Latest / Leaders In Payments / Insurance Payments Simplified with Todd Greenbaum, Input 1 | Episode 520

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Insurance Payments Simplified with Todd Greenbaum, Input 1 | Episode 520 · Leaders In Payments

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Leaders in Payments Podcast, where we talk to sea level leaders from across the payments landscape.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: 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_00: We will also hear stories from our guests about their journeys to the top.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_02: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Leaders in Payments Podcast.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_02: I'm your host, Craig Myers, and today's special guest is Todd Greenbaum, the president and CEO of Input One.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_02: So, Todd, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the show.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks a lot, Craig.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: I'm really glad to be here.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_02: So before we dive into your career and talk about the company and the industry, can you give us a quick snapshot of your personal background, maybe where you grew up, where you call home today, a few things like that?
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: Certainly.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I live in Southern California in a in a town called Agora, which is to northwest of downtown Los Angeles.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: I've lived here since I was about 11 years old, with the exception of a short spat for college.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: And otherwise, I am a native Southern California, always been here, and probably always will be.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_02: Well, my understanding is you got involved with input one at a very young age.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_02: So do you mind walking us through that story?
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: Sure, no problem.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: So I actually started here when I was 16 years old, and the genesis was pretty simple.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: We had dinner every week with my grandparents, and my grandfather, who was a serial entrepreneur, had sold his last company and had started this new company that was in the business of helping banks run finance operations, essentially run insurance, premium finance companies, which allows for payment plans for insurance products sold.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: And he said to me, I, you know, I need a computer program for this business.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, gee, I, you know, I'm a gamer.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know that I really know how to write code, but I like computers.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: He says, Ah, you're a smart kid, you'll figure it out.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: So I went out and I bought a book.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: I was very uh a little intimidated coming back to him saying, gee, the book costs$65.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: It was very expensive for 1984.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, Yeah, no problem at all.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I read the book and it came very easy to me.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: And over the next several years, I ended up writing a piece of code throughout my college career that became the backbone of the business.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: And then I started learning operations and built the business from there and grew it in concentric circles with similar and related types of services, but all surrounding the payment ecosystem and the insurance landscape.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's a great way, a great segue to the next question.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_02: So tell our audience what Input One does.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: So Input One is a platform that manages all modalities of inbound premium payment.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: So when it comes to an insurance product, there are three traditional ways that people pay.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: You can either pay up front, you can write a write a check or send a transfer on January 1 for the whole year.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: You can pay by installments monthly or quarterly that are typically offered by an insurance carrier or a managing general agency, or you can finance the premium.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: We are the only company that I am aware of that actually handles all elements of that potential inbound premium.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: So if you want to pay in full, we have the payment rails.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to bill it, we have the payment rails plus the billing mechanism.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: And if you want to finance it, we own a finance company and all the payments connected to that.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: So it's everything related to inbound premium, and we work with all elements of the insurance vertical carriers, MGAs, retail brokers, and finance companies and banks, all of that in the service of policyholders so that they can make their payments to the insurance entities that the premiums are due to.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_02: So when you say insurance, does that mean all insurance or just specific verticals within that?
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: We lean very heavily in the property casualty side of the insurance industry.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: We do some surety, which kind of borders on the side of the other of the other side, which is the life and health side, but our primary focus is property casualty.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_02: What's the biggest challenge your company is solving for your customers right now?
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: I would say just try my my customers being the MGAs, the carriers, the retailers, is there is still, despite the digitization of payments, which is becoming quite it's happening all over the place right now, it's the reconciliation that occurs after that and the embedding of that payment experience into the overall insurance transaction.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: So it's it's easy to say, well, I can move money on payment rails.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: That's quite frankly that that's that's the easiest part of the entire thing.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's how do you handle the communication up front?
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: How do you handle the manual allocation of those money, or how do you handle the allocation of those money so it's not manual in the process, and then how do you report on that and maintain the data warehouse so that you can you can have visibility into that process afterwards?
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: So we help them solve all of the things connected to the payments, in addition to the digitization.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: But as I said, the precursor and the and the and the aftermath of that tend to be the more complicated elements of it.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_02: So my understanding is just like banking, many insurance organizations have a legacy core system that they run their business on.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_02: So this modernization you're talking about, what does that look like when simply ripping out and replacing everything isn't really an option?
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: So just like in most other industries, you know, if you have well-documented and well-tested outward-facing APIs, and you have the ability to build file formats to exchange, because as you know, legacy systems don't always support APIs.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: So sometimes you have to do file transfer, and as long as you're doing that in a in in a in a secure fashion, it's just fine.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: But technology today allows you to integrate, allows a company like mine to integrate basically at any level in the process and through any means.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: So whether it's API, whether it's webhook, whether it's file transfer, as long as you're doing that, you can find the right entry point, you can find the way in which you can extract data out of the system and share data between the two systems.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: And as long as there's documentation or there's ways of getting data in and out of systems, which is most in almost all cases exists, even with legacy systems, you just have to walk through the process and find out what's the best place to connect.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_02: So insurance payments are often viewed as a back office function.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_02: I mean it's kind of what we've been talking about so far.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_02: And they're honestly really a frequent touch point with the customer, right?
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_02: They have to pay for it.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_02: So how should the insurance industry be rethinking the role of billing and payments in this overall customer experience?
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you said it right there.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: It needs to be a better, more visible part of the customer experience.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: The best way to walk through this is to give you an example.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: So I buy my I have an auto insurance policy that I buy, and I pay for it monthly through even it's it's a recurring payment setup.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: So I guess you could just say that it's it's automatic.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: I can set it and forget it, and I don't have to think about it.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: But this company that I work with did something that was really interesting.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: They send me a note, and it's very cute.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: It says, payments in the window or in the mirror are closer than they appear.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, you look at that and you say, Okay, my payment is coming due.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: And then they take the payment and then and then they send me a little text message afterwards that says, You're all gassed up and ready to go.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: Now, initially I thought this was really corny.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: I said, you know, I'm I'm signing up for auto payments.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's not a big deal.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: You don't have to, you don't have to, but after a while, after a couple of renewal periods, I got I start to get used to it.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I like to see the note that my payments are coming up, and I like to see the note that the confirmation.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: That's one small example of how you can enrich the customer experience and not just move money on a rail.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: So, because it is a frequent touch point, are you building that relationship?
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: If you can take a customer who, on one hand, whose experience has been, well, all I know is that every month I look at my bank statement and I and I see that money came out, as opposed to what a more enhanced and enriched version of that, which is they tell me when they're going to take the payment, they confirm when they got it, and just you as a customer, you say to yourself, wow, at least I feel like they're thinking about me, like I actually matter to them.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_02: So is that something that you help them do, or do you just consult on that and advise what to do?
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: Well, in this case, the example I gave you is not a client of mine.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_01: I am a client, I'm a policy holder, right?
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: They do that themselves.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: But yes, we do this with our customers.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: When we help insurance carriers and MGAs set up and digitize their payment and billing efforts, we add in a whole process where we have very rich, rich featured portals for the brokers when there is a broker involved.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes it's a carrier direct, and the same thing with policyholders when you're communicating with them.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: So I have always felt that if you take a look at the way that we all interact, we interact with banks today or our online brokerage firms.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's a very rich, feature-rich portal.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: You can set up reminders, you can change the way in which you want to receive your documentation if you want to receive it at all.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: And so applying that model to the insurance business helps to enrich those relationships and giving people the ability to do things, it's self-service helps because then on the back end, my clients have less work to do.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: But at the same time, clients feel empowered to connect and engage with the insurance offerer.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: And when they see that, they tend to like it.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: The same way I didn't really care about whether I was getting the confirmation of the payment and then and the advance notice, and then all of a sudden I got used to it and I liked it.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_02: Well, what differentiates input one from your competitors out there?
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: I would say two things.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: Number one, as I had mentioned earlier, we're the only platform I'm aware of that handles all elements of the manner in which a premium can be paid.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: So there are companies out there that do payments only.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: There are companies out there that do billing.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: There's a very, very few, and there's companies out there that do financing.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not aware of a company that does all three of them, which means that when an insurance carrier or an MGA needs to handle a payment modality of any kind, they don't have to go and piece together multiple partners in order to do it.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: They come to us and we're and we're one place, and it allows for a much easier flow.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: The client experience has less friction because the interfaces are all the same, regardless of what the payment modality is.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: And the other thing that I think is very important is that there's no doubt how critical technology is in this process.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: But operational workflow connected that is we found it to be supreme.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: Insurance is a complex thing.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's not like you're just buying, you're selling thousands of coffee cups, right?
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's a static product.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: Insurance changes all of the time.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: And the payments get affected.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if I'm a trucker and I have 10 trucks in my portfolio and all of a sudden I add another truck or I sell a truck, my premiums are going to go up and down during the policy term.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: Those are called endorsements.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: And those affect how much money I'm going to pay every month.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: It might go up, it might go down, predicated on what I'm insuring at any given point in time.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: The workflows and the way in which they are woven together with the technology and the delivery of that is really important.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: So operational discipline, which supports the technology and guides the technology, makes us a really strong player in this space and uniquely identifies us from many others.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_02: And I think in your description there, you talked about payments, billing, and I think you said financing.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_02: So can you explain that last part?
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: So imagine a situation where the right insurance product at the right price for the policyholder with the right coverages has no payment plan, meaning the insurance carrier has made a determination that they cannot afford to collect the premium over time.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: They need the money up front at the policy effective date to invest it in order to have adequate capital to pay claims should they come in later.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: In those cases, the agency says to the policyholder, Well, look, here's the right product for you.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: You have to pay it in full.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: And if the policyholder says, Well, gee, either I don't have the cash to do that or I have much better uses of capital than to give you$10,000 or$50,000 to pay for this policy, then the agent can arrange for financing.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: No different than the way a car dealership will say, Look, here's your car.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: The manufacturer of the car doesn't finance the car, the finance company does.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: It might be a third-party bank or it might be the finance division owned by the manufacturer, like BMW Financial Services, right?
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_01: So that's what financing is.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's the same exact model.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: If there's a product and there's no payment plan offered by the carrier, then you can create a payment plan using a third-party finance company.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_02: Well, let's talk about the future now a little bit.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_02: So, where do you see the biggest growth opportunity in your segment of payments?
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: I would say to you that even though there is still a tremendous movement forward in the digitization of the billing and the payment efforts in the insurance landscape, there is still a massive cohort.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: Depending on who you ask, it could be over 50% that are still collecting payments with checks, paying claims with checks, this type of a thing.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's just kind of quite amazing, you know, give given where we are in this.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so we find that when we were that there are there are a lot of companies that are still using paper checks and they haven't quite digitized or they haven't built a really frictionless way of doing it.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: You know, like Stripe and Square, and these are great companies, but they don't know the insurance business.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: So they might offer payment rails, but they're not necessarily insurance experts.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: So when you bring the insurance expertise and the digital payment element into the overall customer experience and the agent and broker experience, which is a very important part of insurance, there's a lot of there's a lot of growth opportunities there.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that just just the fact that the insurance industry is probably the last vestige of financial services to digitize, there's still a lot of opportunity out there and a lot of gaps that need to be need to be closed up.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_02: So what does success look like for input one over the next, say, three to five years?
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: So our flagship products are the ones in which we are helping the carriers digitize their billing and their payment operation.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, we are still in the overall scheme of the insurance industry, which is trillions of dollars.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: Success for us is greater penetration into that market space.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, you know, you can't really talk about the future without talking about the manner in which you are going to employ artificial intelligence in the process.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so helping our clients to automate their workflows, using AI in very thoughtful ways to reduce costs, to increase the efficiency and the speed at which money comes in and the manner in which it is applied across all of the elements of the policy, premium, taxes, fees, commissions, all of those things that go along with the insurance, bringing those to bear to a greater extent on the market is what success looks like to us.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: And uh we're super excited about it.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: We're talking to startups all the time because there's a lot of investment in the insurance space right now.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: And there's new startups all the time, and these are market makers, these are MGAs and carriers that are starting up as purely digital entities.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: They're calling themselves digitally native and AI native carriers or MGAs.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: And when they do that, they don't always have the back office to do it.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_01: They're technology people.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: They don't they don't necessarily know all of the all of the operational wiring of the insurance space.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so when we can say our billing and payment systems, which were designed specifically for this type of asset and this type of transaction, are brought to bear, we get them to market a lot faster.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: When they create new insurance products, which is something that they're doing all the time to remain competitive, we're helping them digitize that very, very rapidly and allow them to deploy it to the public.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: So we engender a lot of rapid success within our clients as well.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_02: So you're not only working with the big entities, you're working with startups as well.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, sure.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we have global carriers that are our clients, and we have companies that haven't written a single premium yet that are our clients, and uh and and they're and they're getting started.
• 14:24
  unknown: Okay.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_02: Well, let's use that same time frame, three to five years.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_02: So what do you think will have the greatest impact on insurance payments?
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_02: Is it real-time payments, embedding insurance?
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_02: You mentioned AI.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_02: There's, you know, AI is changing fraud prevention, or is it something else that you think is going to have the biggest impact on insurance payments?
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: Well, probably all of the above.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_01: The idea of embedded payments is really, really interesting because you know, when you think about it right now, we think about insurance in terms of buying it for six months or 12 months, right?
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: And then what if you could just buy insurance?
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_01: You you rent the car, you know we we, of course, you do it too when you rent a car.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: You can rent a car and you can buy insurance for the car for a day.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: But what about insurance for a 15-minute Uber ride or insurance for a five-minute scooter ride, right?
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_01: Embedding that into the process to me because more the gig economy has driven these types of services now, right?
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that the ability to embed payments into microtransactions and insurance is really, really interesting to me.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that it will be more broadly adopted as that entire industry unfolds.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: You know, getting real-time payments is really important because insurance is one of those things that says, I'm gonna promise to pay you under given circumstances.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: Well, whether I have if I don't have a payment today, but I have it in 15 minutes from now, it's you know or 15 minutes as opposed to 15 minutes later, that could be the difference between whether you have a cover, whether you have coverage or whether you have no coverage on an insurance premium.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: So real-time payments is is important as well.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: So I I think it's a I think it's a combination of them.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: You know, artificial intelligence is something that is it's really important to us, it needs to be important to uh to everybody.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: I think there needs to be a very thoughtful approach to it.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: I've talked to a lot of folks and I I interview people regularly about it, and I I do get a thematic response in terms of the policyholders, and they say, if it sounds like AI, I'm upset, I don't want to talk to it.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_01: I'll hang up on it immediately.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: So my view on it is we're using it on the back end, we help it monitor phone calls, we help it analyze payment flow, and and it does help us avoid fraud, and it helps us identify where customer experiences can be enhanced.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: We will bring it to the forefront, but I still I'm still not sure that it's good enough to make a human feel good about talking to it to solve a human's problem, right?
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's close, but I still know people that are that are very wary of it.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: So we're monitoring that carefully, and I it's all about being thoughtful about it, I think.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_02: So, how do you think that the insurance industry leaders need to be prepared for all this new technology that we're talking about?
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: Well, tech debt is a real big deal in the insurance space.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: I know it's a big deal in a lot of industries, but because this is my space, I see it all the time.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so when an insurance leader decides to make an investment in the next platform, they really have to be thinking, not is this gonna solve my problem today and for the next five years, they have to think about is this gonna solve my problem?
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: Is this gonna solve for the next 10 years?
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: And what I mean by that is we don't all know what's gonna happen in 10 years, but what we do know is am I buying something or investing in something today that has the open enough architecture to where I can interface it?
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it used to be at one point in time, Greg, where companies would look for the perfect all-encompassing solution.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's not that way anymore.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: There are so many great bespoke add-ons.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: You can buy a great core element, and as long as it has external ability to communicate effectively, then you can plug in all of the best elements that you want, whether it's a claims function, an underwriting function, a billing function, a payments function, some kind of a customer contact function, if you can do that because you have the right core to begin with, then you end up having a lot less tech debt because you can fix things, you can create best in class from a bunch of different solutions and make it look cohesive to the customer and even to the internal folks if it's done correctly.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_02: Well, a couple of final questions.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_02: So if you could go back and give yourself advice at the start of your career, or maybe not go back to 16 years old, but maybe go back to your early in your time there, what would your advice be to yourself?
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I tell this to my children all the time.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: I was a little stubborn when I was younger, and I felt that the best way to approach things is, you know, I felt I was largely the smartest guy in the room, and therefore I was just gonna run through walls and I was gonna do it all myself.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, at the end of the day, there are so many smart people out there.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so I tell them, and I would absolutely go back and tell myself, is bring smarter people into the room faster, spread your network more, meet more people, ask more questions, all that kind of thing.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that there's no shortage of incredible intellectual capacity out there.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: And tapping into it, people are usually so gracious with their answers and their advice.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't take advantage of that as much as I wished I would have.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: So I would say to any young entrepreneur today, please take advantage of the gratuity that people will give you in terms of their time and knowledge because it will, it will, and those networks that you create by doing that will be incredibly valuable.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Todd, one final question.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_02: What's the biggest takeaway you hope that leaders that are listening to this show take away from this conversation?
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's being it's making sure that you are making very specific, very informative decisions about the manner in which technology is acquired and the capital is invested in it.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_01: And making sure that the technology platforms that you are acquiring allow you the movement that you need, the flexibility that you need moving forward so that you don't we don't replicate these systems in a box that occurred, you know, that that created the legacy debt of today.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: And be open to, you know, like I'm I'm I'm obviously in the tech-enabled service or outsource business, right?
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: So it's so it's a self-serving comment to say you should take a look at uh outside services opposed to building yourself.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_01: But ask, you never know what you're going to find.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I think that it's just a matter of broadening your viewpoint in order to make the best informed decision about the future of your technology and to ensure that you have the operational discipline to make sure that that technology stays on track, does what it's supposed to do, and that you're and that you're dispersing your capital properly.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's really important because it's easy to get very myopic in this and to stay open-minded and to look at all possible solutions and then make a decision at that point, I think is one of the best pieces of advice I could give.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Todd, I think that's a great way to wrap up the show.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_02: So I want to thank you so much for being here.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_02: I know your time is very valuable, so I really appreciate you being on the show today.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, Greg.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: I enjoyed it very much.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_02: And to all your listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_02: And until the next story.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: Make sure you visit our website at leadersandpayments.com, where you can subscribe to the show and where you'll find our show notes.
• 20:58
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