, my previous company[inaudible], which I found an assault to Western union, I was the CEO there. I started my career in engineering and then went into product management from product management, into product marketing and then business development and then MNA. And so I've gone actually through all the various functions along the way before really running companies. And that is good training because you see all the different aspects of the business so that when you're running the business, you're able to relate to all its functions. And so that's something that I think is helpful in everybody's journey. As you go from one role to another, that's really a good way to then broaden their skill sets. So that the one that if you want to run their company, you understand the various aspects of the business you're running. Okay.
• 19:37
  Speaker 2: What are some things that you're passionate about?
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: Maybe one thing work-related and one thing personal we'll work with later,
• 19:44
  Speaker 3: We like taking advantage of new technology, disruptive technology to change the landscape and give something new to the user.
• 19:56
  Speaker 3: And so if you think of the way we build theme, we really try to leverage the latest tools and technology to bypass established infrastructure, to create a different experience to the user.
• 20:11
  Speaker 3: And that formula, that playbook is something that I think will do well in, in tech, in general and FinTech, because you're using different instruments and different tools to go get that customer or something new that they only have access to from a personal perspective, I like environments where you can make a difference to somebody's life, whether that's personal life or their business.
• 20:37
  Speaker 3: And so we at Veem and the reason why we created the theme is to help businesses with their payment delivery, for both paying and getting paid because you're taking friction out of the way.
• 20:51
  Speaker 3: And these are customers that as, and BS in particular tend to be the least service in the market.
• 20:58
  Speaker 3: I mean, generally you'll see all kinds of services for the consumer, all kinds of services for enterprise customers as, and BS are the ones that are lost in the market.
• 21:08
  Speaker 3: The banks don't service them well.
• 21:10
  Speaker 3: And we go after that segment because we feel that it's the most under-serviced market in the industry.
• 21:16
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 21:17
  Speaker 2: You know, when I started in payments, this goes back about 15 years, I wasn't really looking to get into payments, sort of fell into the industry.
• 21:25
  Speaker 2: And I think times have changed a lot in the last few years with the sheer amount of investment that's happened, just even the word FinTech being created and the disruption that's happened in the industry.
• 21:37
  Speaker 2: So I think now kids coming out of college, they can look at payments as an industry to build a career around.
• 21:43
  Speaker 2: And I think there's even some colleges that offer FinTech or payments types of courses.
• 21:49
  Speaker 2: So I think it's a different environment.
• 21:51
  Speaker 2: So being someone who's been in the payments industry a while, what would your advice be to someone who's just coming out of college, they want to start a career in payments.
• 22:00
  Speaker 2: What advice would you give them to help them be successful?
• 22:02
  Speaker 3: I think FinTech is going to be one of the hardest industries for awhile.
• 22:06
  Speaker 3: It's probably one of the hottest industries in tech because it's an industry that has not seen innovation for a long period of time.
• 22:15
  Speaker 3: The reason it's sexy right now is because it's been building up for a while.
• 22:20
  Speaker 3: Cause there hasn't been that many changes in that industry.
• 22:23
  Speaker 3: And now with the technology and the amount of capital that's pouring into it, it's creating an environment where the established infrastructure and the established players are really under attack by modern companies that leverage technology and leverage their speed of operation to take a shot at providing something very different to the user and therefore taking a shot at the established players in the industry.
• 22:49
  Speaker 3: And that's exciting.
• 22:51
  Speaker 3: And the thing is going to be like that for a long period of time.
• 22:53
  Speaker 3: It's a good time to be in payments and FinTech.
• 22:56
  Speaker 3: I think if you're starting out, that's a good career move.
• 22:59
  Speaker 3: You will find a lot of demand for the skillsets that you set up in this industry.
• 23:05
  Speaker 3: Do you think,
• 23:05
  Speaker 2: I think that it makes sense for someone coming out of school to do sort of like you did.
• 23:10
  Speaker 2: And they saw the engineering side of the business, the marketing side of the business, all the different aspects is that sort of something you think someone just starting out should follow that sort of career path.
• 23:21
  Speaker 3: If you start in engineering, it gives you a good grounding as to what it takes to build products.
• 23:28
  Speaker 3: And that's really good training.
• 23:30
  Speaker 3: If you finish your school wherever you graduate in and you want to be in FinTech.
• 23:34
  Speaker 3: My recommendation is to work for startups.
• 23:37
  Speaker 3: You'll learn a lot.
• 23:39
  Speaker 3: You'll see, uh, how hard it is to create change in an industry.
• 23:42
  Speaker 3: And you'll get a lot of experience in a very short period of time.
• 23:46
  Speaker 3: I think generally most graduates end up going for brand name, large companies.
• 23:53
  Speaker 3: And I think if you want to be an entrepreneur, you don't want to do that.
• 23:57
  Speaker 3: You want to actually go to startups that are funded, that are able to teach you how growth happens.
• 24:04
  Speaker 3: And so you learn from that environment on the ground and that's the best training you're going to get.
• 24:10
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I would agree.
• 24:11
  Speaker 3: Well, we've covered a lot of ground about you and your background and Veem and the industry.
• 24:16
  Speaker 3: Is there anything else you'd like to cover before we wrap up?
• 24:19
  Speaker 3: I would say that the market, the SMB market is an area that out of all the segments in FinTech is one of the most exciting, cause that's an area that's the most underserved, it's requires a blend of technology and know-how and expertise to go after that market.
• 24:39
  Speaker 3: And it's a market that's going to see a flux of services going after it.
• 24:44
  Speaker 3: And it's going to make that industry very highly in the, to be, yeah, I would agree.
• 24:48
  Speaker 3: I've always sort of had a passion for that small business market as well.
• 24:52
  Speaker 3: Well, Maran, we've covered a lot of ground today.
• 24:55
  Speaker 3: I want to thank you for your time.
• 24:56
  Speaker 3: I know it's very valuable.
• 24:57
  Speaker 3: So thank you so much for being on the show today.
• 25:00
  Speaker 3: Thank you for having me.
• 25:01
  Speaker 3: Absolutely.
• 25:01
  Speaker 3: And to all you listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well.
• 25:04
  Speaker 3: And until the next story,
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us this week on the leaders in payments podcast, make sure you visit our website@leadersinpayments.com, where you can subscribe to the show and where you'll find our show notes.
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: If you enjoyed listening, please share on your social channels as well.