Latest / Leaders In Payments / Parker Graham, Founder & CEO of Finotta | Episode 291

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Parker Graham, Founder & CEO of Finotta | Episode 291 · 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: Being a fintech company and banking, it's very hard to generate revenue fully digitally from end to end, and we're one of the only, if not the only, providers that can actually do that.
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: You implement with us, or we implement with you, rather, from that moment on, you're generating revenue in your digital channel for the first time, more than likely ever In our world.
• 0:36
  Speaker 2: Deposits are extremely expensive.
• 0:39
  Speaker 2: Cost of funds are going up.
• 0:40
  Speaker 2: Deposits are coming in the front door, leaking out the back door for better rates.
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: Somewhere we got a Fed that might decrease rates.
• 0:47
  Speaker 2: All this rate hype right.
• 0:48
  Speaker 2: Well, how do you get your customer to actually stay with you and actually generate profitability within a short amount of time?
• 0:54
  Speaker 2: Because you don't have much time with them.
• 0:56
  Speaker 2: That's really what makes us super different and what's helping us be really successful the last few years.
• 1:07
  Speaker 3: That was Parker Graham, founder and CEO of Finata, and he is my special guest on this episode, episode 291 of the Leaders and Payments podcast, and I'm your host, greg Myers.
• 1:15
  Speaker 3: Finata uses personalized financial guidance to drive digital growth for financial institutions.
• 1:21
  Speaker 3: Finata embeds their products and features into digital banking channels to create a personalized experience that predicts the bank's customers needs, which, in turn, increases product conversions and delivers actionable guidance in an all-in-one solution.
• 1:35
  Speaker 3: Parker and I talk about Finata and what makes it unique in the marketplace, as well as Parker's professional journey and his passions.
• 1:42
  Speaker 3: We've got a great episode ahead, so let's get started.
• 1:44
  Speaker 3: Hi Parker, thank you for being here and welcome to the Leaders and Payments podcast.
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: You bet, greg, you're having me.
• 1:56
  Speaker 3: Absolutely.
• 1:56
  Speaker 3: So let's dive in, if you don't mind.
• 1:58
  Speaker 3: Tell our audience a little bit about yourself, maybe where you grew up, where you went to school, where you currently live, a few things like that, and then we'll circle back to your professional career in just a minute.
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you bet, greg, I grew up really as a Midwestern guy.
• 2:11
  Speaker 2: I grew up hunting, fishing and a little town in Southwest Missouri Just was always involved in sports, always involved in like the outdoors, like I said, and left the Midwest to go to college in Oklahoma so I guess it's still kind of the Midwest and went from there to a bunch of different places.
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: I've been to Baltimore, back to Oklahoma, up to Kansas City, and my wife and I and our kiddos all live here in Kansas City now.
• 2:34
  Speaker 3: Well, let's talk about the company, so tell the audience what Finata does.
• 2:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so Finata is basically a company that came about with the real surgeons and personalization technology.
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: Everything that you see, do touch At this point.
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: It's really personalized to you and who you are as a consumer, as a spender and really the only place that doesn't exist is in banking technology.
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: And so back in 2020, I had a software company that was doing more direct-to-consumer type of tech and helping people eliminate debt and try to get out of debt, and what we realized with our customers was that every single one of them was asking us to have our technology in their bank or credit unions app.
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: And so I'm an old football player.
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: I played both college, brooklyn, the state and pro for Baltimore.
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: You have to tell me something a couple of times before I get it, because I've been hitting the head a lot, but user after user basically kept coming back to us and saying, man, can you put this in my banks app?
• 3:27
  Speaker 2: So it's exactly what we did.
• 3:28
  Speaker 2: So Finata basically is an embedded FinTech company that allows really any bank or credit union doesn't matter what size they are, whether they're 100 billion in assets or 8 billion in assets and everything in between.
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: It allows us to put personalization technology directly in their mobile app specifically, and what it does is it basically figures out what financial journey your individual user is on and figures out what products and services that they currently have and maybe don't have in some instances and really cross sells and up sells those products that the bank wants to sell to the customer in a completely digital way, all while improving the financial health of the end user, basically helps them go from point A in their financial journey which might be debt recovery or just building a business or building an emergency fund for the first time to point B, the next financial journey, and if you can imagine that over the lifetime of a banking customer, right, there's tons of journeys to go on and tons of journeys to be on.
• 4:20
  Speaker 2: It's really difficult for a bank or a credit union to service all of those different, unique instances at scale, and so that's really why our company exists is to do that for both the end user and making their financial life a better scenario than it was before us, and also helping the institution really come into the 21st century and start making digital revenue with their customers.
• 4:39
  Speaker 3: So I assume your customer is the, actually the bank, not the end user.
• 4:44
  Speaker 2: Correct.
• 4:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so we're interesting in the sense that we are definitely purchased by the bank or the credit union, but really, who we pay the most attention to, though, is the end user, and that's because, as with anything technology based that deals with the phone, that front end user experience has to be pristine.
• 5:00
  Speaker 2: It cannot act like a bank built it, which is something we actually pride ourselves on.
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: I don't know if you opened your bank's app in the last day or so, but if you open that and then open Instagram, it's going to look very, very different.
• 5:14
  Speaker 2: It's going to function differently.
• 5:15
  Speaker 2: It's just not built the way that we're used to apps being built.
• 5:18
  Speaker 2: When our clients, the banks, take on our technology, like I said, we embed it directly in their user experience, and it has a lot of the functionality that you're used to right.
• 5:27
  Speaker 2: It reflects who you are as a consumer.
• 5:29
  Speaker 2: It augments itself and helps you depending upon your unique financial journey, which is really how everything else works in this world, and we just basically took that and put that in this unique instance, and it's been really exciting.
• 5:42
  Speaker 2: The other cool thing about having the bank be the customer, but the end user being the real driver of everything, is that we get to actually directly impact the financial lives of tens of thousands of people at this point, which will be millions soon in the future.
• 5:56
  Speaker 2: And it's really cool because we're a direct one to one, Like when a user uses us, their financial life is better in some form or fashion.
• 6:03
  Speaker 2: We call it, lives changed internally.
• 6:05
  Speaker 2: It's a beautiful kind of rising ties, lifts all boats environment that we get to live in every day.
• 6:10
  Speaker 3: It makes a lot of sense.
• 6:11
  Speaker 3: So, as a consumer, I log into my mobile app.
• 6:15
  Speaker 3: Is there sort of a setup Like do you ask questions?
• 6:19
  Speaker 3: That helps you determine the personalization, like you know what are your goals, what are you trying to accomplish, or how do you know what journey they want to go on?
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a great question.
• 6:29
  Speaker 2: So it's definitely something that's a little bit more advanced than that.
• 6:31
  Speaker 2: So our algorithms basically figure out what journey you're on right now completely automatically.
• 6:37
  Speaker 2: So the moment you touch our tech, we are in the banks apps.
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: You go into the banks app.
• 6:40
  Speaker 2: There's a typically a button that's in that home page.
• 6:44
  Speaker 2: That's us, but we're white labeled.
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: So consider doesn't know that, but the interface does.
• 6:48
  Speaker 2: And once they click that, our technology goes in and looks at all the transactional data that's out there, all the different accounts you have, that institution.
• 6:54
  Speaker 2: It makes a bunch of inferences off of that and then from there the user interacts with the system and basically itself adjusts to what the user's wanting to work on.
• 7:03
  Speaker 2: So kind of like what you mentioned.
• 7:04
  Speaker 2: They might want to do a financial journey that's specific to them, but they might actually need to fix some things in a different one.
• 7:10
  Speaker 2: First, kind of augments to that and really, again, at the end of the day, wherever the user is at point A, we're trying to figure out how to get them to point B and that might be a savings goal.
• 7:19
  Speaker 2: It might be, you know, paying, you know building some wealth in some form or fashion and really everything in between.
• 7:25
  Speaker 3: And do you go to market with like a direct sales force?
• 7:28
  Speaker 3: Do you work through partnership channels or a little of both?
• 7:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah, a little bit of everything.
• 7:32
  Speaker 2: We've been at this for five years now, so we've got great relationships across the entire fintech ecosystem everything from, you know, publicly traded digital banking providers that we work with very, very closely, to global providers who work with everybody from folks in the States up to Canada, all the way over to Europe.
• 7:49
  Speaker 2: So we've definitely really just scratched the surface, in my opinion, of where we're trying to go, and, as a person who's been doing this for five years, that's a really fun way to think about things, because there's always more people that you can help and there's always more institutions that need help, and that's exactly why we exist and why we're really excited for this year.
• 8:07
  Speaker 2: It's the beginning of 2024 and it's going to be our biggest year.
• 8:11
  Speaker 2: It's a lot of fun being in the seat that I'm in and getting to see that every day.
• 8:14
  Speaker 3: So what would you say?
• 8:15
  Speaker 3: Differentiates you guys from your competitors out there?
• 8:19
  Speaker 2: There's a couple.
• 8:20
  Speaker 2: The first one is just really actions based insights versus more past tense historical events and what really.
• 8:28
  Speaker 2: What I mean by that is you probably opened up an app before and it says like hey, looks like you spent 400 bucks at Starbucks last month.
• 8:34
  Speaker 2: You shouldn't do that.
• 8:36
  Speaker 2: That's terrible.
• 8:36
  Speaker 2: You lost $10,000 in the stock market by doing that.
• 8:39
  Speaker 2: If you would have just moved your money over here.
• 8:41
  Speaker 2: Have you ever seen anything like that?
• 8:42
  Speaker 2: They call it the latte factor.
• 8:43
  Speaker 3: Yeah, sure, absolutely.
• 8:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so our technology doesn't work like that.
• 8:47
  Speaker 2: It's much more action based.
• 8:48
  Speaker 2: So it's it's next best opportunity.
• 8:51
  Speaker 2: So I don't care that you spent 400 bucks last month at Starbucks.
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: What our technology cares about is where your next $400 goes, and so it's just a complete different shift in how we're approaching user behavior and how we coach our users to make the next best financial step in their life.
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: So it might be, you know, user comes in and our tech automatically knows okay, hey, you need to put $25 extra this month to this amEx card, versus paying $25 to your student loan.
• 9:19
  Speaker 2: Here's why Do you want to make that decision?
• 9:21
  Speaker 2: Yes, I do.
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: Great, you can do it all here within the application.
• 9:24
  Speaker 2: You don't have to bounce out to your MS provider.
• 9:27
  Speaker 2: You don't have to bounce over here to this provider.
• 9:29
  Speaker 2: It all is encompassed in the environment.
• 9:32
  Speaker 2: And then, on top of that, maybe we find that you need an account right then and there at the institution, and we can actually open that account right then and there on core, which is a fancy term for saying that we've messed with enough legacy dinosaurs that we can actually do some fun things in that stack and really just make the user experience easy for the customer, for the user.
• 9:50
  Speaker 2: That's probably the biggest differentiator.
• 9:52
  Speaker 2: I would say just action based decision making versus insights based decision making.
• 9:57
  Speaker 2: The other thing that I'll say is our technology is built in the last, you know, two years.
• 10:01
  Speaker 2: A lot of the folks that we go up against their tech is about 15 years old and acts like it.
• 10:05
  Speaker 2: It's very unfair if you put an iPhone 15 that I have in my hand here and an iPhone seven.
• 10:11
  Speaker 2: Those are very different technologies, right.
• 10:13
  Speaker 2: Like very different hardware is very different operating capacities, and that's just the beauty of being who we are as far as that, we're younger, we're nimbler and we're able to move really, really fast in the technology that was built and really is here to do what Banking technology should be doing, which is making life easier for the user they shouldn't have to think about at this point.
• 10:33
  Speaker 2: We have so much transactional data that it's really not hard to figure out where people need to put their money.
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: It's a lot harder to get people to really entice them to want to use you as that single source of truth, right, and so for us, that's really the whole entire game that we're playing here is really getting users enticed, helping with their financial health and then, in the same breath, helping the institution be able to figure out okay, this amount of customers need this product, this amount of customers need this product.
• 10:58
  Speaker 2: And we do that fully automatically, without a customer ever having to come into a bank branch, which, again, greg, I'm going to guess here the fact that you're doing a podcast I'm going to guess you don't go into your bank's branch very often, if ever.
• 11:08
  Speaker 2: Is that fair?
• 11:09
  Speaker 2: That's a very fair thing to say.
• 11:10
  Speaker 2: That's the thing, right, in most institutions they aren't equipped to handle that kind of customer and we're one of the ones that's really helping them figure that out.
• 11:20
  Speaker 2: And the third and final is really a byproduct of number two, and that's we actually generate revenue digitally.
• 11:26
  Speaker 2: So, being a fintech company and banking, it's very hard to generate revenue fully digitally from end to end, and we're one of the only, if not the only, providers that can actually do that.
• 11:36
  Speaker 2: You implement with us, or we implement with you.
• 11:39
  Speaker 2: Rather, from that moment on, you're generating revenue in your digital channel for the first time, more than likely ever, I mean, in a world where, in our world, deposits are extremely expensive, cost of funds are growing up, deposits are coming in the front door, leaking out the back door for better rates.
• 11:55
  Speaker 2: Somewhere we got a Fed that might decrease rates next year.
• 11:59
  Speaker 2: All this rate hype, right?
• 12:01
  Speaker 2: Well, how do you get your customer to actually stay with you and actually generate profitability within a short amount of time?
• 12:07
  Speaker 2: Because you don't have much time with them?
• 12:09
  Speaker 2: That's really what makes us super different in what's helping us be really successful the last two years.
• 12:14
  Speaker 3: Well, where do you see this part of the, if you want to call it, the overall fintech or payments industry?
• 12:20
  Speaker 3: But where do you see it headed and say maybe the next three to five years?
• 12:23
  Speaker 2: Oh man, how long we have on this podcast.
• 12:25
  Speaker 2: I think I got a lot of theories.
• 12:27
  Speaker 2: Let's just talk about the industry as a whole, just financial technology and really where I think it's going.
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: I think it's going even more so to automation than it ever has before.
• 12:37
  Speaker 2: You have AGI coming out.
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: You have large language models that are making things easier and easier and easier and easier to get customers to not only get them, but make them have a great experience.
• 12:48
  Speaker 2: Right, I'm sure you probably have had a conversation with a bot two day and you didn't even realize it was a bot.
• 12:53
  Speaker 2: That's how good these things are getting.
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: I think.
• 12:56
  Speaker 2: Really digitizing the sales force for banks in the banking industry, whether that's banks or fintechs, neo banks, whatever it might be it's just speed automation.
• 13:05
  Speaker 2: I don't know about you, but I feel like that has just 10X in the last 16 months.
• 13:11
  Speaker 2: I really feel like the next year the applications for AGI and what ChatGBT is doing and some of the other big providers out there it's going to completely revolutionize everything that we do.
• 13:23
  Speaker 2: I just think it's going to be exciting to figure out which parts have the most benefit.
• 13:27
  Speaker 2: Right, I think about in our vertical, the way that a user sees Fnata in our system is called the financial coach.
• 13:34
  Speaker 2: That's the user experience they see from the bank.
• 13:36
  Speaker 2: Right, it's called the financial coach.
• 13:37
  Speaker 2: That financial coach is built more so on machine learning technology, not AGI as we think about how can we automate and make these experiences even better, adding some of those functionality pieces in there to automate that conversational piece and make it even better to where a person really feels like they have a person in their app that's looking out for their finances.
• 13:58
  Speaker 2: How cool is that?
• 14:01
  Speaker 2: Five years ago, maybe like five to 10 years ago, if you were a middle class, average American, you had no hopes of having financial advice from anyone but your mom, your dad, your uncle, your aunt, someone that you had close proximity to.
• 14:16
  Speaker 2: But you couldn't afford to go to a financial advisor and spend time and get a really good outlook on your finances unless you had money.
• 14:22
  Speaker 2: In the future, that's not going to be the case.
• 14:24
  Speaker 2: Anyone's going to have access to the entirety of financial history and be able to use those things to make themselves and put themselves in a better spot.
• 14:31
  Speaker 2: That's what gets me really excited is that you'll have a lower class American be able to become an upper level income class American simply by the fact that technology has moved so fast in their lifetime and has given them the opportunities and tools to do so.
• 14:45
  Speaker 2: It's going to be really fun.
• 14:47
  Speaker 3: Things like blockchain and Bitcoin, all those things really for your business, don't really play a huge role, right?
• 14:56
  Speaker 2: So the way that we look at those technologies is a whole lot less oh, we're not going to use those and a whole lot more how can we continue to evolve into the organization that our clients need us to be?
• 15:07
  Speaker 2: Right?
• 15:07
  Speaker 2: So you mentioned blockchain and I like to think about smart contracts.
• 15:11
  Speaker 2: Right, there's a lot of application for smart contracts when it comes to, let's just say, like a regional banking institution, right, you've got folks and customers.
• 15:20
  Speaker 2: You have clients at those institutions that are doing you know tens of millions of dollars a year in revenue, doing thousands of contracts, thousands of accounts receivables and accounts payables transactions.
• 15:30
  Speaker 2: You apply, you know blockchain or smart contracts onto those and improve the security, improve the payability of those.
• 15:39
  Speaker 2: I've got a bunch of examples of, like, rural contracts where, like you're dealing with, you know hard assets that people can skip town on, right, and in the blockchain world, that really can't happen, right, because you have the accounts, you have them sitting there and you have the funds, the ability to cross those payments instantaneously.
• 15:54
  Speaker 2: I think that those types of tools are going to be something that we're going to be definitely paying attention to.
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: Whether it's a part of our platform in its current iteration probably not, but, as a company, this is not just one product that we're going to build.
• 16:08
  Speaker 2: Right, we're going to build, and continuously build, products that make sense for our customers, and so it could be something that we build in the future for sure.
• 16:14
  Speaker 3: All right.
• 16:14
  Speaker 3: Well, let's switch gears a little bit and talk about you.
• 16:17
  Speaker 3: So you mentioned you played college and professional football, so maybe catch us up from leaving the NFL, maybe taking your first job, to where you are today.
• 16:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 16:29
  Speaker 2: So I was very blessed I got to play in the NFL for the Baltimore Ravens and it was an amazing experience.
• 16:35
  Speaker 2: But I quickly realized, just by being around my teammates and kind of seeing the financial lifestyle and financial habits that a lot of them had, that I had a calling to do something in finance.
• 16:47
  Speaker 2: So I actually left the league and went directly into wealth management.
• 16:50
  Speaker 2: I worked for a $70 billion asset manager it was a part of a $40 billion bank based out of Tulsa, oklahoma, called Bank of Oklahoma, or BOKF is the publicly traded company and worked there as a wealth management high net worth wealth advisor specializing in all kinds of fun stuff from financial planning to alternative assets to really everything in between a lot of analytical work and really just got to live that dream of helping people with their wealth and really helping people get better money habits, figure out how to make their wealth last as long as possible.
• 17:23
  Speaker 2: The only problem was that I grew up, as I mentioned, a small Midwestern guy who small town, excuse me, not small I'm six, seven, so small town, midwestern guy and carrying a briefcase and wearing a suit every day is what I thought was going to make me feel important and it just wasn't.
• 17:39
  Speaker 2: I felt this calling to really build a business that could help people, like the folks that I grew up with helping people get from zero to one, not one to 10.
• 17:48
  Speaker 2: I felt a real big spiritual calling to building something like that.
• 17:52
  Speaker 2: So in 2017, I started figuring out what that business was going to be and I looked around and I was actually leading our IPOs and doing a lot of analytical work on all of our IPOs that we were investing in as a firm and was reading all these founder stories about these 20-year-old wonderkins who founded a company when they were 18, 19, 20, 22 and had IPO by the time they were like 26 and I was like, oh my gosh well, I've read enough of these.
• 18:18
  Speaker 2: If they can do it, I can certainly figure something out.
• 18:20
  Speaker 2: Well and behold, I did not IPO by the time I was 26, but it gave me that drive and that fire to go build something that was bigger than myself.
• 18:30
  Speaker 2: That was a company that was the previous iteration of Fanata and it was called Destiny.
• 18:36
  Speaker 2: Destiny Wealth was the name of it.
• 18:41
  Speaker 2: Basically, I ideated on that in 2017, got the guts to leave the company and started in 2018.
• 18:48
  Speaker 2: And, like I mentioned, I left that company with, I think, $50,000 in my pocket to build a company for the masses and very quickly realized that, number one, you can't that's just very infeasible to try to build a company, a software company, with no experience, no idea what you're doing and also very, very little money Simply ran out of money, got a part-time job working at a liquor store I love telling that story just to make ends meet and ended up having to go work for a bank at a certain time, just to make ends meet even more, and was building the company on the side.
• 19:24
  Speaker 2: And 2020 rolled around, continued listening to customers and started working for a bank, like I said, and saw all the problems in banking technology and late 2020, early 2021 made the pivot to what is now Finata.
• 19:40
  Speaker 2: Ever since then, we've found our niche and have brought this personalization really to the forefront.
• 19:46
  Speaker 2: It's actually a term in the industry now which is kind of interesting.
• 19:49
  Speaker 2: It's something we've been talking about again since 2020, and it's now like an industry vertical, which is kind of cool to say, even though we're still a small company and we're still trying to get biggest of our competitors.
• 20:01
  Speaker 2: It's something that we created and the job's just not done.
• 20:05
  Speaker 2: We've got plenty of work to do.
• 20:06
  Speaker 2: There's 10,500 financial institutions out there and we're trying to go be of service to any and all of them, but that's really how we got from Pro Ball to where we are today.
• 20:16
  Speaker 3: Awesome.
• 20:17
  Speaker 3: Well, what are some things you're passionate about?
• 20:19
  Speaker 3: So, maybe one personal passion and one business passion.
• 20:23
  Speaker 2: So I'm a girl dad first and foremost.
• 20:25
  Speaker 2: I'm blessed with three beautiful daughters and really a family man at heart.
• 20:29
  Speaker 2: When I'm not working, I'm typically with my family doing just typical dad things.
• 20:35
  Speaker 2: It's funny I played football, but I'm probably the last person that you want to take to a football game because I'm just going to sit there and analyze the whole time.
• 20:42
  Speaker 2: So I much rather like watching it in the comforts of my home with the announcers off.
• 20:46
  Speaker 2: But a huge fan of sports love sports anything.
• 20:51
  Speaker 2: It doesn't matter if it's cricket or whatever.
• 20:53
  Speaker 2: If it's on I'm happy and really probably biggest passion outside of those things is really fishing.
• 21:00
  Speaker 2: It's kind of like my solitude and weightlifting.
• 21:03
  Speaker 2: Those are my two calling my moments with God, because there's just nothing else going on, it's just the weight's moving or the fishing line going out and, as I mentioned before, I'm a Christian.
• 21:14
  Speaker 2: So those are my moments of just kind of being in solitude, if you will, with the Lord.
• 21:20
  Speaker 2: And yeah, that was probably it.
• 21:22
  Speaker 2: You don't get to have a whole lot of hobbies when you do things like this and you really start companies.
• 21:26
  Speaker 3: So they're very few, in part between yeah, that's why I don't ask about hobbies.
• 21:30
  Speaker 3: To me, the passion question can be.
• 21:34
  Speaker 3: A lot of times the business and the personal passion when it's a founder of a company are very similar.
• 21:40
  Speaker 3: So how about your business passion?
• 21:42
  Speaker 3: What part of running this business are you most passionate?
• 21:45
  Speaker 2: about.
• 21:45
  Speaker 2: Oh, people, 100%.
• 21:46
  Speaker 2: I mean it's not even close.
• 21:48
  Speaker 2: There's not a close second.
• 21:49
  Speaker 2: There's two ways that comes.
• 21:50
  Speaker 2: The first one is the people you get to work with every day.
• 21:53
  Speaker 2: We are very blessed to have an incredibly talented team.
• 21:56
  Speaker 2: Without our company would not exist.
• 21:58
  Speaker 2: No company is one person.
• 22:01
  Speaker 2: I might be the face, people might see me at conferences speaking, but there are an amazing group of people behind and with me that make our company fun to go to every single day.
• 22:12
  Speaker 2: That's 1000% like the most important part of what I do.
• 22:17
  Speaker 2: That's kind of where I get my most fulfillment.
• 22:20
  Speaker 2: That's a perfect word for it.
• 22:21
  Speaker 2: Absolutely.
• 22:22
  Speaker 2: The piggyback off of that is the people we affect.
• 22:24
  Speaker 2: So it's the people internally that you get to work with every day and it's the people that you affect.
• 22:30
  Speaker 2: Now, it doesn't matter what job I've ever been in.
• 22:33
  Speaker 2: It doesn't matter what that matter if I was playing football or stocking, you know, whiskeys on aisle six at the liquor store, the conversations, the impact that is driven when you can wake up every single day and realize that your technology Somewhere, someplace, is helping someone do something better than they did the day before.
• 22:54
  Speaker 2: There's nothing better on this earth than that.
• 22:56
  Speaker 2: I mean not only that is not about their team all the time.
• 22:59
  Speaker 2: It's a whole lot less about even who we affect on a daily basis, but it's the ripple effects of who we affect on a daily basis, right?
• 23:06
  Speaker 2: So it's the, the mom that we're helping figure out what to do with her credit card debt so that she's in a better spot when her kids need to go play you know, go play in a basketball tournament somewhere.
• 23:15
  Speaker 2: She's got a shell out six hundred bucks, right, it's like those ripple effects.
• 23:18
  Speaker 2: It's the, you know, the person who started a business and is making really good money but needs to figure out how to make the next step right.
• 23:25
  Speaker 2: Those are people that we get to affect every day, and that's not only a great byproduct, but it's it's an incredibly important responsibility, and the combination of those two things is by far what get me excited to get up and do what I do every day, and a lot of times way late into the night, but those are, those are what make it worth it and all honesty, every day.
• 23:44
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 23:44
  Speaker 3: Well, this final question is is around the people side of the business or the industry.
• 23:50
  Speaker 3: And you know, if someone's coming to you and they say, hey, parker, I'm interested in joining your company and I really love this fintech space and what it's doing, and you know there's so much money being invested in and it's a great place to build a career, so he or she comes to you and says what do I need to do to be successful in my career and fintech?
• 24:10
  Speaker 3: What would you tell?
• 24:11
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of ways to think about how to answer that question really depends on, like, where you want to be.
• 24:15
  Speaker 2: So, do you want to be at a startup, like a, you know?
• 24:17
  Speaker 2: If not, I.
• 24:17
  Speaker 2: Do you want to be like a, a bigger player who's raised, you know, series D, capital, like a bond, a I or something like that.
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: Right, very different experiences from working perspective.
• 24:27
  Speaker 2: So be the first kind of understanding I would have to have If it's the, you know, start up mentality, like the start of the work in an early stage, start up.
• 24:35
  Speaker 2: You better get ready for the biggest education that you have ever had and literally things that you never thought you need.
• 24:40
  Speaker 2: An education.
• 24:41
  Speaker 2: It is the fastest Route to growth and employ ability, I would say because you just learn so much in such a short time frame.
• 24:51
  Speaker 2: I bet if you would ask any of our employees, they would probably say the exact same thing, like they have learned more In a faster time than any other thing they've ever done in their life.
• 25:01
  Speaker 2: Right, because it's just constantly moving, your constantly dying, your constantly like trying to survive.
• 25:07
  Speaker 2: When you're in that fight or flight moment, your only option really is to hide, and so you have to kind of figure out who you are and it's a huge blessing and all honestly, because anywhere else you go after going from a startup is kind of easy to be completely honest with you because the page is coming every single week like it's not that hard like you do.
• 25:24
  Speaker 2: Some spreadsheets got to make some sales, like that's great.
• 25:27
  Speaker 2: There are people that works for not awesome, go to your thing and if that is how you are, startups are not for you.
• 25:33
  Speaker 2: So that's kind of like why.
• 25:33
  Speaker 2: That's the first you know delineating factor.
• 25:36
  Speaker 2: The second one we're working on a bigger start up right, start up so that are kind of trying to make their way towards IPO.
• 25:41
  Speaker 2: So if you're looking to do something like that, it's more competitive to get into that start up right because they have so many more employees there's.
• 25:48
  Speaker 2: There's more like specific roles and titles.
• 25:51
  Speaker 2: If you're kind of fresh and green and don't really know how to do that, like the first thing I would do is message the founders.
• 25:56
  Speaker 2: Like I don't care how long the startups been around.
• 26:00
  Speaker 2: If you will message the as long as a pre IPO, once it's past IPO, there's, you know, is the founders of theirs.
• 26:05
  Speaker 2: It's probably more difficult.
• 26:06
  Speaker 2: But there's series, bcd, I would literally find something that you can solve for them.
• 26:12
  Speaker 2: It might be like, hey, I saw this article and you guys were talking about this being a pain point.
• 26:18
  Speaker 2: I went ahead and solve that for you.
• 26:20
  Speaker 2: It's a terrible example.
• 26:21
  Speaker 2: But something like that where you're providing value In showcasing, in this outreach, like what you can do, right.
• 26:28
  Speaker 2: So it doesn't have to be something that, like, you actually can have a lot of knowledge about, but you're just like showing them like, hey, I can do stuff and I want to do it for you.
• 26:36
  Speaker 2: And you should offer to work for free, like if you're brand new and your job, you're trying to break into an industry, there's no better way than to prove yourself to people, because they will give you shots, they will give you opportunities.
• 26:46
  Speaker 2: Reach out, tell them something that you can do, show them something you can do and then say, listen, I'll work for you for free until I earn a spot.
• 26:52
  Speaker 2: And that, right there, shows a lot about the kind of character that you are.
• 26:57
  Speaker 2: And if you're really not that character, you'll flame out right.
• 27:00
  Speaker 2: So like Beautiful, double edged store.
• 27:02
  Speaker 2: Because for the founder at that stage like, okay, yeah, I'm gonna get some free work, I'm really see who you are and what you're about and if you prove yourself, then shoot.
• 27:09
  Speaker 2: It's really easy to find a role for you.
• 27:10
  Speaker 2: Those are kind of two ways that I would kind of think about, depending upon where you're reaching out and how you're kind of going about Want to break into that industry in the kind of company you're trying to get into, especially in fintech yeah, I think it's very powerful advice.
• 27:24
  Speaker 3: Well, parker, we covered a lot of ground, obviously about the industry and about fanata and what great work you guys are doing there, and obviously about your Professional and personal journey.
• 27:34
  Speaker 3: Is there anything else you'd like to cover before you wrap up the show?
• 27:37
  Speaker 2: Honestly, I think the that I like to end on is just really about where the industry is going to kind of double you kind of clicked into it.
• 27:43
  Speaker 2: I want to double click into it real quick.
• 27:45
  Speaker 2: There's been a lot of conversation in our industry, specifically around like a gm chat to be, a lot of these a I models that are going to be coming out, and I just gotta say there is not been a better time to get into financial technology.
• 27:59
  Speaker 2: It's becoming easier.
• 28:00
  Speaker 2: It doesn't matter what vertical you pick to.
• 28:02
  Speaker 2: It could be in bank technology, like what we're doing on, could be in payments, could be in crypto, could be anything.
• 28:06
  Speaker 2: All these things are going to move at Mach speed from this point forward.
• 28:12
  Speaker 2: The reason why I say that is it's taking us five years to get our tech to where it is today.
• 28:16
  Speaker 2: If you are starting our company right now, it would take you half that time with the tools that are already available.
• 28:23
  Speaker 2: So if you're thinking about doing anything in this industry for thinking about trying to get your tone of the water is great said getting a job somewhere this is the time, because five years from now, technology is not going to be even close to the same as what it was, which is something I'm super, super excited for, and I'm sure a lot of your listeners are too.
• 28:42
  Speaker 2: What if you're trying to get in or thinking about getting in?
• 28:44
  Speaker 2: It's to.
• 28:45
  Speaker 2: The time is now.
• 28:46
  Speaker 3: I think that's a great way to end the show and, parker, I know your time is very valuable, so I want to thank you for being here and really do appreciate your time today.
• 28:53
  Speaker 3: You bet great thanks for having me and to all your listeners out there.
• 28:57
  Speaker 3: I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story.
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us this week on the leaders in payments podcast.
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: Make sure you visit our website at leaders in payments dot com where you can subscribe to the show and where you'll find our show notes.
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: If you enjoyed listening, please share on your social channels as well.