Latest / Leaders In Payments / Special Series: Pay Outs - A New Revenue Stream for Vertical SaaS Businesses with Payabli's Will Corbera and Jo Phillips | Episode 371

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Special Series: Pay Outs - A New Revenue Stream for Vertical SaaS Businesses with Payabli's Will Corbera and Jo Phillips | Episode 371 · Leaders In Payments

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: This special series of the Leaders in Payments podcast focuses on the next generation of payments infrastructure for software companies.
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: Payably provides a single, unified API and infrastructure stack to quickly and easily monetize and manage a SaaS platform's payments business built around the three P's Pay in, payout, pay-ops.
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: In this three-part series, we'll dive deep into the three P's, including payment acceptance, paying vendors and suppliers and managing payments operations.
• 0:36
  Speaker 2: Imagine offering your users a payout experience that's fast, flexible and built right into your product, whether it's ACH, instant payments or virtual cards.
• 0:45
  Speaker 2: The ability to embed robust Payables functionality can unlock new revenue streams and create a competitive edge.
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: In this episode, we'll explore how vertical SaaS businesses are transforming their Payables process, giving users more choice and convenience while driving efficiency and growth.
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: In the last episode in our series with Joe Phillips and Will Corbera of Payably, we discussed their pay-in solution for payment acceptance.
• 1:10
  Speaker 2: In this episode, we will focus on their payout product.
• 1:14
  Speaker 2: So hello everyone and welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 1:17
  Speaker 2: I'm your host, greg Myers, and today on the show to discuss the payout product for Payably are Joe Phillips and Will Corbera, co-founders and co-CEOs of Payably.
• 1:28
  Speaker 2: So welcome to the show.
• 1:30
  Speaker 3: Thanks, Greg.
• 1:30
  Speaker 3: We're really excited.
• 1:31
  Speaker 3: We enjoyed the last two episodes and we're looking forward to the third.
• 1:34
  Speaker 3: Third time's a charm.
• 1:35
  Speaker 3: Likewise, Greg.
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: Thanks for having us.
• 1:37
  Speaker 2: Absolutely.
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: So before we dive into the meat of this, Joe, if you don't mind, tell us a little bit about yourself and your professional journey.
• 1:46
  Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:47
  Speaker 3: I'm a go-to-market leader, turned founder, started my career at one of the first online food ring platforms, ran national sales for them for many years.
• 1:55
  Speaker 3: Post that was an early team member at a company called Service Titan, which has become the de facto leader in B2B SaaS for tradespeople, and while I was there, led their sales team and had a BD role as well.
• 2:06
  Speaker 3: And then, ultimately, through that experience, I was inspired, based off of some of the work that Will and some of my team members did at Service Titan Payments to go build payably, as we saw a lot of gaps in the way we went about it at ST and we saw this tectonic shift of commerce moving off of legacy technology and distribution and becoming embedded within vertical SaaS, and we said let's go figure out a way to build a better platform for the next generations of service titans to monetize payments and that's the quest that Will and I have been on for the last several years Outside of that Southern California all across the country.
• 2:38
  Speaker 3: But SoCal is my home and having a lot of fun building payably with my good buddy, will Corbera here.
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: Awesome, Well, Will over to you Same question, maybe a little about yourself and your professional journey.
• 2:51
  Speaker 4: Sure Blessed to have been in the payment space for close to 25 years.
• 2:55
  Speaker 4: My past life co-founded a payments platform where we ultimately pioneered property payments in that vertical.
• 3:01
  Speaker 4: We were one of the leaders in that space and put some incredible relationships, incredible learnings around that way, Ultimately also helped incubate one of the very first pay fact programs in the country, Then ultimately grew that business, bootstrapped it with my brother for close to 15, 16 years and had a successful exit in 2017.
• 3:20
  Speaker 4: Other than that, most important to me a father of three, happy husband and have an incredible wife.
• 3:28
  Speaker 4: That is an incredible support to all of our crazy entrepreneurial journeys.
• 3:36
  Speaker 2: I hear you so Will.
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: We'll stick with you for a second.
• 3:38
  Speaker 2: Tell the audience a little bit about Payably and what exactly you do.
• 3:42
  Speaker 4: Absolutely so at Payably.
• 3:44
  Speaker 4: What we strive to do is make it easy for software platforms to embed and monetize payments quickly and easily.
• 3:52
  Speaker 4: As Joe mentioned, kind of our past experiences, we felt that there was a huge problem to solve, which is how do we facilitate all these platforms that are trying to monetize money in, money out and really figure out how to navigate this industry that's so fragmented, with different service providers, from money movement to payment operations, and ultimately, we strive to build out a single unified API infrastructure stack that helps these SaaS platforms embed and monetize payments.
• 4:21
  Speaker 4: So that's our focus.
• 4:23
  Speaker 4: We think of ourselves as the AWS of payments and very keen on executing on that vision.
• 4:30
  Speaker 2: Okay, great Thanks for sharing that.
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: So let's go ahead and get into the meat of the payout product.
• 4:35
  Speaker 2: So, joe, we're going to start with you.
• 4:37
  Speaker 2: So when you created this, did you see a problem?
• 4:41
  Speaker 2: Was there a specific problem or a gap in the market that kind of led to the creation of this?
• 4:47
  Speaker 3: Yeah, first and foremost, I think it's important to discuss how we define payouts.
• 4:52
  Speaker 3: Other companies in the space oftentimes talk about payouts as just merchant settlement or sending money to a recipient based off the original payment acceptance flow money to recipient based off the original payment acceptance flow right, so the money in that comes out.
• 5:08
  Speaker 3: Think of like an Uber driver getting paid after a drive is finished.
• 5:10
  Speaker 3: Or Instacart right, the shopper goes online, orders all their groceries.
• 5:15
  Speaker 3: Ultimately, the carrier is going to get a virtual card.
• 5:19
  Speaker 3: They're going to go to Whole Foods or whatever market, pick up the equipment and pay for it with that virtual card.
• 5:22
  Speaker 3: Those are payouts use cases as most of our other competitors in the space talk about, and while we facilitate flows like that, we really think about payouts as true embedded payable solutions where a merchant, vis-a-vis their software provider, needs to pay a recipient, whether it's a vendor, a supplier, a subcontractor, an employee efficiently, securely and with a monetization opportunity, back to that software company and we did experience this firsthand both at Will's last venture, revo, and then at ServiceTime.
• 5:55
  Speaker 3: We saw that for these software platforms they had an AR solution, they had an AP solution.
• 6:01
  Speaker 3: While the AR functionality generally had providers that could support them for embedded payments, there really wasn't that corollary on the payable side right, and we saw that there was a huge opportunity there, because there's a lot of utility value that these vertical SaaS companies can provide to their merchants by simplifying and optimizing the vendor payment process.
• 6:20
  Speaker 3: There's also a huge revenue unlock, oftentimes even more so than on payment acceptance.
• 6:25
  Speaker 3: So from very, very early on in my journey, we saw that there was a need to seamlessly marry money in and money out pay in and pay out as we like to call it and that's what we've been doing since the origins of Payably.
• 6:38
  Speaker 2: Okay, okay.
• 6:38
  Speaker 2: So, joe, stick with you for a second.
• 6:41
  Speaker 2: So was there a major pain point that these software companies had?
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: It's kind of a two-part question, so is there a pain point?
• 6:48
  Speaker 2: And secondly, are there specific verticals that most of these companies, or is it pretty much across the board most SaaS companies, have this challenge?
• 6:58
  Speaker 3: Yeah, great question.
• 6:59
  Speaker 3: There's a multitude of challenges.
• 7:01
  Speaker 3: I think the first one.
• 7:02
  Speaker 3: It sounds pretty basic, but it's just awareness.
• 7:05
  Speaker 3: We spend a good amount of time with prospects in our discovery calls, sussing out payouts use cases and educating them on the value of adding payout execution functionality to their payable solutions and educating them on how they can actually unlock new revenue.
• 7:22
  Speaker 3: So I think generally there's just kind of ignorance in the marketplace that this service even exists.
• 7:28
  Speaker 3: Part of that is that.
• 7:29
  Speaker 3: The second piece is that there's just kind of a lack of modern API for solutions out there to support these ISVs, these vertical SaaS platforms that want to provide an embedded payables offering.
• 7:40
  Speaker 3: A lot of these providers today are legacy providers.
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: They got antiquated technology and they don't have best in class documentation or developer resources like us.
• 7:48
  Speaker 3: So there hasn't been that kind of API-first, modern infrastructure provider to solve that problem for folks all approach.
• 7:55
  Speaker 3: So you may have a modern card issuer that all they really focus on is card issuance and they may have large minimums and they really kind of focus on that one modality of card issuance.
• 8:15
  Speaker 3: And then you may have kind of a provider like an Avid Exchange that provides that managed service but they do everything soup to nuts and it's largely an outsourced experience where the merchant, the ISV's merchant, the vertical SaaS platform's merchant, has to now live in two different platforms and do a lot of the workflow in Avid or a different provider's solution.
• 8:32
  Speaker 3: We saw the need for a modern, api-first provider to offer a multitude of different payout solutions, of be able to mix and match those.
• 8:44
  Speaker 3: So we have kind of our managed program, our on-demand program, spend management, consumer use cases are coming out soon.
• 8:50
  Speaker 3: But really kind of that diversity of solutions depending on the merchant and the ISV platform's needs was a critical insight for us.
• 8:57
  Speaker 3: In terms of verticals, again, I think we talked last time about the need to pay verticals that we focus on.
• 9:03
  Speaker 3: Those are generally a lot of those.
• 9:05
  Speaker 3: Both have AR and AP needs, which is one of the reasons why we really focus on them, but we see it for all sorts.
• 9:11
  Speaker 3: We do have a lot of property management partners, car dealerships, software companies and the commercial and home services that have payout use cases too, so it really just runs the gamut.
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: So Will over to you maybe talk a little bit about the payout product at a high level.
• 9:27
  Speaker 2: We'll dive a little deeper later, but just at a high level.
• 9:29
  Speaker 2: Can you describe the product?
• 9:32
  Speaker 4: To double down on what Joe mentioned is think about how we saw these problems, for our partners is where you have a platforms customer, often going to different portals to be able to support their merchants with vendor payables, right, and the way that our products solve these problems is by fully offering via API or fully embedded, where, ultimately, our vision is that this entire payables experience lives within the platforms that we serve.
• 9:58
  Speaker 4: Our belief is that our payments are going to be embedded, but also fully living on vertical SaaS platforms, and payables is just that.
• 10:08
  Speaker 4: So the API automation piece that often is living on a third party's website we're seeing is either supported by our current platforms or soon to be built up by our platforms themselves, and so what we do is we have built a solution where our platforms, through an API, have access to three basic programs managed payables, on-demand payouts and soon here, spend management.
• 10:29
  Speaker 4: The first one of which, managed payables, is, if you think about it, it's an embedded bill pay solution that's partner simplified and optimized the bill pay process.
• 10:37
  Speaker 4: It's very similar to payroll right, where, instead of paying employees, you're actually paying vendors and suppliers, which is a big challenge for many of our platform's merchants, right, and the way the program works is that the platform has the API automation workflows that allow for the bill ingestion, the e-lock box, the approvals of flows and so forth.
• 10:56
  Speaker 4: Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, but assuming that they do, once that bill is approved within the platform and they're approved, an AP file is ultimately generated and sent to us via API.
• 11:07
  Speaker 4: We also have a payable exchange service for flat files, but ideally it's sent to us via API.
• 11:12
  Speaker 4: We consume all those bills that have been approved for payout and we will then run it against our vendor database and if that vendor is already enrolled in previous relationship that we've had with that vendor, we will then ultimately issue that payout in the preferred pay method or modal that they've pre-selected in the past.
• 11:32
  Speaker 4: But if they don't, what we'll then do is we'll enroll them into our vendor name of the process, contact the merchant to ask if they'd like to get paid by virtual card, by ACH or physical check and soon here's some other payment methods.
• 11:44
  Speaker 4: Then ultimately the vendor gets paid and we provide our partners, via API, full visibility into the entire trail of where that payment stands, which is a big problem as well that we solve right.
• 11:55
  Speaker 4: Traditionally, when you send out that payment right, you don't know where it stands, if the check got lost in the mail, or if the check gets reissued, or let's say that virtual card declined, what happens after that?
• 12:06
  Speaker 4: We provide the full visibility into that life cycle of that payout and ultimately, if it's a vendor virtual card or ACH payment, there's a revenue share that could be had there with our partner.
• 12:16
  Speaker 4: The second product that we provide is something called ODP on-demand payouts, where it's a pretty innovative program where it facilitates our platforms to have on-demand issuance of virtual card or ACH or check to that particular vendor right.
• 12:31
  Speaker 4: So if you've got a vendor right then and there that wants to get paid, or you've got a support agent that's, or an AP clerk that's wanting to pay a particular vendor that's online, you could issue a card immediately.
• 12:45
  Speaker 4: It's fully embedded.
• 12:46
  Speaker 4: You can unmask that card that allows the particular AP clerk to now pay that supplier in real time.
• 12:52
  Speaker 4: And last but not least is spend management, which is something that we're soon to roll out, which is ultimately an embedded way for our partners to offer merchants reloadable cards where they can facilitate the spend of different and serious expenses that might be needed in this particular ecosystem.
• 13:11
  Speaker 4: So think about like a property management company might have various techs supporting different merchants throughout their portfolio and they have to go to Home Depot to do a run, or they might need to go to a supply store for pipes, for any of the landscaping.
• 13:24
  Speaker 4: You could issue that card in real time, they could go and spend it and you have full tracking of that and the full ledgering of that.
• 13:31
  Speaker 4: So those are the three products ultimately embedded managed payables, on-demand payouts and spend management here soon.
• 13:38
  Speaker 2: Okay, and it sounds like those capabilities are for the merchant.
• 13:43
  Speaker 2: So what are you solving for the software company?
• 13:46
  Speaker 2: What's their needs that you're solving for in this kind of?
• 13:49
  Speaker 2: It's like an ecosystem that you're building right when you're handling money movement for this whole ecosystem, but what's really in it for the software company?
• 13:58
  Speaker 4: Good question.
• 13:58
  Speaker 4: So it goes back to kind of how I started off answering the previous question, where, at the end of the day, the software company can monetize and support, bring a lot of value to their merchants by fully embedding the AR and AP use cases within their overall platform right.
• 14:15
  Speaker 4: So we make it easy for that software platform to first, like Joe said, be very aware of.
• 14:21
  Speaker 4: Not only can they monetize money in but they also can monetize money out.
• 14:26
  Speaker 4: So it's driving a revenue stream, right.
• 14:28
  Speaker 4: But furthermore, how do we drive more ROI to not only the software platform but to their merchant, right?
• 14:34
  Speaker 4: Our belief is, if we do both, that merchant is going to want to live and pay for that embedded AP automation within the SaaS platform but at the same time use those embedded payment rails that we've done, support the software platform with, instead of having to go on to a third party to manage their spend or to manage their accounts payable right, which many cases these are thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of payments that are happening on a monthly basis across either a set of merchants or definitely across a portfolio within a SaaS platform.
• 15:08
  Speaker 4: So kind of final approach, kind of from a developer standpoint, what we've done is taken that Barbara approach that we talked about in our last session, right where we've got these very rich APIs that make it easy for our developer friends at the software level to pick and choose what they want how they want to onboard those vendors, how they want to create those bills with that platform, how they want to issue those payout requests and tell us if it's a managed payable, if it's a virtual card that they want to issue on demand and so forth.
• 15:35
  Speaker 4: Other than the bar bill, we have these no-code tools where they could stand up in a better experience, where the vendor can select how they would prefer to get paid right.
• 15:45
  Speaker 4: So often our partners will already have their entire API automation experience.
• 15:49
  Speaker 4: They'll have a vendor portal, but they don't want to handle any of the sense of information that's being transmitted.
• 15:55
  Speaker 4: That's what we'll secure and host, which is quite our big differentiator in the market right, that combination of money in and money out capabilities, which is very hard to stitch.
• 16:05
  Speaker 4: But given our past experiences and past lives, we've been very fortunate to have a team that understands that big problem that we're trying to solve.
• 16:13
  Speaker 2: Okay, makes perfect sense.
• 16:14
  Speaker 2: So, Joe, over to you, maybe give us a real life use case of one of your customers and what vertical they're in and exactly sort of how they've benefited.
• 16:23
  Speaker 3: Sure, this is, I think, where we really shine.
• 16:26
  Speaker 3: I spoke about this in the last episode too.
• 16:28
  Speaker 3: Where we really hang our hat is when our partners come to us with complex, nuanced use cases and needs and we partner with them to really understand those needs and tailor our solution to solve those problems right.
• 16:43
  Speaker 3: I think one example of this is in the property management vertical, which is a vertical that we have a lot of experience in and are getting a lot of market sharing, and we had a very large property managers in the country and they were issuing, literally manually, 30,000 checks a month and had a full kind of AP team running this process.
• 17:04
  Speaker 3: And they came to us and they wanted a few things.
• 17:06
  Speaker 3: One, they wanted to maintain control over that vendor network.
• 17:09
  Speaker 3: They had amassed the vendor network over many, many years and actually decades in the industry and they saw a lot of strategic value in having ownership over that vendor network.
• 17:18
  Speaker 3: Secondly, they wanted to maintain a very strong vendor and merchant experience.
• 17:24
  Speaker 3: All their communities had relationships with these vendors.
• 17:28
  Speaker 3: They had relationships with these vendors and they want to provide a seamless, frictionless, strong experience.
• 17:32
  Speaker 3: They built a lot of goodwill in the industry.
• 17:34
  Speaker 3: They want to damage their reputation by handing that vendor network over to a third party party.
• 17:43
  Speaker 3: And then, most importantly, they wanted to make the process more efficient.
• 17:46
  Speaker 3: They were literally stuffing 30,000 checks a month, packaging them, tracking the delivery, doing all the vendor kind of exception management right.
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: So they wanted to make it more efficient, and they wanted to monetize on those payouts.
• 17:54
  Speaker 3: They had caught word that there's actually revenue opportunity there and they wanted a provider that could help them convert some of that spend to a monetizable form.
• 18:03
  Speaker 3: In addition to that, they were very stringent around not running afoul of certain regulatory compliance needs In that vertical, specifically when they're managing money on behalf of many different communities.
• 18:13
  Speaker 3: They were very concerned about commingling funds.
• 18:16
  Speaker 3: So what we did with them is we designed with our sponsor bank and them in mind.
• 18:22
  Speaker 3: They basically helped us prop up a program where we developed a hybrid credit model where we would allow them to basically use our on-demand payouts product to issue virtual cards, ach and check directly out of their community's DDA accounts.
• 18:36
  Speaker 3: And on the virtual card issuance, basically those cards were pre-funded with credit and we basically debit their bank accounts each night, right.
• 18:46
  Speaker 3: So it was kind of credit debit offset and that allowed them not only to provide a better vendor experience at the end of the day but also kind of mitigate those concerns around compliance and commingled funds.
• 18:57
  Speaker 3: So that's one example.
• 18:59
  Speaker 3: We have customers in property and education and insurance and commercial services and so on, and we design similarly different programs.
• 19:08
  Speaker 3: Most of it is based off of our on demand product, but different kind of flavors of it depending on their needs.
• 19:15
  Speaker 2: Okay, so Will.
• 19:16
  Speaker 2: We've talked about sort of the three Ps and the pay-ins, pay-outs and pay-ops, which I think, by the way, is really cool positioning as a marketing guy, I really love that.
• 19:26
  Speaker 2: So how does the payout infrastructure stack that helps entrepreneurs?
• 19:30
  Speaker 4: and helps developers easily create those embedded experiences however they wish.
• 19:34
  Speaker 4: Right and ultimately, we understand that payment acceptance is generally well understood by these vertical SaaS platforms and how they commoditize them.
• 19:53
  Speaker 4: Yet payables is severely misunderstood or underserved in the space right, where often our partners may not even have been exposed to the idea that they could automate these payables in a tangible way and help their customers relieve them from that burden right and also drive ROI to themselves, but also to their customers.
• 20:13
  Speaker 4: So I think that has really helped us because that value add helps drive more value to our partners so that they could have continued to digitize other forms of payments not just money in, but money out.
• 20:25
  Speaker 4: From a positioning standpoint, I think that it's helped because it really distinguishes us from our competition.
• 20:32
  Speaker 4: Often partners are they're just talking about acquiring or they're just talking about issuing right.
• 20:37
  Speaker 4: Both are extremely difficult to be able to tie together.
• 20:40
  Speaker 4: We've been very intentional to, from day one, to be able to create a single, unified API that makes it easy for partners to do both right, and so it's really helped us from a positioning standpoint.
• 20:51
  Speaker 4: And finally, from a product standpoint, I think it opens up a lot of interesting avenues for innovation.
• 20:57
  Speaker 4: One simple example is, if you think about who a payables is being sent to, right, that vendor supplier is actually a merchant right From their perspective.
• 21:07
  Speaker 4: They're getting paid by their customer, right.
• 21:10
  Speaker 4: So the customer is the vendor, the vendor is the customer, and so we get very excited about the capabilities of now that vendor becomes an opportunity to become an acquiring relationship.
• 21:22
  Speaker 4: You have this very powerful network effect and ultimately, in our industry, as you very well know, trust is key to be able to minimize risk and fraud.
• 21:32
  Speaker 4: So having this expanded network of vendors slash customers, depending on how you see it opens up a lot of room for innovation and I think our positioning has really helped us with that right and since we've been intentional about that since day one.
• 21:49
  Speaker 2: Okay, so Will.
• 21:50
  Speaker 2: We'll stay with you.
• 21:51
  Speaker 2: And you kind of mentioned trust.
• 21:53
  Speaker 2: I think another component that's incredibly important is security.
• 21:57
  Speaker 2: We can't hardly have a payments conversation without talking about security and compliance and risk.
• 22:02
  Speaker 2: So maybe talk about that from the payout product perspective.
• 22:06
  Speaker 4: Sure, for starters, we talk about this often at Payably.
• 22:10
  Speaker 4: Internally, we've got two main priorities which are paramount, always present.
• 22:17
  Speaker 4: First, it's security and reliability System can't go down.
• 22:20
  Speaker 4: We have to have at least five, nines of reliability.
• 22:24
  Speaker 4: We've got to ensure that we don't mess with the money and that we're ledgering everything right and it's a big part of what we do.
• 22:32
  Speaker 4: But from a security standpoint we also recognize that we're big targets, especially as we have a bigger and bigger footprint.
• 22:45
  Speaker 4: We work really hard to reduce that exposure on behalf of Paley and our partners and our merchants, because especially with payouts, greg, once that money leaves, it's very, very hard to recover those monies.
• 22:52
  Speaker 4: So don't disclose too much of our secret sauce, but do go to extreme lengths to leverage things like positive pay for checks or integrated bank verification capabilities.
• 23:04
  Speaker 4: Do a lot of data mining on vendor history.
• 23:05
  Speaker 4: Vendor history is key to payables and payouts right.
• 23:09
  Speaker 4: If you want a faster payment to a vendor, there's got to be a substantial vendor history relationship there.
• 23:15
  Speaker 4: That can happen, being able to throttle time ranges as to how fast a vendor can get that virtual card in their hands and get paid by ACH.
• 23:24
  Speaker 4: Even though we could do it in real time, we will throttle that, depending on the risk store that's applied to that vendor.
• 23:30
  Speaker 4: So hope that answers enough the question, given that security is paramount but also tends to kind of not want to disclose too much of our secret sauce there.
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: Totally, totally makes sense.
• 23:41
  Speaker 2: So, joe, over to you and we've talked about monetization but we haven't really kind of gotten into it.
• 23:46
  Speaker 2: So maybe talk about the monetization of these.
• 23:49
  Speaker 2: I think a lot of people don't realize that you can actually monetize the payout.
• 23:53
  Speaker 2: So maybe speak to that a little bit, if you can.
• 23:56
  Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely.
• 23:57
  Speaker 3: This is as a sales guy through and through.
• 24:00
  Speaker 3: This is one of the funnest parts about offering embedded payables.
• 24:03
  Speaker 3: Offering is really educating our partners and showing them how they can monetize payouts.
• 24:08
  Speaker 3: I mentioned earlier we've designed our sales process very methodically where in the discovery calls we suss out those use cases and start kind of planting the seed about payables.
• 24:19
  Speaker 3: When we get to the stage in the sales process where we start commercial education, where we start talking about the economic component and how they can unlock new revenue, that's where it's really fun to see the light bulb kind of come on that not only can I make money on the acquiring side, but by providing more utility to my already existing AP solution, by handling payout execution, I can make money on the payouts.
• 24:45
  Speaker 3: It's really fun to kind of see that kind of epiphany take place and really it's a little bit of mind bending at first but the way that you monetize all the payouts is predominantly through vCard issuance, right?
• 24:55
  Speaker 3: So when a vendor gets paid, you send them a virtual card, whether it's through a digital journey or whether it's a kind of a managed solution, where you're doing vendor enablement and reaching out to that party, but you're giving them, ultimately, a virtual credit card that's got monies already pre-funded on it and they're going to run that with their.
• 25:12
  Speaker 3: The vendor is going to run that with their processor and ultimately, when that kind of virtual card gets processed, we get reimbursed interchange and we're going to share a good amount of that interchange with our partner and then they can determine if they want to give some of that back to their merchants.
• 25:27
  Speaker 3: Right, and that's one way to monetize enhanced ACH, where for a more expedited ACH payment is another one.
• 25:34
  Speaker 3: There are other modalities that we're actively looking to introduce, like RTP and FedNow push to card, digital checks and others.
• 25:42
  Speaker 3: But really the primary revenue driver is that virtual card issuance and we're constantly looking for ways to drive more adoption of that, whether it's through some innovative programs like straight through processing, whether it's better digital journeys that are influencing folks to accept that virtual card.
• 25:59
  Speaker 3: Those are the things that I think makes Pavely stand out in the market, that we're not only just trying to issue those cards, but we're thinking of ingenious ways to influence the vendor to take that card as well.
• 26:11
  Speaker 2: Okay, so Will.
• 26:13
  Speaker 2: Final question for you let's talk about the future.
• 26:16
  Speaker 2: I know you don't want to spill the beans, so to speak, but maybe talk about what's on the roadmap, what you're willing to share.
• 26:22
  Speaker 4: Absolutely.
• 26:22
  Speaker 4: One of the big challenges we talk a lot about internally is, in kind of our dream world, right?
• 26:27
  Speaker 4: What would it look like to be able to pay those vendors?
• 26:31
  Speaker 4: For us, it's not having to even pick up the phone, not having to even contact a vendor, which is a seamless payment that hits their ledger on the acquiring side, right?
• 26:41
  Speaker 4: Joe mentioned it briefly in straight-through processing.
• 26:44
  Speaker 4: How do we continue to innovate there and bring to market tools where, when a vendor is needing to get paid, that our partner can immediately issue that payment to that vendor and it hits that vendor's actual acquiring relationship seamlessly?
• 27:01
  Speaker 4: That's our North Star for us, right?
• 27:03
  Speaker 4: Without having to have any human even having to contact them and ask them if they want to get paid by virtual card or ACH or any other digital modality, right?
• 27:12
  Speaker 4: So think about that often and investing a lot of resources into that.
• 27:18
  Speaker 4: Furthermore, expanding the payment modalities is another big item on our list, greg.
• 27:22
  Speaker 4: How do we give more optionality for those suppliers to get paid in the methods that they prefer, right?
• 27:28
  Speaker 4: Do they want to accelerate their payment?
• 27:29
  Speaker 4: Or if they still want that paper check, we'll still do that?
• 27:32
  Speaker 4: Right?
• 27:33
  Speaker 4: But we want to be able to continue to expand that library of payment methods that give our partners again a differentiator and competitive advantage by just offering their merchants a wider toolkit.
• 27:44
  Speaker 4: Continue to invest in security fraud tools.
• 27:47
  Speaker 4: That stays ahead of the curve.
• 27:51
  Speaker 4: As I mentioned in our previous conversation, we have invested in AI for some time already, before it became HIP, and not only is it HIP.
• 28:00
  Speaker 4: I think AI is actually here to stay and I think it's going to bring some real value to the world.
• 28:04
  Speaker 4: But doing a lot of things on AI that will continue to make that dream vision a reality.
• 28:10
  Speaker 4: So those are our main focal areas for the payout space and how do we continue to expand on them.
• 28:15
  Speaker 4: One final one that I didn't mention, actually, is cross-border payments.
• 28:18
  Speaker 4: We get that request often.
• 28:20
  Speaker 4: How can I make a payment to a supplier or a vendor that's outside the United States and how do I make it as easy as paying someone in the States?
• 28:29
  Speaker 4: So not an easy challenge to solve, but certainly something that we're working on, okay.
• 28:35
  Speaker 2: Okay, so Will and Joe, we've covered a lot of ground, and so we'll start with you.
• 28:39
  Speaker 2: Is there anything else you'd like to discuss?
• 28:41
  Speaker 2: We could talk about anything from the industry to Payably to the Payout product.
• 28:45
  Speaker 2: Anything you want to mention before we wrap up.
• 28:49
  Speaker 3: Yeah, greg, you mentioned it last time.
• 28:51
  Speaker 3: We're really excited and bullish on where Payably is going.
• 28:54
  Speaker 3: We've been growing extremely fast.
• 28:56
  Speaker 3: We have a lot of opportunity on all three of these vectors pay-in, pay-out and pay-offs.
• 29:01
  Speaker 3: We're looking forward to the next episode on pay-offs to talk about what we're doing there.
• 29:04
  Speaker 3: Pay-offs is really exciting because we think there's a new frontier.
• 29:07
  Speaker 3: It's been very underserved.
• 29:08
  Speaker 3: There's a lot of exciting opportunities that we're conceiving.
• 29:12
  Speaker 3: There's a lot of interesting applications with artificial intelligence that we're also pioneering as well.
• 29:17
  Speaker 3: So we're super excited about the future of our payouts product.
• 29:21
  Speaker 3: We are looking for a couple of key roles.
• 29:23
  Speaker 3: One of those is our first product marketer, and I think one of the challenges that we have is because there's such a lack of awareness around payouts.
• 29:32
  Speaker 3: A lot of people think that our payout solution is just like another provider that is thinking payouts in a much more limited capacity.
• 29:39
  Speaker 3: So I think for that future product marketer hopefully you're listening to this podcast and you get inspired that's one of the opportunities that you have at working at Pavely is really trying to distill the really innovative and unique thinking that we're doing in development of these tools that we're doing at Pavely, and how do you translate that into a commercially viable way that helps people understand it really well and helps us ultimately earn customers that way.
• 30:02
  Speaker 3: So looking for those product marketers, looking for great developers if you have payouts experience, please reach out to us Always looking for great minds that are software engineers that have payments experience with their money in and money out.
• 30:14
  Speaker 3: And again, we're just really grateful for this opportunity to be on this podcast.
• 30:19
  Speaker 3: We love what you're doing for the industry and appreciate you giving us a moment to shine here and share a little about our journey and all the exciting stuff that we're up to at Pavely.
• 30:27
  Speaker 2: Absolutely Will.
• 30:28
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I'll second that, greg.
• 30:29
  Speaker 4: Thanks for the opportunity.
• 30:30
  Speaker 4: I think it's incredible what you're doing here to educate the world on what can be done in payments, because payments is everywhere right and it's it's the backbone of how value gets exchanged, and we're all part of this journey that's transforming how things are getting digitized.
• 30:45
  Speaker 4: So thanks for the opportunity and to the next one.
• 30:48
  Speaker 2: Okay, well, thank you both so much for being on the show.
• 30:50
  Speaker 2: I know your time's very busy, so I really appreciate you being here.
• 30:53
  Speaker 2: Thanks, greg.
• 30:54
  Speaker 2: I look forward to the next one.
• 30:55
  Speaker 2: Thanks, greg, and to all your listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well.
• 30:59
  Speaker 2: To learn more about Payably, and specifically their Payout product, please visit payablycom.
• 31:05
  Speaker 2: Slash pay hyphen out.