Latest / Leaders In Payments / David Lambert, CEO of Paycross | Episode 246

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David Lambert, CEO of Paycross | Episode 246 · 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: We talk about the phrase payment orchestration, but we actually question what it means to be a payment orchestration platform.
• 0:24
  Speaker 2: That's really part of our mission today is to effectively build out a full-stack payment orchestration technology business where our merchants see stickiness.
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: That means they don't have to leave our platform to get additional solutions.
• 0:45
  Speaker 3: That was David Lambert, the CEO of Paycross, and he is my special guest on this episode, episode 246 of the Leaders in Payments podcast, and I'm your host, greg Myers.
• 0:54
  Speaker 3: Paycross is a multifaceted payments orchestration technology platform.
• 0:59
  Speaker 3: Paycross can support its customers with a comprehensive set of solutions across card payment processing, local payment methods and cross-border transactions.
• 1:07
  Speaker 3: David and I discuss his journey to the role of CEO.
• 1:10
  Speaker 3: We also discuss what differentiates Paycross and David's professional and personal passions, and much, much more.
• 1:16
  Speaker 3: We've got a great episode ahead, so let's get started.
• 1:19
  Speaker 3: Hi, david, thank you for being here and welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 1:28
  Speaker 2: Thanks, Greg.
• 1:29
  Speaker 2: It's a pleasure to be here and thank you for having me on the show.
• 1:31
  Speaker 3: Absolutely.
• 1:32
  Speaker 3: So let's dive right in, If you don't mind.
• 1:34
  Speaker 3: 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.
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah, of course.
• 1:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so I'm a Londoner from the United Kingdom, pretty much in North London.
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: All my life.
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: I went to school in North London a boarding school, as we have over here which was an experience in itself.
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: And then I went to, I guess, college in the Southwest of England, actually to Bristol, bristol University, where I studied modern languages, which is one of those things because I never really knew what I wanted to do with my life and I wasn't bad at French actually when I was at school and I went on to study modern languages at university, trying to have that moment of clarity somewhere in my life that I would, even at that age, understand what I wanted to do with myself.
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: And I had a moment.
• 2:17
  Speaker 2: I lived in France as well for a year as part of the course.
• 2:19
  Speaker 2: I lived in Paris and a friend of mine who was there with me at the time said in one of those kind of heart to heart moments where I was probably it was probably late night, I probably had too much to drink and realized that I was coming to the end of my college life and still hadn't got a clue what I wanted to do and, as most 20-somethings probably do before they really kind of understand what their life's about and I always fancied being on the radio and getting into media and entertainment and so I kind of put my heart and soul into that and I went back to university for my final year after Paris and got involved with student radio and then from there I went on to have a first career at Virgin Radio in London and that was quite fun.
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: I realized that five, 10 years into that job I wasn't making any money but I was having a lot of fun and meeting some very interesting people.
• 3:06
  Speaker 2: But it was only really when I sort of got married and realized that what I was earning was definitely not able to support my life.
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: And you have that realization moving on from my 20s into my early 30s.
• 3:17
  Speaker 2: That, christ, if I don't actually figure this out, it's going to be a challenging life.
• 3:22
  Speaker 2: So through various means it drove me into payments and I've never really looked back.
• 3:27
  Speaker 2: Actually, it's an industry that when I joined in 2011 now, so I've got 12 years ago very different place to where it is now.
• 3:34
  Speaker 2: It still feels like the land of opportunity, but back then it was like a real wide Iona because I'd gone from a warm and cuddly, friendly media environment where everybody ended their emails with a little X at the end, thanks X to an environment which was, in financial services, quite cutthroat.
• 3:51
  Speaker 2: Be professional and actually understand that you're with serious people here not that the media wasn't serious, but real serious finance people who are driven to make money.
• 4:00
  Speaker 2: And it was a big shift for me.
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: But actually when I took quite well, I'm quite a fast learner Back in 2011, I found myself at the deep end of payments and I was mixing it with a lot of people.
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: I didn't really know what I was talking about back then, but I learned quick and actually I always think that's one of the great things about certainly this industry I'm sure others, but this industry in particular is that when you really start to apply yourself and understand things, you can pick it up quite quickly.
• 4:23
  Speaker 3: Okay, okay, great.
• 4:24
  Speaker 3: Well, let's talk about the company Paycross.
• 4:27
  Speaker 2: So tell us what Paycross does I hooked up with some guys who had some interesting technology that ultimately allowed me to move ahead and develop the idea and it was quite a lot of us doing that business at the time and it was quite an interesting sort of eye opener to actually supporting myself, to actually getting into more leadership positions as well.
• 4:47
  Speaker 2: And as we evolved that business from, I guess lifestyle and, as some might say, started, like you know, started in a, as you call it, in the States of Garage, you know, to actually taking an office, working from home and then taking an office and actually having people working for us in an office environment.
• 5:05
  Speaker 2: And suddenly I'd gone from being in that position as an employee and I say suddenly, but it takes a while to get there but I've gone from that position of being an employee and looking around all these C level executives going, huddling in boardrooms and thinking, god, I really want to be part of that myself one day.
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: And actually just taking a step back, there was an opportunity when I worked at Secure Trading to take on a more senior role, but it never quite worked out.
• 5:29
  Speaker 2: I think there was a sort of dispute between the management as to what my roles should really be at the company, which is what precipitated my departure, because I thought that in the end, actually, you know what I want to be in control of my own destiny here and I want to be the, I want to be the guy that makes these decisions.
• 5:43
  Speaker 2: I don't really want my own sort of life being in the control of other people when it comes to, certainly, my own abilities.
• 5:50
  Speaker 2: So, you know, fast forwarding, I was found myself, you know, a few years ago in a company that we'd started, that had employees, and that those management decisions were being taken by myself and my partners at the time, and it felt really exciting and it was that moment that made me realize that, you know, a lot of things in life are possible if you, if you really apply yourself.
• 6:09
  Speaker 2: And so back then, you know, I looked back eight years ago and I was programming music for an eighties radio station and eight years on and I'm managing a payments company, and that that's really an amazing moment for me in my life that I kind of realized that these things are possible.
• 6:24
  Speaker 2: So we started to accelerate that and we built something really interesting there.
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: And unfortunately, as things happen, you know, sometimes just partners just can't agree on things, and so we got to sort of midway through last year and actually I decided to break away from that business and, and actually, with all of the goodwill and the good network and some of the people that are accumulated along the way, set up Paycross.
• 6:49
  Speaker 2: And what we did with Paycross is we want to be we continue to want to be full global payment orchestration platform, and that orchestration platform is all encompassing where we believe that as a technology business, we can really join the dots in a way perhaps that a lot of people talk about this, but in a way that perhaps hasn't really been nailed yet, and I think that there are many different companies trying to lock down orchestration and, believe me, we're not unique in some respects, but we are unique in other respects.
• 7:24
  Speaker 2: We talk about the phrase payment orchestration, but we actually question what it means to be a payment orchestration platform, and that's really part of our mission today is to effectively build out a full stack payment orchestration technology business where our merchants see stickiness.
• 7:41
  Speaker 2: That means they don't have to leave our platform to get additional solutions, and one of the reasons that I found trust payments or secure trading quite challenging back in the day was that we never had all of the solutions that our merchants needed, and I think there was a trap in payments, or there is a trap in payments sometimes is that when you build a payments business comes with a, I guess, an angle where you don't always understand what the merchant wants.
• 8:07
  Speaker 2: And the moment you fall into that trap to try and build your own business in your own vision, you can be left behind quite quickly, especially if the technology doesn't sort of fit the bills.
• 8:16
  Speaker 2: So what we try to do is we try to understand what exactly today a merchant needs, and we know that more and more and more the banking sector, certainly in Europe I can't speak too much for the US, but certainly in Europe the banking sector is less and less interested in interesting business and I probably put speech marks around the word interesting but less and less interested in interesting business in that it doesn't necessarily want to embrace new technologies, new ideas, which is why we have a bribing neo banking environment.
• 8:50
  Speaker 2: The likes of Revolut and Monzo and some of the others and Starling Bank have kind of come forward to try and plug that gap, especially when it comes to things like financial services, because financial services is such a heavily regulated sector and there's so much in the way of perceived money laundering within financial services that traditional banks really find it a struggle.
• 9:11
  Speaker 2: And so we've realized that a lot of merchants that come to us they want banking solutions and rather than log into their banking portal to get their statements or their balances and their payment processing back office to get their reconciliation there and maybe the acquirers back office to check the charge backs, and maybe they have an external deliverable FX company you know, it's maybe like a Monix or something who who ultimately they use that to do their FX with and suddenly they're logging into sort of four or five different platforms to try and effectively reach a common goal.
• 9:45
  Speaker 2: And what we've built at Paycross is a system of orchestration that ultimately marries or unites all of it together.
• 9:52
  Speaker 2: So when a merchant is using us for their payment processing, why can't they use us for their iBans as well?
• 9:59
  Speaker 2: And we treat as a technology business.
• 10:02
  Speaker 2: We treat any bank that has an API as a potential partner, so we can hook up a bank into our platform and the merchant will say, oh, I bank with ClearBank, for example, or I bank with EqualsMoney, for example, or anybody like that, and we can then marry up all of the technology and all of the reconciliation into the back office, because we've drilled an API into that bank in the first place and and we continue to work like that we don't hold any customer funds.
• 10:28
  Speaker 2: We don't need to be regulated.
• 10:29
  Speaker 2: We're a pure technology orchestration system.
• 10:32
  Speaker 2: So if the merchant then says to us, oh, I need a, I need an acquiring solution in Australia and I need so forth as a payment method and discover as a payment method and I need a bank account in Australia, that is all possible and that is the essence, what we believe to be as orchestration.
• 10:47
  Speaker 2: We see a lot of companies talking about orchestration, which is a variety of payment methods or additional fraud tools or anything like that, but we see that as an absolute minimum.
• 10:57
  Speaker 2: From my days at Trust Payments, secure Trading, I would find myself sort of banging my head against the wall because the merchant had a huge opportunity for us with ideal as a payment method in the Netherlands, but we couldn't support that because we'd never integrated it.
• 11:09
  Speaker 2: And the mental note I made back then was when you set up your own company, make sure that the payment methods are there as an absolute base, because if you only offer Visa or Mastercard and nothing else, you're pretty much dead in the water.
• 11:21
  Speaker 2: So we built Paycross with a view to serving merchants globally from a technology perspective.
• 11:27
  Speaker 2: So we keep building out our tech, we keep including more APIs and actually today, what we've also done is integrated a solution for payouts so we can now do payouts for things like money transfer companies in over 70 countries globally.
• 11:40
  Speaker 2: So we keep adding to the stack and merchants like us because we're flexible, we're agile and we get business done with them in a very slick way.
• 11:49
  Speaker 2: That's the essence of Paycross is that the more sticky we become to our merchants, the less need there is for them to look elsewhere.
• 11:57
  Speaker 2: Where we see the US as an interesting market is there are actually a lot more industries in the US that perhaps hadn't been considered in Europe.
• 12:04
  Speaker 2: So part of our globalization and orchestration plan at PayCross is to very much attack the US market.
• 12:10
  Speaker 2: So there are industries.
• 12:12
  Speaker 2: I'll digress for a moment.
• 12:13
  Speaker 2: When I was at Money 2020 in Vegas a few years ago, I remember seeing a conference going on, sort of in another part of the hotel.
• 12:23
  Speaker 2: That was.
• 12:23
  Speaker 2: What was it?
• 12:24
  Speaker 2: The world's largest seat belt and fastener seat, safety belt fastener conference?
• 12:30
  Speaker 2: And I thought to myself surely it's the world's only safety belt fastener conference.
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: But what it did was it opened my eyes up to the fact that in America and the United States there are so many small verticals that we don't even think about as a European sort of focused business, and that's what makes the US quite exciting for us is, you know, we see things like the health and beauty space.
• 12:54
  Speaker 2: We see things like, you know, online automotives is another great example of this.
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: We see these sectors that haven't really sort of taken hold in Europe as much as they have in the US and actually the opportunity is slightly wider margins and a lot more opportunity out there.
• 13:10
  Speaker 2: Which is why we think that our model of orchestration being able to go to automotive platforms and be able to spin out whatever it is whether it's payroll payment processing not so much deliverable FX, because the US is very US centric, obviously, and there's less FX flow for a lot of the volume that goes through these platforms but certainly things like, maybe, prepaid cards, all of that good stuff that ultimately is quite forward thinking and actually challenging US businesses to think a little bit more digitally in some respects and I know it's going that way in the US but we believe that our platform is well positioned to actually attack some of those sort of interesting evolving sectors, especially the automotive space, and there are lots of different ways that we can help.
• 13:56
  Speaker 3: What would you say?
• 13:57
  Speaker 3: Differentiates your company from your competitors.
• 14:01
  Speaker 2: I think the answer to that question is we're just focusing on very specific niche markets that are underserved right now.
• 14:09
  Speaker 2: And if I were to look at my own history and payments and again coming back to my years working at trust payments, we were kind of pigeonholed into what we were supposed to be selling.
• 14:21
  Speaker 2: So we had the e-commerce guy, we had the video games guy, we had the digital entertainment guy or girl, we had the emerging markets, whatever that meant, and it sort of boxed in verticals.
• 14:36
  Speaker 2: That perhaps was a little bit narrow thinking and you find this a lot in, certainly in the UK and Europe, is that sales people are charged not with going after we talked about nail salons or automotive.
• 14:48
  Speaker 2: They're not challenged with going after specific verticals within e-commerce.
• 14:53
  Speaker 2: It's just e-commerce.
• 14:55
  Speaker 2: So they naturally gravitate to retailers and that's a big issue and a big problem actually.
• 15:00
  Speaker 2: And so where we position ourselves is that we are very focused in our approach to our potential prospects and merchants and what we try to do is we try to really, because we're small enough as a business to be able to afford this time we remain profitable and with that profitability we're not under as much pressure.
• 15:22
  Speaker 2: We don't have investors yet, so it's all organic, so we're not under as much pressure to deliver in terms of revenue as opposed to actually focusing on what a merchant needs when we go to prospects.
• 15:35
  Speaker 2: So if we take a merchant that we've been looking at, funnily enough at the moment a US based booking platform and we know that they process with, I think it's Stripe we know what their volumes splits are because they've told us and we know what their fees look like.
• 15:49
  Speaker 2: So what we've done is we've done, amongst other things, an interchange analysis, comparing what they're paying on a blended rate to what they would play on interchange.
• 15:58
  Speaker 2: Plus, we're looking at how they're processing payments, how it regionally splits out, what their cross border exposure looks like, who they're banking with and all of the different components to what they're actually trying to do right now.
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: Because quite often we find in payments is that merchants and CFOs and in fact, we ourselves as salespeople in payments, can get into a complacency where things just don't really need to change.
• 16:27
  Speaker 2: And that's not a great thing to be proud of, because change is always good.
• 16:32
  Speaker 2: I'm a big believer in change.
• 16:34
  Speaker 2: Change freshens things up all the time.
• 16:35
  Speaker 2: But actually when we look at what our competitors are doing and when we look at what we're doing.
• 16:41
  Speaker 2: We have an analytical approach that I think and it's a bit of an arrogant thing to say perhaps is quite unique.
• 16:47
  Speaker 2: I was going to say unrivalled, but that's not fair because I haven't got analytics on how every single payment company approaches sales.
• 16:55
  Speaker 2: But I think what we're doing is we're quite analytical and quite unique in our analysis and a lot of merchants they get a nice treatment from us so that instead of sending the merchant the pricing on an email, we actually put together a full proposition for them explaining what we do, explaining all the different angles that we can attack their payment processing with, explaining how, at the moment, this is why they're paying this in terms of our competition.
• 17:22
  Speaker 2: We kind of know how they behave, we kind of know what the competition are doing, but we're trying to find those gaps.
• 17:29
  Speaker 2: We're trying to really show a merchant exactly where they need to be, as opposed to being told what they think they want to hear Right.
• 17:37
  Speaker 3: Well, when you step back and look at the payments industry as a whole, where do you think it's headed, say, in the next two to three years?
• 17:45
  Speaker 2: That's a great question and it's sort of the.
• 17:47
  Speaker 2: You know, it's the.
• 17:48
  Speaker 2: If I knew the answer to that, I think I'd be a very wealthy man.
• 17:51
  Speaker 2: But I think, in terms of where it's going, I question in the short term, I question the I'm sure I've got to be careful how I say this, but I question the.
• 18:01
  Speaker 2: The relevance is probably the word, the relevance of Visa and Mastercard in an environment where there are just so many different ways to pay now, and the schemes, the card schemes, have had it good for a long, long, long time and they've gone unchallenged because their network, their technology, is so heavily embedded into the issuing banks that that actually it's.
• 18:21
  Speaker 2: It's one of those things where trying to break that dominance is near impossible.
• 18:26
  Speaker 2: I mean, american Express, it's its own bank, so kind of different story, but but even still they haven't been able to really crack the Visa Mastercard dominance.
• 18:33
  Speaker 2: And so will Visa and Mastercard continue their dominance in the next two to three years?
• 18:38
  Speaker 2: Yes, are there significant challenges to their presence?
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: Yes, very much so.
• 18:43
  Speaker 2: Some of those challenges, you know, fednow is a great example of this If merchants start we have this in the UK with faster payments, the moment those open banking or FedNow and will come to Europe in a minute, it's a slightly different issue.
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: But when those payment methods and FedNow is not a payment method, it's like a scheme, but somebody will somebody will sit on top of it to productise it, to create a payment method that will ideally run off a QR system where at the point of checkout it says do you wish to pay by bank transfer or do you wish to pay by Visa or Mastercard?
• 19:17
  Speaker 2: And you kind of have to put maybe Amazon behind the scenes here for a moment, because it's a slightly different story.
• 19:23
  Speaker 2: But if your normal sort of standard bog stand and mum on pop retailers, fednow solves a major problem for them because it means that they don't have to be contracted to an acquirer.
• 19:34
  Speaker 2: It means that the money comes instantly into their account.
• 19:37
  Speaker 2: It means that the customer can effectively drive the payment via a QR code through their phone or cell phone by effectively hovering over the QR code with their camera, and that links to their app which then instructs the payment.
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: No need for a Visa or Mastercard there and, more significantly, a massive reduction in cost, but at the expense of the issuer, because they don't benefit from the benefit from the interchange, from that, because that's a card payment fee.
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: So open banking in the UK is the same thing.
• 20:06
  Speaker 2: Via faster payments, a merchant, rather than paying 0.2% on the interchange for a debit card or 0.3 on a credit card, plus some scheme fees, plus the acquirer's margin of say 40, 50 bits, whatever it is you know, nearly closing in on 1% there.
• 20:21
  Speaker 2: Interesting story when the productized methods like Vine, vault, tink, token the list goes on and on and on TrueLayer etc.
• 20:31
  Speaker 2: Can effectively power that payment for significantly less and where maybe the merchant's paying 0.25% rather than 1%, that 0.2% is going into the pocket of the processor rather than the bank.
• 20:44
  Speaker 2: So the interchange model is shifting over to the product provider, like the aforementioned open banking providers.
• 20:52
  Speaker 2: I see that's going.
• 20:53
  Speaker 2: That's where Fed now will go, with a lot of people now jumping on this and productizing it so that it becomes effectively a peer-to-peer payment method.
• 21:01
  Speaker 2: Instant payments in the US.
• 21:02
  Speaker 2: In Europe open banking is a little bit more challenging because you're relying on sepa instant and sepa instant is not enabled for all banks across Europe.
• 21:11
  Speaker 2: So it becomes much slower.
• 21:13
  Speaker 2: It's not instant and you're relying on the European Central Bank to effectively mandate that sepa instant must be enabled on all banks across Europe for it to work.
• 21:22
  Speaker 2: That's a lot of banks and that's a lot of countries that need to get their act together.
• 21:26
  Speaker 2: Where you have a domestic country Sweden, I think, has swish Poland have their own clearing methods.
• 21:33
  Speaker 2: Fed now in the US, I think Canada have their own Interac I think it's called out there.
• 21:37
  Speaker 2: So where you have that scheme running, then it's great and that's where it's going and that's where the dominance of Visa and Mastercard becomes really pretty pressured.
• 21:47
  Speaker 2: It's why they're investing in different platforms and different technologies.
• 21:50
  Speaker 2: In fact, I think Visa actually invested in Tink.
• 21:53
  Speaker 2: They also put into currency cloud as well banking platform.
• 21:56
  Speaker 2: So they're really trying to hedge their bets at the moment and see where it's going.
• 22:00
  Speaker 2: The other thing I haven't mentioned, of course, in terms of that's the short term, but the longer term is more around CBDCs, cross-border digital currencies.
• 22:08
  Speaker 2: That's a different thing altogether, although Fed now may put that to bed, but certainly for cross-border payments.
• 22:16
  Speaker 2: It's going to be very interesting to see how that ties in, because the moment, say, for example, the UK and the US come up with some sort of cross-border CBDC arrangement, then you're in a world where Swift is potentially under some threat there, because at the moment obviously sending money to the US requires a swift code and you need to maybe a day and a half, two days, sometimes quicker for the money to arrive.
• 22:43
  Speaker 2: But if it's sent on a cross-border digital currency, where it acts exactly the same way as sending a wire to the US now, but on a digital basis, where, effectively, my £500, whatever I want to send to the US gets translated into a CBDC let's call it a US CBDC within my bank, so I pay the FX to switch it to a digital currency.
• 23:06
  Speaker 2: I then send that to the recipient in the US, who unpacks it on their side, in their account, and then it's just translated back into US dollars Near instantly.
• 23:15
  Speaker 2: That's interesting.
• 23:16
  Speaker 2: That's a very different proposition altogether, but again, it relies on a very serious relationship between, effectively, the US Fed and the Bank of England to agree that route and, as we know, banks globally don't always agree on things.
• 23:31
  Speaker 2: So.
• 23:31
  Speaker 2: But I know that there are significant projects going on with the Bank of England at the moment to try and facilitate cross-border digital currencies.
• 23:39
  Speaker 2: Whether it's within the European Central Bank or whether it's at the US Fed remains to be seen, but I think that's where it's going.
• 23:45
  Speaker 2: I feel like in 10 years time we won't be talking about swift anymore.
• 23:50
  Speaker 3: Right, I would agree with you there.
• 23:51
  Speaker 3: Well, let's switch gears a little bit and talk about you.
• 23:54
  Speaker 3: What are some things that you're passionate about?
• 23:57
  Speaker 3: So, maybe a personal passion and a business passion.
• 24:00
  Speaker 2: Okay, well, from a business passion perspective, I like getting a job done.
• 24:05
  Speaker 2: I know that sounds a bit of a strange thing to say.
• 24:07
  Speaker 2: From a business passion perspective, I like you know what I like to see.
• 24:10
  Speaker 2: I actually really like to see people thriving in my business.
• 24:13
  Speaker 2: We have some guys our support team is actually based in Manila.
• 24:17
  Speaker 2: We have a theme out there and it's such an interesting thing to see the evolution of people when they learn and when they're willing to learn, and when you're working with people who actually want to take on information and, more to the point, not only do they take it on but they use those skills that myself and my partners have shared with them.
• 24:36
  Speaker 2: So we have regular calls where we explain things, and I think that's quite missing in payments sometimes is that there's an assumption that people just know what's going on and you know we talk about interchange, we talk about scheme fees, we talk about open banking.
• 24:50
  Speaker 2: We talk about here's a good example that Visa or Mastercard have just mandated a new sort of a new framework for what we call AFTs account funding transfers where they have.
• 24:59
  Speaker 2: We need to explain to a lot of merchants what it is, because merchants don't understand these things and there's a big disjoint there between what the schemes and the acquirers want and what the merchant actually understands.
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: Sometimes you're talking about small retailers who are just plotting along doing what they do, and then Visa or Mastercard come along and say you're non compliant.
• 25:18
  Speaker 2: And they're like how am I non compliant?
• 25:20
  Speaker 2: I'm just running my little business, and you know.
• 25:21
  Speaker 2: And that disjoint is plugged when we explain to our team what it means, so that our team can comprehensively explain that to our merchants.
• 25:31
  Speaker 2: And that's exciting for me is that, and I love that, I'm passionate about that.
• 25:35
  Speaker 2: I love when our support guys actually understand and start solving problems and when a transaction comes in, based on every time a transaction comes in where there might be a problem.
• 25:46
  Speaker 2: Here's a great one.
• 25:47
  Speaker 2: We had a merchant who just couldn't understand why the transactions were failing and we looked at it and we looked at it and we looked at it and we couldn't work it out either, and I put all my years of expertise in there, but I couldn't see what it was.
• 26:00
  Speaker 2: It looked fine to me and so we found an article about something called color depth.
• 26:04
  Speaker 2: I mean go figure, right that the screen that Sender was using didn't conform.
• 26:10
  Speaker 2: It's amazing Visa or Mastercard require, or the acquirers require the color depth on a laptop or a monitor to be a certain range for the transaction to go through.
• 26:20
  Speaker 2: It makes no sense.
• 26:21
  Speaker 2: But actually, when we figured it out and we read articles about it and the guys are coming back to me saying, do you think this?
• 26:27
  Speaker 2: Now they say to me sometimes, do you think this could be a color depth issue?
• 26:30
  Speaker 2: It's fantastic.
• 26:31
  Speaker 2: It's amazing that we've basically taken some people who are knowledgeable, well educated, but who are willing to learn, and that's really I love that.
• 26:39
  Speaker 2: I think that's just an amazing thing that you can sometimes regurgitate I can regurgitate what's in my head sort of onto their skill set and that's really nice and I love that and that's what I'm passionate about.
• 26:51
  Speaker 2: On a business sense, on a personal sense, I collect Japanese whiskey and I'm actually rather ashamed now that I have almost nowhere in my house to store it now, because I think there are about 150 bottles now.
• 27:02
  Speaker 2: But you know what it is.
• 27:03
  Speaker 2: It's something that kind of gives me a bit of a break from doing what I do, just to investigate and look at what's out there, what's valuable, what's not valuable.
• 27:11
  Speaker 2: Whiskey is a very, very collectible thing right now.
• 27:13
  Speaker 2: I didn't realize.
• 27:14
  Speaker 2: I just happened to really like it.
• 27:15
  Speaker 2: I thought it'd be great to have a few bottles to shove on a bar at some point if I ever had had somewhere to display them at home, which I don't, of course I don't.
• 27:23
  Speaker 2: But my sort of pipe dream is that one day I'll have a sort of very well stocked Japanese whiskey bar with some rice crackers, but.
• 27:29
  Speaker 2: But actually it's become one of those things where you learn about these things and again it sort of appeals to my.
• 27:35
  Speaker 2: I worked in radio.
• 27:36
  Speaker 2: I got really good at it, I understood it, I became a good producer, I completely shifted gears.
• 27:41
  Speaker 2: I went into financial services, I learned about it.
• 27:43
  Speaker 2: I ended up running a payments company, which is exciting, and I will continue doing that.
• 27:47
  Speaker 2: And whiskey is another one where you just I love learning about things and I think that what's interesting is I've now learned about the distilleries, about the ages, what it means, what this, when they say it's got a toffee nose to the whiskey kind of doesn't mean anything until actually one day I sort of smelt it and I went oh my God, I can really smell the caramel in that.
• 28:05
  Speaker 2: And you know, suddenly it becomes something that I probably bore people to death with, to be honest, talking about it, but, but actually it's one of those things that I'm very passionate about and I want to build a collection so that someday I can probably sell it.
• 28:18
  Speaker 2: But you know, the challenge is not drinking it, of course.
• 28:22
  Speaker 3: David, we've covered a lot of ground so far.
• 28:24
  Speaker 3: Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up the show?
• 28:27
  Speaker 2: I just think you know.
• 28:27
  Speaker 2: The only thing I'd say is that it's funny.
• 28:29
  Speaker 2: I came into the payments industry aged I guess I must have been like 32, 33, whatever he has about 32 years old.
• 28:38
  Speaker 2: I'm now 44.
• 28:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so that makes sense.
• 28:40
  Speaker 2: So my 12 years have been in this game.
• 28:42
  Speaker 2: It's amazing how it evolves.
• 28:44
  Speaker 2: It never stands still and I think the best companies are the ones that can keep adapting, keep evolving, keep working with the payments industry and not get left behind.
• 28:53
  Speaker 2: And you know that's what we're trying to do at Paycross.
• 28:55
  Speaker 2: We're trying to stay ahead of the game here.
• 28:58
  Speaker 2: We're trying to be able to service merchants who will come to us in three years time and say what have you got for us for CBDC or what have you got for us on Fed?
• 29:06
  Speaker 2: Now you know, what can you do for us in these markets?
• 29:09
  Speaker 2: And that's the eternal challenge.
• 29:11
  Speaker 2: And as long as you can stay ahead of the game, certainly from a technology perspective, which is how orchestration really should be then you have half a chance of faking it.
• 29:19
  Speaker 3: Okay, well, david, thank you so much for being on the show.
• 29:22
  Speaker 3: I know your time is very valuable, so I really appreciate you being here today.
• 29:25
  Speaker 2: That's been great.
• 29:25
  Speaker 2: I've enjoyed it, thank you.
• 29:26
  Speaker 2: Thanks, greg, it's been really great.
• 29:28
  Speaker 3: Yes, and to all you listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story.
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 29:36
  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.
• 29:43
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