Latest / Leaders In Payments / Joe Mach, CEO of Castles Technology | Episode 386

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Joe Mach, CEO of Castles Technology | Episode 386 · Leaders In Payments

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast, where we talk to C-level leaders from across the payments landscape.
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: We'll be discussing the products and services that impact the payment space today, as well as trends and predictions for the future of payments.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: We will also hear stories from our guests about their journeys to the top.
• 0:18
  Speaker 2: Hello everyone and welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: I'm your host, greg Myers, and on today's show we have a very special guest, joe Mack, the CEO of North America at Castles Technology.
• 0:28
  Speaker 2: So, joe, welcome to the show.
• 0:29
  Speaker 3: Good to be here.
• 0:30
  Speaker 3: Thanks for letting me join the podcast.
• 0:32
  Speaker 3: I look forward to the next 20, 30 minutes chatting with you.
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: Me too.
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: So, if you don't mind, tell our audience a little bit about yourself, maybe where you grew up, where you went to school, where you currently live, a few things like that.
• 0:41
  Speaker 3: Sure, where you currently live.
• 0:42
  Speaker 3: A few things like that.
• 0:43
  Speaker 3: Sure, chicago native, grew up there, transplanted to Minnesota about 25 years ago.
• 0:48
  Speaker 3: So one of my claim to fames is I'm the only person in the world that knows how to say Chicago correctly, wisconsin correctly and Minnesota correctly, so I've got the Midwestern accents down.
• 0:58
  Speaker 3: People do ask me where I live.
• 1:00
  Speaker 3: My frequent response to that is Delta Airlines seat 10A or whatever.
• 1:04
  Speaker 3: That seat is right behind first class.
• 1:06
  Speaker 3: You know I'm just one off of it.
• 1:07
  Speaker 3: But despite living in Minnesota, I've been commuting down to Atlanta for about the last 15 to 20 years.
• 1:13
  Speaker 3: So I tried to spend two to three weeks a month in Atlanta in various jobs that I've had and then the rest of the time kind of traveling nomad going all over God's creation.
• 1:22
  Speaker 3: I think I'm sitting at like 3 million miles.
• 1:25
  Speaker 3: We'll talk a little bit today about customer engagements and kind of my philosophy of business.
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: Tell us about Castles Technology.
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: What does Castles Technology do?
• 1:34
  Speaker 3: Castles is a great company.
• 1:35
  Speaker 3: It's interesting, Greg, I'm coming up on almost my one-year anniversary, so we'll probably talk a little bit more about my career at some point, but I've been in this fintech retail space for about 25 years.
• 1:47
  Speaker 3: Left payments, for a little bit, was running some companies for private equity.
• 1:50
  Speaker 3: Castle came knocking on my door, asked me to join as CEO of North America, which I accepted, and it's kind of funny.
• 1:57
  Speaker 3: When I first came here I jokingly say that I kind of felt like that frat boy at 11 o'clock at night, after a whole bunch of beers calling everybody I know, I landed at Castles and I started calling all my old customers and partners and I said, hey, I landed at Castles and very frequently I got Castles who, Despite the fact that we're the fourth largest player in the payment terminal software solution space, it's a brand that not a lot of people know.
• 2:22
  Speaker 3: So what we do is we enable cashless transactions, whether it be in a retail, hospitality, large retail, small retail, etc.
• 2:31
  Speaker 3: And so we have the hardware, the software, the cloud services, some of the technology that we'll talk about today that enables fast and secure cashless transactions.
• 2:39
  Speaker 3: What's a bit unique about Castles is two things.
• 2:43
  Speaker 3: Number one, one of the reasons a lot of people haven't heard of us is we've got a stat that over 60% of everything we sell doesn't have our name on it, and so we're a very, very large player.
• 2:54
  Speaker 3: We like to say that we're in the business of yes, and so if we have a relationship with this partner that says, hey, we want to have the product, but we want to have it in this color, with our name on it, we go no problem.
• 3:04
  Speaker 3: If we have customers that come to us and say, hey, we want that, but we want it with a bigger screen, or we want it a little bit different, or we want something that doesn't exist today, we build that for them.
• 3:20
  Speaker 3: And so Christy, my VP of product management, came up with this saying of people trust us so much they put their name on it right.
• 3:23
  Speaker 3: So a really big part of our business is building stuff for some of the biggest players in the world, and we'll talk about some of those relationships today.
• 3:31
  Speaker 3: What's unique about Castles Inside of North America that I think is different from the traditional players is about 50% of our business is attended payments.
• 3:38
  Speaker 3: So think about you go into a store where there's a checkout counter and there's a payment device, but 50% of our business is unattended right.
• 3:45
  Speaker 3: And so, when you think about the explosion of unattended, there's a stat I read six months ago that referenced 7% growth inside of the attended payment space, 11% growth inside of the unattended space.
• 3:58
  Speaker 3: And so where we've been super strong and there's reasons to this is in the vending space specifically.
• 4:04
  Speaker 3: So you think about a decade ago you'd go to buy yourself a Coke or a bag of chips.
• 4:09
  Speaker 3: It was a cash transaction.
• 4:11
  Speaker 3: 90% of the time you fast forward to today and 50, 60, 70% of the time you're able to pay with your phone, able to pay with a credit card.
• 4:20
  Speaker 3: It's been a massive shift that's happened Inside of that space, inside of vending.
• 4:24
  Speaker 3: We've got somewhere around 55% to 60% market share.
• 4:27
  Speaker 3: We've got relationships with the Cokes and the Pepsis of this world.
• 4:30
  Speaker 3: More importantly, we have relationships with some of the biggest players Cantaloupe I know you've done some podcasts with some folks from Cantaloupe 365, Retail, Global Connect.
• 4:39
  Speaker 3: The list goes on.
• 4:40
  Speaker 3: We've been so successful in this unattended space because we don't just make a piece of hardware and give it to a partner and say, hey, go make it work.
• 4:48
  Speaker 3: Really deep, deep domain expertise that allows us to solve exactly the problems that are there for that use case.
• 4:54
  Speaker 3: And so what I've been focused on on the unattended space and then we'll come back to attended but what I've been focused on in the unattended space for the past year is saying, okay, we've been so, so successful inside of the vending space.
• 5:07
  Speaker 3: How do we take those same things and lessons learned and take those solutions and move into other unattended use cases?
• 5:14
  Speaker 3: We're now involved in EV.
• 5:16
  Speaker 3: Charging is all the rage, although that's a relatively small market when you think about it still, but great partnerships there.
• 5:23
  Speaker 3: But we're getting into like we have a rollout going on as we speak with one of our new products with an air and vac company up in Canada.
• 5:29
  Speaker 3: So you go into a gas station, got to put air in my tires, I'm going to vacuum it out Again, moving from cash to cashless.
• 5:35
  Speaker 3: And so we have Castle unattended solutions with our cold weather package up in Canada at places where it gets to minus 30, minus 40 degrees Celsius, right.
• 5:46
  Speaker 3: So again, building the right solutions for those use cases and we'll do the same in parking and we're going to go on from there.
• 5:51
  Speaker 3: So we look at unattended as, even though it's 50% of our North American business, we're just at the tip of the iceberg.
• 5:58
  Speaker 3: We believe there's unbelievable growth potential as we get into these other use cases, as unattended continues to grow.
• 6:05
  Speaker 3: On the attended side, we are very partner-focused.
• 6:08
  Speaker 3: We like to go in and say, hey, we want to be the partner of choice, and so we've got relationships inside of North America with the likes of Freedom Pay.
• 6:18
  Speaker 3: We make things for Audion companies like Valor that sell into the SMB space, and so it's through these very strategic partnerships and many, many more are going to get announced over the next year.
• 6:26
  Speaker 3: Two contracts are being signed this week but really leveraging those partnerships to go both after the SMB space the small merchant, small, medium-sized business but we're also now, through these partners, getting pulled into some of the largest hotel properties and some of the largest retailers in the world.
• 6:42
  Speaker 3: So we see great growth potentials on both sides of our business.
• 6:47
  Speaker 3: Last thing I'll say is we are a global company.
• 6:50
  Speaker 3: We're headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan, which we like to refer to as Technology Island, and as we go through the conversation we'll talk more about why that's important.
• 6:59
  Speaker 3: But from that, that is really our engineering, product and manufacturing headquarters, headquarters.
• 7:04
  Speaker 3: Then we set up regions around the world.
• 7:06
  Speaker 3: What's really interesting is that our approach is not to just set up a sales and marketing office when Castles looks to go into a market.
• 7:15
  Speaker 3: We build the full infrastructure to be able to support our partners.
• 7:18
  Speaker 3: I'm sitting here in Kennesaw, Georgia, in Transaction Alley.
• 7:21
  Speaker 3: We've got a full office here.
• 7:23
  Speaker 3: We've got a warehouse that holds products Some of it's our products, some of it's customer-owned product.
• 7:27
  Speaker 3: We've got deployment, key injection capabilities, services like dropship programs, overnight replacements, full infrastructure.
• 7:34
  Speaker 3: From an operations perspective, We've also built up a full support organization tech support, integration support.
• 7:41
  Speaker 3: One of my favorite stories is one of my old customers from a previous life we met with and they decided to engage and they believed in the Castle story and so they started working on integrations.
• 7:52
  Speaker 3: The CEO of the company called and left me a voicemail and said Joe, we got to talk right away.
• 7:56
  Speaker 3: Of course, my first thought was holy crap, what did we do wrong?
• 7:59
  Speaker 3: When you get those calls and those voicemails.
• 8:01
  Speaker 3: It's never good news.
• 8:02
  Speaker 3: So I call this gentleman back and we're chit-chatting.
• 8:04
  Speaker 3: I'm like so what's up?
• 8:05
  Speaker 3: He's like you guys called us back the same day.
• 8:07
  Speaker 3: I'm like did it take too long?
• 8:10
  Speaker 3: He's like no, we work with the other players.
• 8:12
  Speaker 3: We've never gotten a phone call back the same day ever, and so really one thing we pride ourselves on is being responsive.
• 8:19
  Speaker 3: There's a saying and I forget who said it, but 80% of life is just showing up, and that's the same with support.
• 8:24
  Speaker 3: 80% is just answering the phone and making sure that you're there for them.
• 8:27
  Speaker 3: So full support organization, full operational perspective, management, product management everything is regionalized to make sure we're delivering the exact solutions that are needed for these markets.
• 8:37
  Speaker 3: We've got our Atlanta location to service US, and just this month we opened up our office up in Canada.
• 8:43
  Speaker 3: So we'll have the same operational support, technical support, product support up in Canada as well for some of our new partnerships.
• 8:51
  Speaker 2: So do you sell direct or is it all through partnerships?
• 8:55
  Speaker 3: We are 98% through partnerships.
• 8:59
  Speaker 3: We do have a little bit of exception with Coke and Pepsi relationships that have some legacy things associated with them, but really we are very, very, very channel-centric.
• 9:09
  Speaker 3: We can't be the partner of choice if we're competing with our partners, and so we really value those relationships.
• 9:15
  Speaker 3: We think they're an extension of what we do and they allow us to scale our business rapidly.
• 9:20
  Speaker 2: And how many people are here in the North America office.
• 9:24
  Speaker 3: So we're right around 100 employees, and that includes a very large operations team, as you could guess, a pretty substantial support structure that we just talked about.
• 9:33
  Speaker 3: And then we've got sales teams, marketing teams, product teams, focused on those two different parts of our business, attended and unattended.
• 9:40
  Speaker 2: Okay, and you talked a little bit about this already, but I want to double click on it again what makes Castles Technology unique?
• 9:47
  Speaker 2: What do you see as the core differentiators?
• 9:49
  Speaker 2: And if you want to split them up into those two markets, you could do that.
• 9:52
  Speaker 2: But what makes it unique?
• 9:54
  Speaker 3: and different, but I'd start with the focus on and one of the things that I've seen.
• 10:04
  Speaker 3: As I mentioned, I was inside of payments for almost 20 years, left payments for about four or five years to run a retail-focused company for private equity.
• 10:13
  Speaker 3: But in that five years that I left, the amount of innovation and the amount and the pace of change is crazy.
• 10:19
  Speaker 3: Back in my early days inside of FinTech, we would come up with products and solutions and expect to sell them for a decade.
• 10:26
  Speaker 3: That's what we would base our ROI on.
• 10:28
  Speaker 3: You fast forward to today, the advent of Android, all the different form factors, all the innovation that's happening.
• 10:34
  Speaker 3: The ability to continue to innovate and release new products is off the charts.
• 10:39
  Speaker 3: And so, again, coming back to being on technology island, we've got that capability right.
• 10:45
  Speaker 3: We're in Asia Pacific from a technology supply chain perspective, but we're in a very trade friendly and secure environment so we can really keep up with that pace of play.
• 10:54
  Speaker 3: That, I think, is hard for some of the legacy players.
• 10:56
  Speaker 3: Innovation is key.
• 10:58
  Speaker 3: I've said my entire professional career.
• 11:01
  Speaker 3: Those that innovate the fastest win, and so you're seeing this proliferation of form factors, whether it be integrated products on the countertop, the mobile products moving into tablets.
• 11:12
  Speaker 3: You think about soft pause, the impact that's going to have on our business and something I'd like to talk about later on today, but these form factors and all the different ways that people want to pay.
• 11:21
  Speaker 3: You've got to be fast, you've got to innovate and you've got to be a company that people trust.
• 11:25
  Speaker 3: I would say the other thing is we are a technology leader, not a technology follower.
• 11:31
  Speaker 3: We believe in investing when we see an opportunity and a trend, versus waiting to be the second, third or fourth player.
• 11:38
  Speaker 3: Right, we want to be first to market.
• 11:40
  Speaker 3: Do we get it right every single time?
• 11:42
  Speaker 3: Is everything a home run?
• 11:43
  Speaker 3: No, but do we have the capability to go after these and really drive that innovation?
• 11:47
  Speaker 3: One of the areas and I'd love to talk about this more today as well, for example, would be historically, manufacturers of hardware would have terminal management software that would allow you to do software updates, mids and TIDs.
• 12:00
  Speaker 3: Very basic functionality of controlling all these different nodes on the network.
• 12:03
  Speaker 3: Basic functionality of controlling all these different nodes on the network.
• 12:05
  Speaker 3: What I've seen our ability is to really move from TMS to true MDM-like capabilities with these payment devices, and part of that is because of the capabilities of Android and part of that is the innovation we're putting into our cloud services.
• 12:18
  Speaker 3: All of a sudden, think about the ability of a help desk to be able to remotely take over control of a device out in the field and fix and resolve.
• 12:26
  Speaker 3: It's super important and attended even more important and unattended right, because if it's down and there's nobody there to fix it or change something and so, just like when you sit there and your IT department tunnels into your laptop and fixes things, we now have that capability to do that.
• 12:39
  Speaker 3: We also have the ability to do geofencing from a security perspective, and there's some things I'd like to talk about later around understanding the health of the estate out there and using AI to do some predictions on potential failure rates and where you can go replace things.
• 12:55
  Speaker 3: So really driving that level of innovation and being a technology leader.
• 12:59
  Speaker 3: And then the last thing, I think I'll go back to what I said earlier we do want to be the partner of choice, right?
• 13:05
  Speaker 3: 60% of our business doesn't have our name on it.
• 13:08
  Speaker 3: We want to meet our customers where they want to be met, and so if you want our hardware great.
• 13:13
  Speaker 3: You want our hardware software great.
• 13:15
  Speaker 3: Hardware software, cloud services perfect, right.
• 13:17
  Speaker 3: Whatever our partners need.
• 13:19
  Speaker 3: That's what we want to provide to them, not force feed our own agenda to them.
• 13:23
  Speaker 2: You've been in payments for a while in fintech so you know it's a very fast-moving industry.
• 13:29
  Speaker 2: Where do you see it heading, say, in the next three to five years?
• 13:33
  Speaker 3: That's always an interesting conversation to have, and I should really look up some of these quotes I reference all the time because I know I'm not saying them quite right.
• 13:39
  Speaker 3: But Bill Gates once said something along the lines of we, as technology leaders, overestimate the amount of change that's going to happen in the next five years and we always underestimate the amount of change in 10 years, basically saying our prognostication of what it's going to be like in five years.
• 13:56
  Speaker 3: We're so overshooting that, but what we miss is what is that change going to be in 10 years?
• 14:01
  Speaker 3: If I think about retail today, it is changing rapidly.
• 14:06
  Speaker 3: For 100 years, retail was I'd go into a store, I'd buy a product, I'd take it to the front counter, I'd pay.
• 14:13
  Speaker 3: Eventually, cashless came along and debit came along and NFC came along I'd pay for it, I'd walk out the door.
• 14:18
  Speaker 3: If you think about what's happened in this omni-channel, this unified commerce world that we live in, all of a sudden, the number of payment locations has exploded.
• 14:29
  Speaker 3: Sure, I still have my traditional checkout, a huge push towards unattended again self-checkout type of solutions.
• 14:35
  Speaker 3: You also have mobile in the aisle, you have the buy online, pick up in store, and so we're really seeing just a ton of innovation and disruption happening from the typical retail experience, and it's really about the experience that these retailers are trying to drive.
• 14:49
  Speaker 3: So if I think about the next three to five years something I've seen here in some meetings I just had last week the first thing I would say is the power of the ISV probably a common thing that you hear when you sit down and do these podcasts, but I'm amazed at the deep domain expertise that some of these ISVs have.
• 15:05
  Speaker 3: Met with one of our new partners just last week and he's focused on selling point of sale into nail salons Just a very specific use case right Payments and point of sale and you go.
• 15:18
  Speaker 3: Seems like a decent market.
• 15:19
  Speaker 3: There's 100,000 nail salons out there.
• 15:22
  Speaker 3: It's just a mind-blowing stat to me.
• 15:25
  Speaker 3: I'm like not 100,000.
• 15:26
  Speaker 3: And so I see ISVs, whether it's creating solutions very specific for that type of use case or there's many other examples as well as what the ISVs are starting to drive inside of the large retail the tier one, tier two.
• 15:40
  Speaker 3: That's where so much innovation is going to continue to happen as we think about this unified commerce world Also starting to see some what I would say payments plus AI.
• 15:51
  Speaker 3: So we just finished up back in January our NRF trade show and I loved it.
• 15:56
  Speaker 3: So in our booth we tried to create experiences.
• 15:58
  Speaker 3: So one of the experiences that we showed our partners and retailers walking through was a secure checkout closet, and inside of this cabinet could either be vending items Cokes, pepsis, potato chips or it could be items like headphones, razors, things that have some value to them, and so what we showed was the way to go from today, I go into a retail store and some of these high value items are behind lock and key.
• 16:26
  Speaker 3: When I want something, I have to go find a store employee, pull them over, say hey, can you unlock this?
• 16:32
  Speaker 3: I take the good they got to walk me up to the front of the store.
• 16:34
  Speaker 3: The experience is terrible.
• 16:36
  Speaker 3: There's tons of friction.
• 16:37
  Speaker 3: What we showed was you would take your phone, you'd take your card, you'd tap it on a Castle device that would unlock this secure cabinet and then, using cameras and AI, you would get the item that you want, or you could put it back and you could take those items that you want.
• 16:52
  Speaker 3: Two, three items close the door and by the time you're walking away, your phone is buzzing with the e-receipt sending your way, and so that's really showing how payments and AI are really melding together.
• 17:05
  Speaker 3: The third thing that I see over the next three to five years is an explosion of soft pause.
• 17:08
  Speaker 3: I assume that's something that you've spoken with other people about.
• 17:12
  Speaker 3: Soft pause allowing you to take secure transactions on consumer devices tablets, handhelds, phones and those type of things.
• 17:20
  Speaker 3: And again, another use case that we showed at NRF that I thought was interesting and this is how the technology gets adopted is we gave the story of at Christmas I went and bought a Christmas tree and when I grabbed the tree I grabbed the tree at this local hardware store.
• 17:35
  Speaker 3: They gave me a tag.
• 17:36
  Speaker 3: I had to take that tag inside to the cashier.
• 17:39
  Speaker 3: I had to wait in line.
• 17:40
  Speaker 3: I then had my receipt.
• 17:41
  Speaker 3: I had to go back out, get my Christmas tree, throw it on top of my car and drive home.
• 17:46
  Speaker 3: Just a ton of friction, theft, all types of things.
• 17:49
  Speaker 3: So imagine being able to take a soft pause solution on a ruggedized tablet maybe a zebra or honeywell that could handle the temperatures up in Minnesota where I live, and be able to take secure payments on those through a soft pause application.
• 18:03
  Speaker 3: But we also wrote the application so you could have a defined amount of dollars or a defined number of transactions, Because the big concern is what happens if somebody walks away with that device, and what exposure do I have from a security perspective.
• 18:14
  Speaker 3: So figuring out those type of soft pause solutions I think will be a big trend and a big growth opportunity for the payments industry growth opportunity for the payments industry.
• 18:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, related to all of that is what I hear.
• 18:28
  Speaker 2: And curious your thoughts is sort of the new consumers moving into the world, so the younger generation.
• 18:32
  Speaker 2: Whatever label you want to put on them, they have and you've talked about this the friction that's in a lot of this buying process.
• 18:39
  Speaker 2: They don't put up with it, they just move to the next whatever, the next store, the next solution, whatever you want to call it.
• 18:46
  Speaker 2: They're not going to wait for a business to offer modern checkout solutions.
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: Just curious, are you thinking about how those consumers who have that expectation of almost seamless the payment just kind of disappears?
• 18:58
  Speaker 2: What are your thoughts on that?
• 19:00
  Speaker 3: I would agree.
• 19:01
  Speaker 3: Right, I mean the expectations and the experiences.
• 19:04
  Speaker 3: We know that we, as consumers, want to have unbelievable experiences where I can buy online and have it delivered to my house or my apartment in a couple hours, which is just mind-blowing from what existed just 10 years ago.
• 19:16
  Speaker 3: The ability to be able to go into stores and have an incredible experience and be able to have this frictionless checkout experience is huge.
• 19:23
  Speaker 3: That is probably one of the trends, and when we started this, I said, hey, we overestimate the first five years and underestimate the next 10 years.
• 19:31
  Speaker 3: I think, as we start looking over the next 10 years, some of these things to reduce friction they're not going to happen overnight, but over the long term they will.
• 19:39
  Speaker 3: Things like using biometrics for payments.
• 19:41
  Speaker 3: We're at the early stages of that.
• 19:43
  Speaker 3: I think that's one of the things that creates this experience, reduces friction.
• 19:46
  Speaker 3: I think about frictionless checkout experiences.
• 19:50
  Speaker 3: What does that look like?
• 19:51
  Speaker 3: I gave the example of our secure cabinet that could sell various items, going to that Amazon Go type of store and enabling those type of experiences.
• 19:59
  Speaker 3: I think for the younger consumers, those are the things that they're going to expect AI-powered shopping agents that can help them find those things.
• 20:07
  Speaker 3: All of these things as we go maybe not the next two, three years, but as we start going, the next five, six, seven, eight, nine years absolutely see some of those big trends coming into our space.
• 20:18
  Speaker 2: All right.
• 20:18
  Speaker 2: Well, let's switch gears a little bit and talk about you, so maybe walk us through your professional journey and then how you got your role there today.
• 20:26
  Speaker 3: Sure, I'm sure you've heard this before from other CEOs.
• 20:30
  Speaker 3: When I first met the Castles team and came in here to introduce myself, I did talk about how I view myself as an accidental CEO, and so I'll kind of back up from there and talk about how this came to be.
• 20:41
  Speaker 3: But as far as my background goes, I've always been on the commercial, product and strategy side of business, grew up in sales, cut my teeth selling into tier one retail sales and I learned so much early in my career, selling payment solutions to the largest of the large retailers and taking a territory that I managed from 20, 25% market share up to 80% market share.
• 21:04
  Speaker 3: It really taught me the importance of being that subject matter expert, understanding the ecosystem, being that trusted advisor, and so in that sales process it kind of defined me and the way that I approach life and the way that I try to coach and lead the companies that I'm now in charge of.
• 21:22
  Speaker 3: I took that from being a salesperson and said to my boss and this is part of the story and said, hey, I've been pretty good here.
• 21:28
  Speaker 3: I think I can spread this out throughout the whole organization.
• 21:31
  Speaker 3: And even though she wasn't looking for a new sales manager, I talked her into hey, give me a chance, let me step up, let me see what I can do.
• 21:38
  Speaker 3: Leading the whole region, the whole US, from a tier one retail perspective, was able to take what I did individually, coach other people to do the same.
• 21:46
  Speaker 3: Then there was an opportunity to be a general manager.
• 21:48
  Speaker 3: I saw some problems, identified them and led that group and continued to really transform the business from a hardware to a hardware, software and services company.
• 21:57
  Speaker 3: And so every step of the way I never had the intention when I was a sales guy to go, oh, I really want to be a sales manager.
• 22:04
  Speaker 3: But I always saw there was a problem, there was an opportunity and I stepped up to the challenge just because that's my nature and what I enjoy doing.
• 22:12
  Speaker 3: Ultimately, that led to me becoming a president of North America, eventually president of North and South America, and then over the last 10 years I've held various CEO roles and so I didn't start my career back in college going, hey, I'm going to go get my MBA, I want to be on a fast track to be a CEO.
• 22:29
  Speaker 3: I just love the commercial side of business.
• 22:31
  Speaker 3: I love building partnerships.
• 22:32
  Speaker 3: That passion has provided me the opportunity to move up through the organization and now lead organizations and build that same culture and transforming and growth within organizations.
• 22:44
  Speaker 2: What are some things you're passionate about?
• 22:45
  Speaker 2: Maybe one work-related passion and one personal passion Interesting question Professionally.
• 22:51
  Speaker 3: I guess I probably touched on it a little bit.
• 22:53
  Speaker 3: But one passion I have is growth growing a company.
• 22:56
  Speaker 3: The growth is a little bit about.
• 22:58
  Speaker 3: Certainly we have shareholders.
• 23:00
  Speaker 3: We need to make money and grow.
• 23:02
  Speaker 3: You're either growing or shrinking, so that's important.
• 23:04
  Speaker 3: You have to have money to reinvest into the company.
• 23:07
  Speaker 3: But why I'm passionate about growth is growth creates opportunities, and this is what every company that I've led I talk to the employees about this and I'm sincere about it.
• 23:16
  Speaker 3: If we grow, it creates opportunities for employees.
• 23:19
  Speaker 3: Employees can learn and grow within organizations and I tell employees all the time teammates, my goal is that you grow so much that you go and do something outside of this company.
• 23:28
  Speaker 3: Time teammates, my goal is that you grow so much that you go and do something outside of this company.
• 23:31
  Speaker 3: And so, as I look around the fintech payment space in North America and, quite frankly, around the world, I've got I don't know if I'd say 100, but 20, 30, 40 people that have worked for me at different points, that are now VPs, evps, presidents and CEOs, some that have gone on to do even greater things than I've done.
• 23:45
  Speaker 3: And to me, that's why I like to grow companies, because if you're growing the companies, you're creating opportunities for other people to go grow their careers.
• 23:53
  Speaker 3: The second thing with business, I love just trying to figure out how to transform business.
• 23:57
  Speaker 3: If you just try to keep doing the same thing and expecting you can grow, you can't do it.
• 24:01
  Speaker 3: You always have to transform the business for many of the things we just talked about today.
• 24:05
  Speaker 3: If you're not figuring out how to transform the business into something different to prepare for the future, the company's not going to be able to grow.
• 24:14
  Speaker 3: So I would say those would be the two professional things.
• 24:17
  Speaker 3: On the personal front, I'm pretty competitive.
• 24:19
  Speaker 3: Just last week I had the opportunity to take a customer to Topgolf and he made a joke about how competitive I was the previous night.
• 24:26
  Speaker 3: So I guess what I would say on the personal front is I like to push myself physically and so I may not be the best natural athlete in the world, but 25 years ago 20 years ago I had a boss that did triathlons and he ultimately talked me into doing triathlons.
• 24:42
  Speaker 3: I ultimately ended up doing them with my daughters.
• 24:44
  Speaker 3: I've always traveled a bunch, but being able to go home on the weekend, go for a training run, a training bike ride or going out and doing a lake swim with my daughter.
• 24:51
  Speaker 3: It was a real bonding thing.
• 24:53
  Speaker 3: I just love to compete in triathlons and today I do a bunch of running races with both my daughters they're 25 and 27, 10ks half marathons.
• 25:02
  Speaker 3: I always jokingly say that I go run races with my daughters, but really I'm at the starting line, they go run and finish and then I eventually catch up with them.
• 25:09
  Speaker 3: But maybe I'm not as athletic as I used to be as you get older.
• 25:12
  Speaker 3: I still love going out there and competing and I think that carries over to the business side as well.
• 25:17
  Speaker 2: So one final question.
• 25:18
  Speaker 2: I'm curious your answer, given how you like to create opportunities for people.
• 25:23
  Speaker 2: So if someone comes to you, joe, and they say, hey, I'm interested in the payments or fintech space Maybe they're right out of college or something and they say, what do I need to do to be successful in my career in payments?
• 25:33
  Speaker 2: What would you tell them?
• 25:34
  Speaker 2: The?
• 25:35
  Speaker 3: first is, I think I'd go back to what I had to do early in my career, which is master the ecosystem Payments is not exactly a black and white space, and so to be successful, you have to be a subject matter expert within the payments and the fintech ecosystem.
• 25:51
  Speaker 3: If you don't do that, you can't get anywhere, and if you do that, your value is unbelievable.
• 25:57
  Speaker 3: I'm sure everybody would say this, but it's true.
• 26:00
  Speaker 3: Networking, it's getting to know people.
• 26:01
  Speaker 3: I've mentioned I've traveled a bunch.
• 26:03
  Speaker 3: The reason I travel a bunch is I believe that's how you build relationships.
• 26:07
  Speaker 3: Building those relationships are key.
• 26:09
  Speaker 3: So networking, network, network, network, stand up, take initiative, just like myself.
• 26:14
  Speaker 3: When you see a problem, don't wait for somebody to come to you and say, hey, would you like to do this?
• 26:18
  Speaker 3: Go to your boss and say, hey, here's what my goal is.
• 26:21
  Speaker 3: I'm here today and for three, five years I'd like to be here.
• 26:24
  Speaker 3: Can you help map that out for me?
• 26:29
  Speaker 3: And then the last is work hard.
• 26:30
  Speaker 3: It's really about outworking everybody else.
• 26:31
  Speaker 3: If you work hard, you understand the ecosystem, you network, you set goals for yourself.
• 26:35
  Speaker 3: That's how you can build an unbelievable career like I've been able to enjoy inside of FinTech.
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: Awesome.
• 26:41
  Speaker 2: We've covered a lot of ground about the company, about the industry, about you.
• 26:44
  Speaker 2: Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up the show?
• 26:48
  Speaker 3: I just always get such a charge out of talking about the business, talking about leading castles, talk about where the industry is going.
• 26:59
  Speaker 3: Enjoy these conversations.
• 26:59
  Speaker 3: I just hope that as people listen to this, they see the passion, hopefully get some inspiration around what I shared.
• 27:02
  Speaker 3: But I think it was a great conversation and I guess, greg, when I say it was a great conversation as I talked and you listened, no, I enjoyed the conversation today.
• 27:10
  Speaker 2: Well, joe, thank you so much for being on the show.
• 27:12
  Speaker 2: I know your times are valuable, so I really appreciate you being here today, absolutely.
• 27:15
  Speaker 2: Thank you, greg, great to meet you today, and to all you listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story.
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 27:25
  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.
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: If you enjoyed listening, please share on your social channels as well.