Latest / Leaders In Payments / Rochelle Blease, President of G2 Risk Solutions | Episode 373

Transcript

Rochelle Blease, President of G2 Risk Solutions | Episode 373 · 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 special guest, rochelle Bleas, the president of G2 Risk Solutions.
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: So, rochelle, welcome to the show.
• 0:29
  Speaker 3: Thanks so much for having me, Greg.
• 0:31
  Speaker 2: So let's start out by having you 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.
• 0:38
  Speaker 3: Yeah, a geographic journey.
• 0:40
  Speaker 3: I grew up in the Midwest, in Minnesota, and really really wanted to study science, genetics, ventured into a completely different field, ended up going to law school after undergraduate on the West Coast in Southern California where I met my husband.
• 1:00
  Speaker 3: We lived there for about 10 years.
• 1:02
  Speaker 3: He was a practicing attorney as well and I was doing some things with business and commercial litigation, a bit in bankruptcy, enjoying the variety of cases in Southern California life, but we were 1,500 or 1,800 miles away from family, moved back to Minnesota with our first child, our daughter Emily.
• 1:24
  Speaker 3: Back to Minnesota with our first child, our daughter Emily, and I ended up working for a company that is now a very, very large provider of fintech in the global compliance space.
• 1:35
  Speaker 3: My focus was to get a good day job with health benefits, and it really evolved very quickly for me, which was quite fun.
• 1:44
  Speaker 3: So in a couple respects, things evolved.
• 1:48
  Speaker 3: So we now have three children.
• 1:50
  Speaker 3: They are all adults.
• 1:51
  Speaker 3: I'm a grandmother of one and then one on the way.
• 1:55
  Speaker 3: In April we moved back to Minnesota, lived there for about 20 years.
• 2:00
  Speaker 3: All our kids grew up there while I was working for Wolters Kluwer, and that was a tremendous journey.
• 2:09
  Speaker 3: I moved really from the legal realm, which was interesting and exciting, but to the business realm, where I told everybody I think I have the best job in the world.
• 2:19
  Speaker 3: I get to learn something new every day, and the company was incredibly acquisitive.
• 2:25
  Speaker 3: I would say over the course of my career I've probably done 38, 39 acquisitions all around the globe, and as I'm mixing family and business a little bit, but as the kids grew older, they got out of school and now are starting their careers, my husband and I moved back to New England, which is where he grew up, and that had been a place we visited many, many times over the years.
• 2:50
  Speaker 3: Lots of family back there as well, and so I now live in the smallest village, in the smallest town, in the smallest county in the smallest state of Rhode Island.
• 3:01
  Speaker 3: I'm very much enjoying it.
• 3:03
  Speaker 3: We have one of our children lives not too far.
• 3:06
  Speaker 3: The others are on the West Coast, in Minnesota respectively, so I still spend a bit of time on airplanes visiting family all over the country.
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: Awesome.
• 3:16
  Speaker 2: Well, thanks so much for sharing that.
• 3:17
  Speaker 2: So let's talk about G2 Risk Solutions.
• 3:20
  Speaker 2: So tell the audience what you guys do.
• 3:23
  Speaker 3: Well, we protect the commerce and payments ecosystem and we do that in a number of ways.
• 3:30
  Speaker 3: G2 Risk Solutions really was a pioneer in the merchant risk and payments risk space over 20 years ago and they started working very, very closely with card brands, mastercard in particular, and they developed technology and expertise to enable merchant acquirers and payments facilitators to monitor and watch activities and identify the bad stuff and stop it and allow the good stuff and keep it in there.
• 4:02
  Speaker 3: So obviously the portfolio has evolved and is much, much more sophisticated today.
• 4:09
  Speaker 3: But really the goal is for any of us that go buy something and use all different forms of payments Today.
• 4:19
  Speaker 3: It might be a card, it might be a digital wallet, it might be Venmo, but where there's a transaction occurring in commerce, whether it's in a store, an online provider or even in marketplaces like an Etsy or Amazon we're there with our technology and expertise trying to make sure that the people who are engaging in commerce are legitimate, not fraudsters and criminals, and that the activity itself, that transaction, is in compliance with a whole host of card brand, local, regional rules and regulations.
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: Well, what verticals are most of your customers in?
• 4:59
  Speaker 2: You serve banks, merchants, all of the above.
• 5:03
  Speaker 3: It's merchant acquiring banks.
• 5:04
  Speaker 3: So we have sponsored banks, merchants, all of the above.
• 5:05
  Speaker 3: It's merchant acquiring banks.
• 5:06
  Speaker 3: So we have sponsored banks, sponsor banks, we have merchant acquirers.
• 5:09
  Speaker 3: We do a lot of business with some of the biggest platforms you can think of, maybe one that starts with a G and one that starts with an A and some others like that, and I'm not being coy, it's just out of respect for those relationships.
• 5:25
  Speaker 3: So these online platforms may be engaging in commerce by selling something, like an Amazon.
• 5:32
  Speaker 3: They may be engaging in commerce by selling advertising to people who want to sell things, and so, in addition to looking at whether the people on these platforms are legitimate or nefarious, we're looking at activity around transactions, but also advertising and some other types of communication.
• 5:56
  Speaker 2: Okay, and are you?
• 5:58
  Speaker 2: Sounds like you're a global company, so you could have customers all over the world, I would assume global company so you could have customers all over the world.
• 6:05
  Speaker 3: I would assume Indeed, we do.
• 6:11
  Speaker 3: There are very few countries where we don't have business right now.
• 6:12
  Speaker 3: Over the last couple of years and I suspect this will be the case in the coming two, three years we're seeing tremendous growth in more focused geographies Letham kind of in the big Asia Pacific focused geographies.
• 6:27
  Speaker 3: Letham kind of in the big Asia Pacific, eastern Europe where some of the merchant acquiring and payments activity isn't quite as sophisticated.
• 6:31
  Speaker 3: But because of the rapid proliferation of digital commerce, there are also a lot of new entrants in those geographies as well.
• 6:41
  Speaker 3: So it's an exciting time and it's challenging.
• 6:45
  Speaker 3: I love that it's challenging.
• 6:46
  Speaker 3: The fast pace of things is good for our business and one of the things that's really continuously changing is the regulatory landscape.
• 6:58
  Speaker 3: That is also good for our business because that's where we step in with our expertise and, again, greg, kind of a global perspective.
• 7:08
  Speaker 2: Okay, okay.
• 7:09
  Speaker 2: What would you say?
• 7:10
  Speaker 2: Differentiates you guys from your competitors out there?
• 7:14
  Speaker 3: Two things data and expertise.
• 7:17
  Speaker 3: The data is very interesting.
• 7:19
  Speaker 3: I mean, I've worked in risk and compliance for 40 years and on the business side you are always trying to identify those differentiators, things that are going to set you apart.
• 7:31
  Speaker 3: And for this particular business, because we were pioneers and really started with MasterCard and then other card brands to develop these processes and systems we were the first and had many, many years of working with the largest merchant acquirers and payments facilitators globally and through the work that we do with them and watching the regulatory landscape, we curated really what is very unique and important for how we deliver and differentiate Today, something we refer to as our merchant map.
• 8:11
  Speaker 3: Think of the merchant map as a sophisticated neural network.
• 8:14
  Speaker 3: So we know merchants that are bad, we know merchants that are good.
• 8:19
  Speaker 3: Think of it like metadata.
• 8:21
  Speaker 3: So it might not be a merchant name like Greg's T-shirt shop, but it might be that Greg's T-shirt shop was doing transaction laundering and we can kind of connect the breadcrumbs even if there is a phone number that might be the same or other kinds of breadcrumbs that even the most sophisticated criminal enterprises.
• 8:48
  Speaker 3: They still leave them behind.
• 8:49
  Speaker 3: A lot of times what they do is because they're extremely well-funded.
• 8:55
  Speaker 3: They'll stand up maybe 5,000 different URLs they may only have 50 to 100 that are active and they'll test some things.
• 9:06
  Speaker 3: They'll try to find vulnerabilities and weaknesses, but because they set up 1,000 at a time, often there's some patterns right, we can see similar templates, we can see similar policies, and those are really important clues and things that this neural network, this merchant map, really supports today, and it is something that is again global, because we work with global merchant acquirers and payments facilitators.
• 9:38
  Speaker 3: Whether I'm in Wellington, new Zealand, or Seattle, washington, I have a rich enough view to inform, and so that data is something now that our more sophisticated data scientists and analysts are working with in new ways, and we have to do that because we need to try to stay ahead of the well-funded fraudsters and criminals.
• 10:04
  Speaker 3: The second thing really is that expertise, and so I am by no means an AI specialist.
• 10:11
  Speaker 3: I know about large language models and machine learning, but what I hear about AI is I think it's a little I use the term responsible AI.
• 10:23
  Speaker 3: Right, there are all sorts of technologies that can help us be smarter and maybe faster.
• 10:32
  Speaker 3: Us be smarter and maybe faster, but you have to really understand how you're sourcing data, what the data governance models are, and that involves working with these experts who understand rules and regulations and card brand rules and constantly have their finger on the pulse of how the fraudsters are trying to kind of dupe the system when they can.
• 10:56
  Speaker 3: So, data expertise coming together, we're going to stay on that focus and just keep striving to innovate.
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: Sure.
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: So where do you see the industry headed, say, in the next three to five years?
• 11:10
  Speaker 2: And certainly you can answer that from a global payments kind of perspective or a more kind of risk and compliance perspective, or both really how you view the future of the business that you're in.
• 11:22
  Speaker 3: I think, in the near term, what I commented on earlier with respect to what we see in some of these emerging, more emerging economies, that is going to continue and that's just a demographic phenomenon, where technology is now able to reach out to more and more populations very, very quickly.
• 11:45
  Speaker 3: Some of the basic kinds of ways people buy and pay for things it's so much more available than it was.
• 11:55
  Speaker 3: And what's interesting is having been in the industry and watching risk and compliance for a long period of time, some of these geographies they don't have the same distance to evolve from as, say, even the US right, they don't use cash.
• 12:14
  Speaker 3: Right, there's payments-to-payments phenomenon.
• 12:18
  Speaker 3: I traveled and saw customers in India and Australia and had conversations with a number in Japan and the Philippines and now Indonesia.
• 12:30
  Speaker 3: They just buy things with a phone and a QR code.
• 12:33
  Speaker 3: So I see that as an important phenomenon.
• 12:37
  Speaker 3: I think continued regulation is a given.
• 12:41
  Speaker 3: We're seeing that.
• 12:42
  Speaker 3: We're seeing more I wouldn't say harmonization, but I think we're seeing a little bit more consistency as commerce becomes so global.
• 12:52
  Speaker 3: And I think there continues to be these high-risk areas, whether it's pharmaceuticals that's a huge one right now firearms, adult those are risk areas that are going to continue to be vital for merchant acquirers and payments facilitators to monitor, because the card brands will continue to fine, local governments will continue to need to shut those things down that are nefarious or illegal, and so we just need to be able to ferret that out as much as we can.
• 13:31
  Speaker 3: I do think AI that's involved in marketing and selling and advertising and communicating all sorts of generative AI and deep fakes that is also something that I see being particularly challenging for at least the next several years, and it's here.
• 13:56
  Speaker 3: It's already pretty sophisticated when you think about how some of the criminal enterprises are trying to do things today, and the vastness of it.
• 14:05
  Speaker 3: Just that kind of blows my mind.
• 14:07
  Speaker 3: Sometimes, to be honest with you, it's like everywhere I look, it's there.
• 14:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think the fraudsters are going to use whatever tool is available to help them get better at what they do.
• 14:19
  Speaker 2: So it happens to be AI today, right, and AI continues to evolve and get better and faster and cheaper and all those things.
• 14:28
  Speaker 2: So it's almost like you're chasing this thing over and over and it sounds like you guys are doing a great job of that.
• 14:34
  Speaker 2: And then the whole compliance side and the regulatory side, which you know.
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: It amazes me that you guys can do that globally, right?
• 14:42
  Speaker 2: You talked about data and expertise.
• 14:43
  Speaker 2: I mean, I think those have to be huge components of your success, just because of the vastness of both of those.
• 14:49
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and still a challenge, because we need to understand all of those rules and regulations and policies and the ever-changing nature of those.
• 15:01
  Speaker 3: The fraudsters just don't care, they don't have to worry about that, you know, they just go right in there for the money, so they don't have to build systems and infrastructure, and that you know it's an uneven playing field in a way.
• 15:13
  Speaker 3: But I refuse to say I would refuse to give up.
• 15:17
  Speaker 3: It's just way too important.
• 15:18
  Speaker 3: It's way too important for the global economy.
• 15:22
  Speaker 3: But it hits you right at home too, because it can be spam in my mother's email and trying to make sure that she's watching those things.
• 15:35
  Speaker 3: It can be stolen identities, it can be my children trying to do online commerce and getting in a huge, huge mess.
• 15:45
  Speaker 3: So uneven playing field, but that sort of motivates me.
• 15:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great motivator.
• 15:52
  Speaker 2: So let's switch gears a little bit and talk about you.
• 15:54
  Speaker 2: You talked a little bit about your career journey, but maybe walk us through that and how you got to the role that you're in today.
• 16:02
  Speaker 3: Well, I'll start with just working for a FinTech company, which was my third job out of law school.
• 16:09
  Speaker 3: It really helped to understand and have that sort of framework of the law which I loved.
• 16:16
  Speaker 3: I really did.
• 16:17
  Speaker 3: I was a litigator but the business side of things was so much fun Complex problems and technology and expertise sort of coming in to fix them.
• 16:30
  Speaker 3: After I initially started in a product development role in a fintech company, that's what the trained lawyers did.
• 16:37
  Speaker 3: They helped develop products because it was really about translating complex rules and regulations into rules that could be coded.
• 16:46
  Speaker 3: So that was fun and I was afforded an opportunity to work on one very, very new software project launch and I got to go out and talk to customers and more deeply understand what they did and how they did it and where the similarities were and the differences were, and it just like I didn't look back from there.
• 17:11
  Speaker 3: I wanted to be this positive change agent for businesses.
• 17:16
  Speaker 3: I wanted to have a more market and customer facing role and that continued with Devol.
• 17:22
  Speaker 3: The fintech I was working for at the time was then acquired by a very large global information and software company, wolters Kluwer, and time and, I think, energy met in a positive way for me a number of different times and I was able to get increasingly bigger roles, and one that I enjoyed I did tell people I think I have the best job at the company was overseeing strategy and corporate development, and that portfolio started at maybe $150 million in revenue and when I left about eight years ago it was in excess of $1.2 billion and that was not just things we acquired but also things that we built and that was a lot of fun.
• 18:11
  Speaker 3: And through that journey, the market exposure, the people exposure was again tremendous, motivating.
• 18:18
  Speaker 3: When you work for a large company, some of the positives are that they have a lot of systems and incentives in place around professional development and career development.
• 18:30
  Speaker 3: I was able to be on one side of that as my career developed, but then I got to mentor.
• 18:35
  Speaker 3: But then I got to be the person who was helping some of the younger professionals come along and that was terrific.
• 18:43
  Speaker 3: After I left that organization I thought I might retire, but it was just a good point, an inflection point in my life.
• 18:53
  Speaker 3: I did a lot of volunteer work.
• 18:54
  Speaker 3: I have philanthropic interests, mostly in mental health, education and music, so I did some of that and then I volunteered.
• 19:03
  Speaker 3: I'm not sure if you've heard of a US organization called SCORE.
• 19:07
  Speaker 3: It's an acronym and basically it's 11,000 or so volunteers.
• 19:14
  Speaker 3: This started as mostly retired executives and it's a free service.
• 19:19
  Speaker 3: There's a partnership with the Small Business Administration and you become mentors to people who are aspiring to start businesses.
• 19:27
  Speaker 3: I did that for a couple years and I was almost as busy as I was at the end of my tenure with Wolters Kluwer and then COVID hit and then I went.
• 19:37
  Speaker 3: I got to do something, even the volunteer work.
• 19:42
  Speaker 3: It really shifted quite a bit and I had, because of my involvement in a lot of acquisition activity over the years, I had developed relationships with different PE companies and investment banks and I was asked to take on a couple projects and those were.
• 20:00
  Speaker 3: They were great, they were focused.
• 20:02
  Speaker 3: It was all about positive change and growth.
• 20:05
  Speaker 3: We had a very successful transaction with a company called Suntic, which is identity theft protection.
• 20:12
  Speaker 3: That was an acquisition that TransUnion made TransUnion.
• 20:16
  Speaker 3: I agreed to help them for a year with integration and then there were some other dynamics and another private equity organization.
• 20:24
  Speaker 3: After I left Trans, transunion asked me to help in evaluating the G2 risk solutions assets and that then evolved into my current role, which I'm enjoying.
• 20:36
  Speaker 2: Okay, great.
• 20:37
  Speaker 2: So what are some things you're passionate about?
• 20:39
  Speaker 2: Maybe one work-related passion and one personal passion.
• 20:43
  Speaker 3: I think my work-related passion is about the customer.
• 20:48
  Speaker 3: Who are your customers?
• 20:49
  Speaker 3: Do you really understand them?
• 20:50
  Speaker 3: How can you truly understand them if you don't have a conversation and sometimes you can't step in their shoes?
• 20:58
  Speaker 3: But you have to get as close to stepping in their shoes as you possibly can, otherwise you won't understand the problem well enough to solve it for them.
• 21:08
  Speaker 3: So solving problems is kind of the outcome, but the passion has to be about the customer and understanding that, and one of the fun things about now working with my current team is helping them understand all the creative ways that you can better understand your customer.
• 21:29
  Speaker 3: But it has to be something that is deliberate.
• 21:32
  Speaker 3: That is the focus of many people across an organization.
• 21:37
  Speaker 3: It's not just a salesperson's responsibility to understand the customers.
• 21:41
  Speaker 3: It's really the organization's responsibility to do that, and that's a lot of fun.
• 21:46
  Speaker 3: I get to have a lot of time with customers.
• 21:50
  Speaker 3: I would say in 2023, which was kind of my initial year with G2 Risk Solutions easily 70% of my effort was just reaching out to customers.
• 22:01
  Speaker 3: I was new to them, but I also wanted to get to know them and understand them, and so I think that would be my work passion around the customer, I would say my personal passion starts and ends with my family, and I have a very, I would say, not very, very large, but it's a large, extended family and we're very, very close, we're very supportive of each other.
• 22:27
  Speaker 3: That's when I'm not engaged in my work activity.
• 22:31
  Speaker 3: There's always something that I'm doing that's connected to them, and now, with one and two thirds grandchildren, that's gonna be, I think, even more fun.
• 22:41
  Speaker 3: It's for those of your listeners who have grandchildren.
• 22:46
  Speaker 3: You understand you never thought you could love until you have children, but now that you've got grandchildren, and so that's important, made important to me.
• 22:54
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean mental health.
• 22:55
  Speaker 3: Music has been a part of my family generationally, and so I want to continue to support arts, particularly music.
• 23:13
  Speaker 3: And then the one thing that I love to cook.
• 23:16
  Speaker 3: So I'm really looking forward to more time down the road to experimenting and cooking.
• 23:23
  Speaker 2: Okay, great.
• 23:23
  Speaker 2: Well, if someone came to you maybe it's a young person right out of college and they're looking at the FinTech or payment space as a career and they came to you maybe they're interviewing for a job there or just come to you and they ask you what do I need to do to be successful in this industry?
• 23:41
  Speaker 2: What would you tell them they should do?
• 23:44
  Speaker 3: I got some good advice.
• 23:46
  Speaker 3: That kind of was a happy accident very, very early in my career and it was indirect advice.
• 23:54
  Speaker 3: It wasn't really from an individual, it was from an exercise and the essence of that exercise was if you like what you are doing, you're going to be good at it.
• 24:06
  Speaker 3: You're going to be good at the things you really really love doing.
• 24:11
  Speaker 3: And my motivated abilities, the things that I really loved to do, was drive change, to learn and to drive change.
• 24:21
  Speaker 3: And so for that younger professional, it is take a litmus test on whether you are enjoying what you're doing and, if you're not, try to get as much exposure to different things as you possibly can or talk to people within the business who may have had varied experiences, but it's the exposure.
• 24:43
  Speaker 3: Trying something over here, trying something over here, and you're like, wow, I really love that and I enjoyed being a lawyer, but I loved working on growing companies and that's where I just sort of honed in.
• 25:00
  Speaker 3: I think there's a lot of social pressure.
• 25:01
  Speaker 3: Here's a career path, here's a school path, here's this, this or I have a title or this job or that job.
• 25:08
  Speaker 3: If you don't like what you're doing, I don't think you really can scale and grow from that point.
• 25:15
  Speaker 3: And that doesn't mean you have to stay in the same track.
• 25:17
  Speaker 3: I didn't.
• 25:18
  Speaker 3: You know, I kind of had a little serpentine there, and that's part of what made it fun and interesting, and I think it's having just having the courage to like, ask the question do I like what I'm doing?
• 25:30
  Speaker 3: And if I don't, I'm going to try something else.
• 25:33
  Speaker 3: And you can do that in unrisky ways, right, you don't have to throw up your arms and quit your job and, you know, be at risk, but you can take some time to try some new things.
• 25:47
  Speaker 2: Okay, I think that's great advice.
• 25:47
  Speaker 2: I mean, I think if you don't like what you're doing, you're to your point.
• 25:49
  Speaker 2: I don't know that you're going to be successful, so I think that's great advice.
• 25:52
  Speaker 2: Well, rochelle, before we wrap up, is there anything else you'd like to discuss before we wrap up the show?
• 25:58
  Speaker 3: Just thank you, greg.
• 25:59
  Speaker 3: I like what you're doing.
• 26:00
  Speaker 3: It's not only the personal perspectives of folks, but different points of view that you can share with your listeners, and I think the theme or the focus that you have around payments.
• 26:15
  Speaker 3: I enjoy that because I think it will take strong and sustained leaders and efforts and results to protect this global ecosystem.
• 26:27
  Speaker 3: That it's exciting but challenging at the same time.
• 26:30
  Speaker 3: So thank you for that and for the time today.
• 26:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you, and I know your time is very valuable, so I really appreciate you being on the show today my pleasure, and to all you listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story.
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 26:48
  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.
• 26:55
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