Latest / Leaders In Payments / Before the Transaction: Jaron Ruckman, Product Manager at IRIS CRM / NMI | Episode 247

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Before the Transaction: Jaron Ruckman, Product Manager at IRIS CRM / NMI | Episode 247 · Leaders In Payments

• 0:06
  Speaker 1: This special series of the Leaders in Payments podcast, titled Be Solid, is brought to you in collaboration with NMI, the fully integrated payment solution built to scale.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: In this six-part series, we'll take a look at what has to happen before the transaction, as well as business processes and tools that can help your business, whether you're an ISO, isv, payback or bank.
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: We'll also take a look at the latest trends in the digitization of cash and card issuing as they ultimately drive money movement In a world full of squares and stripes, be Solid.
• 0:44
  Speaker 2: By having Iris, agreement, express and NMI all these platforms put together we've really created this super solution for our current and future partners.
• 0:59
  Speaker 3: That was Jaren Ruckman, product Manager for Iris CRM, which is owned by NMI.
• 1:04
  Speaker 3: He is my special guest on this episode, episode 247 of the Leaders in Payments podcast, and I'm your host, greg Myers.
• 1:10
  Speaker 3: As we continue our deep dive into the Be Solid campaign brought to you by NMI, jaren and I discussed the functionality and value of having a solution like Iris.
• 1:19
  Speaker 3: For those of you who don't know, iris CRM is a complete merchant management solution.
• 1:24
  Speaker 3: We also talk about how the tool can help with sales, customer support and residual management.
• 1:29
  Speaker 3: We've got a great episode ahead, so let's get started.
• 1:32
  Speaker 3: Hi, jaren, and welcome to this episode of the Leaders in Payments podcast, where we're doing a deep dive on what happens before and after the transaction.
• 1:47
  Speaker 3: So welcome to the show.
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: Thanks, greg, I appreciate you having me.
• 1:50
  Speaker 3: Absolutely so.
• 1:51
  Speaker 3: Let me just set the stage for our conversation today.
• 1:55
  Speaker 3: As you know, iris CRM is a complete merchant services management solution and it was acquired by NMI in January of 2022.
• 2:03
  Speaker 3: So we're going to be talking about a couple of things the functionality and the value of having a solution like Iris.
• 2:09
  Speaker 3: So, before we get into the product, we want to talk a little bit about you.
• 2:13
  Speaker 3: So tell us about your current role there and maybe a little personal and career background about how you got there.
• 2:19
  Speaker 3: Sure.
• 2:20
  Speaker 2: I'm the product manager for Iris and I started 10 years ago on the support team.
• 2:25
  Speaker 2: I was actually the only support person, so we eventually built a team around what I started with and over the years, I think we had about under 10 employees when we started and about 10 clients.
• 2:39
  Speaker 2: Now we've got, I think, over 60 employees that work specifically on Iris here at NMI and almost 300 clients.
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: So quite a growth in 10 years.
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: Iris itself was started in 2010 by Dmitri Akron, who had an ISO who needed a payment-specific CRM, couldn't find any solution, eventually had it built himself and then found that his we'll call them competitors and colleagues out there other ISOs could also benefit from the same kind of product, so he could sell it out.
• 3:11
  Speaker 2: Now, before I started with Iris years ago, I'm from Kansas City.
• 3:16
  Speaker 2: I was living there, I worked for a few different big tech corporations and got an itch to move to New York City look for a job, and that's actually where Dmitri and Iris found me.
• 3:27
  Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, I didn't know all the details of the background of Iris and I didn't know it had been around that long and you've been there almost from the beginning, so a lot of experience that we're going to dive into.
• 3:38
  Speaker 3: So why don't we do that?
• 3:39
  Speaker 3: Why don't we talk about Iris and give us the 50,000-foot level of what Iris does?
• 3:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 3:46
  Speaker 2: So this is, of course, a CRM, as we've put into our name.
• 3:49
  Speaker 2: The original name Iris meant integrated reporting, is simple, just to kind of play on words, a fun way to kind of get excited about the product, and eventually we wanted to put CRM in the name, because that's really the focus.
• 4:03
  Speaker 2: We wanted to stand out in the marketplace and specifically in the payments industry, because that's where we serve as a full service tool.
• 4:11
  Speaker 2: Our primary clients are ISOs.
• 4:14
  Speaker 2: However, we have sponsor banks and also ISVs that get a great benefit by using Iris.
• 4:20
  Speaker 2: Now, the main functions that Iris serves in are going to be around sales boarding, merchant reporting, support and residuals, and in those areas we have integrations with the top processors.
• 4:34
  Speaker 2: Naturally, we've got excellent connections to our parent company in a my so that clients can easily board gateway accounts with a few clicks and just around the corner.
• 4:44
  Speaker 2: We're also adding a boarding feature right into our merchant boarding pages called TurboApp, which allows you to get your merchant account and your gateway account in one process.
• 4:56
  Speaker 3: So when we talk about sort of this complete merchant services management solution, I mean you're managing the entire life cycle.
• 5:04
  Speaker 3: You're helping your customers and your ISOs and some banks and others manage that whole life cycle.
• 5:11
  Speaker 3: That's right.
• 5:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we decided long ago that basically there's other CRMs that are out there.
• 5:17
  Speaker 2: They might be kind of generic there's very popular versions out there but they don't really serve this industry as close as they could get.
• 5:26
  Speaker 2: These integrations with the processors are really what makes us unique, because we've spent weeks, months and years actually scoping out and building these integrations, because that's the area that we knew when this got started.
• 5:40
  Speaker 2: That's what we want to keep our focus on.
• 5:42
  Speaker 3: Okay, so those integrations make it unique.
• 5:46
  Speaker 3: What else makes it different and unique in the marketplace?
• 5:49
  Speaker 2: Well, I think really the obvious that is the focus on the industry.
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: But also we've got not a huge team, we've got dedicated sales and support teams, implementation teams also that work with our clients, so there's pretty close relationships there.
• 6:04
  Speaker 2: Anybody who's signed up for a big product online for something knows you self-sign up, you kind of self-support.
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: Maybe the plan you have has some kind of support component, but you're really pretty distant from those people With our teams.
• 6:17
  Speaker 2: We've got our support teams, which you can call, email and even use live chat with.
• 6:23
  Speaker 2: They're all US-based, we've got normal operating hours and we're also available pretty much throughout the year at industry events.
• 6:33
  Speaker 2: So we've got a big presence there.
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: So any other CRM tool probably is not really thinking about the merchant's industry is something that they want to focus on.
• 6:42
  Speaker 2: Meanwhile.
• 6:43
  Speaker 2: We're looking at it as this is what we know, this is what we serve and this is what we're the best choice in.
• 6:49
  Speaker 3: Okay, Well, can you talk a little bit about some of the challenges that maybe ISOs and other payments companies have if they don't have this sort of end-to-end complete solution?
• 7:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, when an ISO doesn't really have a what we'll call it a full support tool to sell and service their accounts, often they're left kind of scraping together and they're using different systems or they might just be hacking some tool to try to fit the purpose.
• 7:17
  Speaker 2: One example of this is a lot of our clients, when they come to us about residuals calculations, give us these Excel spreadsheets that they've created and crafted.
• 7:27
  Speaker 2: Usually they're basic calculations or they have macros and there's a lot going on in there.
• 7:31
  Speaker 2: But there's a lot also that can go wrong in there and so these advanced calculations could result in a bad payout or a bad calculation internally on how much revenue was received on accounts or how much should be paid out.
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: So in iris what we do is we set up each merchant account that you're boarding and tie a specific user whether that's an agent, referral partner, sub, iso to that and have you set the split procedures and then decide on if there's any advanced calculations and that way when that residuals files comes in whether it's in the next month or so when that account is processing you've actually got the calculations all ready to go and it takes a minute or maybe a little more to get those payout amounts and know exactly what you've made.
• 8:19
  Speaker 2: And not worry.
• 8:20
  Speaker 2: Oh, is my Excel spreadsheet updated or did I make some kind of error in there.
• 8:25
  Speaker 3: Okay, so is it pretty fair to say that the companies out there that aren't using you?
• 8:31
  Speaker 3: They're most likely kind of just putting a bunch of systems together and trying to figure out how to make them all talk to each other, and that's one of the huge pain points that you solve for.
• 8:41
  Speaker 2: Exactly, and with iris, we know that sometimes people do like a certain other tool or they have some other system that they want to connect to.
• 8:50
  Speaker 2: So we've got a public API that any client can use.
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: The documentation is right in our website and also with that API, we have connections to a system called Zapier, and if anybody has heard of this, they know how capable it can be.
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: But it's basically like a like an integration translator for all kinds of tech systems.
• 9:10
  Speaker 2: So if you want to pass data between two systems that haven't integrated to each other but they've integrated to Zapier, zapier serves as that conduit, that translator of information, to feed information back and forth, so that one thing in another system can trigger something in iris or something in iris can trigger an action in some other system.
• 9:29
  Speaker 2: So, while we definitely consider ourselves the, let's say, best in breed, we know that there's additional things people want to do, maybe specific to their business, information they want to pull out.
• 9:40
  Speaker 2: So there are those opportunities to use the API in Zapier to accomplish those things.
• 9:46
  Speaker 3: All right.
• 9:46
  Speaker 3: Well, let's peel the onion back a little bit and go a little bit deeper.
• 9:50
  Speaker 3: And you mentioned some of this functionality around sales and customer support and residual management, so let's talk about sales.
• 9:57
  Speaker 3: So how does iris help a sales team?
• 10:00
  Speaker 2: Well, the benefit of iris really comes down to organization and visibility in sales.
• 10:06
  Speaker 2: When you're allowing a team to enter all the information about a lead, a prospect that they have, then see everything that they've entered, give visibility to the rest of their team when needed and then report on that information in an elegant way, then they're able to see those deals and have visibility with managers, executives and have more insight of their sales pipeline.
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: So any place can contract information but we're actually giving insights on things like how many leads have emailed you back in the last week, how many did you actually get approved in the last month.
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: Those kind of things can really help their quick insights that we offer in that sales pipeline to help illustrate where that sales flow is taking you.
• 10:54
  Speaker 3: And just for my own knowledge, do you consider these different things like modules or do you have a name for them?
• 11:00
  Speaker 3: Like sales is one customer supports another.
• 11:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we call the leads area my leads, which is pretty straightforward.
• 11:07
  Speaker 2: The live merchant reporting is called my Merchants.
• 11:11
  Speaker 2: Now for our support area that we're going to touch on a bit in a moment.
• 11:16
  Speaker 2: That area is just called help desk.
• 11:18
  Speaker 2: One word, help desk.
• 11:19
  Speaker 2: That's just the name for it.
• 11:20
  Speaker 2: And then the area that we've really put a special name to our boarding tool.
• 11:24
  Speaker 2: It's called TurboApp, indicating the speed at which you can board an account to a processor.
• 11:32
  Speaker 3: And this might be an obvious question, but when someone's working the leads, I assume that the leads just continues on through your system and once it's entered it's always there and that kind of just carries with it throughout the life cycle.
• 11:43
  Speaker 3: That's right.
• 11:45
  Speaker 2: We decided long ago that the lead would never actually disappear once you had a merchant account that came from it, because that lead will have so much history in it and documentation, notes, all the field edits if you've changed anything about it let's say a tax ID or a bank account number before they were boarded.
• 12:03
  Speaker 2: We wanted to make sure that all of that information was retained.
• 12:06
  Speaker 2: So when you do get a live merchant account, that merchant then is linked to the lead from which it came and you can see all of that lead information within the same screen as the merchant.
• 12:17
  Speaker 2: So we essentially embed it alongside all of that merchant information, like its actual account details from the processor, its batches and transactions, disputes and statements.
• 12:29
  Speaker 2: So you've got one screen with the full history.
• 12:32
  Speaker 3: Okay, okay.
• 12:33
  Speaker 3: So that's the value in that right from a nice O perspective, being able to do analytics on all of that information that you just mentioned.
• 12:41
  Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely.
• 12:42
  Speaker 2: I think we've come a long way in our reporting, so that there's a number of features that clients have asked for over the years and we've been able to add those.
• 12:52
  Speaker 2: There's still a number of things, of course, as the product manager, I would love to add, and we're looking at those for the future in the roadmap.
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: But in the last couple of years, we've actually been rolling out what we call our V2 inter-sum.
• 13:03
  Speaker 2: Our interface, iris, having started in 2010, was built on a platform that ultimately didn't transfer over and kind of become modern in the last few years.
• 13:14
  Speaker 2: It really just couldn't.
• 13:15
  Speaker 2: So I let's say somewhat arrogantly, somewhat describe to people that to do this process of rebuilding Iris as a V2, we had to take our product, which I then describe as a Mona Lisa, and paint an exact replica next to it.
• 13:32
  Speaker 2: Exactly the same, but also better and that's what we're aiming to do with our V2 is we don't want people to lose functionality or capabilities, but we wanted to make it a much better experience and add more functionality and make it way better suited for the future, for additional expansion Gotcha, gotcha.
• 13:51
  Speaker 3: Okay, well, let's move on from sales and talk a little bit about customer support.
• 13:55
  Speaker 3: And we know in this industry if the listeners have been in it very long that customer support can be a huge challenge for any payments company, and not just ISOs, but pretty much any payments company.
• 14:06
  Speaker 3: So how does the Iris platform help its customers with their customer support?
• 14:11
  Speaker 2: Just like with sales, we have specific tools for supporting and servicing merchant accounts.
• 14:17
  Speaker 2: And what I touched on just a moment ago, our help desk, is the home for this and it allows tracking of any issue, question or what we call it to do about a merchant account.
• 14:29
  Speaker 2: Basically, if something has come up about a merchant or from that merchant, then you're going to put it in the help desk as a ticket and that's where you're going to put a description, attachments, comments.
• 14:42
  Speaker 2: You can assign it to people, set due dates.
• 14:44
  Speaker 2: We can also put in checklists.
• 14:46
  Speaker 2: So if you have a certain process you have to go through to address something for a merchant, you can complete that and it's really all about accountability.
• 14:56
  Speaker 2: That's a lot of what a CRM is, is tracking, visibility and accountability.
• 15:00
  Speaker 2: And Iris kind of loves keeping that data and making sure it's always available for you too.
• 15:05
  Speaker 2: So in the help desk you can look back and say, oh yeah, we did a billing question for that client a couple months ago, or that account had a question about hardware a month ago.
• 15:18
  Speaker 2: You've got a full history that's available to you and it's pretty interesting.
• 15:22
  Speaker 2: But in the help desk that's also our home for what we call our maintenance pieces.
• 15:28
  Speaker 2: So for TISIS full service providers, we have the ability to do maintenance on accounts, that's, updating bank account information, account details, pricing, terminals and one of our more impressive features that we have specifically with NMI is the ability to board an account.
• 15:48
  Speaker 2: So when you've got an existing merchant account, in the help desk you pick a certain ticket type, as we call it, called NMI boarding, and you can take the information you already have about that merchant account such as the contacts, settlement details, processor information and then select a pricing plan for them and board the gateway account, get that gateway ID back within a second.
• 16:13
  Speaker 2: And that's really one of the things that we've been focusing on lately is how to even strengthen and add to all of our connections within NMI, Because even though we're all remote at this point everybody is in different locations we're all in the same room, so to speak.
• 16:28
  Speaker 2: We're on the same roof, so it makes it that much easier to build these stronger integrations within a MI.
• 16:33
  Speaker 2: So really we're looking at more ways to help that functionality and what we're going to be half coming out in the next few months relates to actually boarding that account, not just after you have a merchant account, but boarding to the gateway as you're using TurboApp and boarding the account to the processor so that one motion process I mentioned earlier.
• 16:55
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 16:55
  Speaker 3: So is it fair to say that an ISO might view IRIS as sort of their system of record for their business?
• 17:02
  Speaker 2: Absolutely yeah.
• 17:03
  Speaker 2: I think the important piece of that is in our data retention.
• 17:06
  Speaker 2: You probably know from looking at a bank account you're going to see certain months of data, maybe a year or two, and we have an indefinite data retention policy.
• 17:18
  Speaker 2: So we don't get rid of old data.
• 17:20
  Speaker 2: We only delete things that a user or an admin wants to delete.
• 17:25
  Speaker 2: Otherwise data stays in the site so you have it available.
• 17:29
  Speaker 2: If you've got an account you've worked on five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten years, you're still going to see that information available on the account because we've kept it in there and made it available to you.
• 17:40
  Speaker 3: All right.
• 17:40
  Speaker 3: Well, you mentioned residual reporting a little earlier.
• 17:43
  Speaker 3: Walk us through the importance of it and what functionality IRIS has.
• 17:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah, many of our new clients, as we mentioned, have used Excel spreadsheets maybe to do their calculations and what we do is, in that setup process of setting up residual splits and adjustments, we make it very tracked, very visible, every change is accounted for and we're really bringing control to the ISO.
• 18:08
  Speaker 2: It's that visibility and control that empower them to know that they're making correct calculations for those residuals and they can see essentially the math that's happening inside of that calculation.
• 18:21
  Speaker 2: Now, what we call a straight split on an account oh, this agent gets 25%.
• 18:26
  Speaker 2: That's easy to do.
• 18:28
  Speaker 2: Now what if there's what we'll call a net split or a split of a split where you've got to pay, maybe a manager or a sub ISO and then someone else below them.
• 18:36
  Speaker 2: You need to calculate out of their split.
• 18:38
  Speaker 2: Or you need to do things with buy rates and other calculations, maybe certain fees to not pay on or exclude or percentage reductions.
• 18:48
  Speaker 2: All of that need and what we've talked with clients over the years has led us to building tools that accomplish those things.
• 18:55
  Speaker 2: And one really impressive thing we have in our residuals features is what we call the fee verifier and this allows you to take your residuals and from your first import for a given processor.
• 19:09
  Speaker 2: It will determine your buy rates based on those columns and all the data points in the file.
• 19:13
  Speaker 2: For future reports that you get it will confirm that those buy rates are still being used to calculate your payout as the ISO.
• 19:21
  Speaker 2: And we found that sometimes processor systems, when they make these files, do those calculations themselves, don't always get it perfectly right.
• 19:30
  Speaker 2: So it's kind of like an audit tool for the ISO to make sure that they've got the right amount of information and the correct numbers so they can then correctly pay their teams.
• 19:42
  Speaker 3: I assume from an ISO perspective, this is solving for a potentially huge pain point that they have or have had in the past.
• 19:49
  Speaker 2: Absolutely.
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: I remember I think it was eight or nine years ago we had a client that said, how do I know if they're giving us the right amount?
• 19:57
  Speaker 2: And I kind of shrugged like, well, how would we potentially know?
• 20:01
  Speaker 2: And then the idea came up to use that initial report as the buy rate guideline or simply just have the ISO tell us their buy rates and then those could be put into the system and used to audit those other reports.
• 20:17
  Speaker 2: So it's really helped a lot of ISOs with that accountability from before them to make sure that they're getting paid correctly.
• 20:26
  Speaker 3: Yeah, makes perfect sense.
• 20:27
  Speaker 3: So when we look at the big picture again, we talked about what do companies do that don't have this and what pain points does it cause?
• 20:35
  Speaker 3: Maybe talk about why is it so important that an ISO has this functionality?
• 20:40
  Speaker 3: You know, obviously it's helping them drive their business, but maybe talk about from your perspective why that's so important.
• 20:46
  Speaker 2: I recently spoke at an event with a lot of our partners and what I summarized about Iris is that it was really three things it's complete, connected and convenient, and it's probably a bit oversimplifying it to say that it's those things, because we know we can talk at great length about it, but those things complete, connected and convenient those really drive what anybody should be looking for when they're looking for a system that would solve for these things.
• 21:14
  Speaker 2: So Iris as a product has functionality that no other generic CRM has to offer or probably ever will offer.
• 21:22
  Speaker 2: And we also know that every ISO is dealing with things that are specific to the processors and the banks and the relationships that they have.
• 21:31
  Speaker 2: So what requirements do they have?
• 21:34
  Speaker 2: Of course, they want complete applications and documentation, so we've built things specifically for that.
• 21:40
  Speaker 2: We can audit information before it's sent to a processor and confirm that it's the right format, and those are kind of things that people wouldn't get, Maybe, if they were using a direct boarding tool or maybe trying to put together some other system of their own, because we've spent so much time building it and updating it due to market demands and processor guideline changes.
• 22:05
  Speaker 2: That's also been very important.
• 22:08
  Speaker 3: Okay, well, we've covered a lot of ground so far, obviously, about Iris, and it's a little bit about its history and a little bit about you, and then, obviously, we've talked in some detail around the value and the different components of the product.
• 22:22
  Speaker 3: So is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up the show?
• 22:25
  Speaker 2: Absolutely.
• 22:25
  Speaker 2: So I wouldn't be a good product manager if I didn't tell you about what we have coming up.
• 22:30
  Speaker 2: So in the quarters ahead, I think I already mentioned about strengthening our integration with the NMI Gateway platform and we've also got another company that's joined under the NMI Umbrella, agreement Express.
• 22:43
  Speaker 2: They do underwriting.
• 22:45
  Speaker 2: So for our wholesale and FSP friends, we are able to connect to Agreement Express and bring in what they call the scorecard so you can see what's happened with the underwriting and if there's any flags raised, anything to resolve.
• 23:03
  Speaker 2: That's something that we had a basic integration before, but we're building one that's much more robust, much more capable and that's going to be coming out in a few months.
• 23:12
  Speaker 2: And then also for our NMI Gateway partners that also utilize Iris, we're going to be adding in maintenance for Gateway accounts and also live reporting.
• 23:24
  Speaker 2: So in addition to all of the transactions that you would see on a Merchant account, you'll also be able to identify specifically the Gateway transactions, see the details of the Gateway account and, as we mentioned before, do the maintenance on those accounts.
• 23:38
  Speaker 2: So by having Iris, agreement Express and NMI all these platforms put together, we've really created this super solution for our current and future partners.
• 23:50
  Speaker 3: Okay, all right.
• 23:50
  Speaker 3: Well, thanks for sharing the future vision and appreciate that.
• 23:53
  Speaker 3: I think that'll wrap up the show for today, so I wanted to thank you for being here.
• 23:58
  Speaker 3: I know your time is very valuable and I really appreciate it, so thanks so much for being on the show today.
• 24:02
  Speaker 3: Thanks so much for having me, greg.
• 24:03
  Speaker 3: I really enjoyed the opportunity Great.
• 24:05
  Speaker 3: And to all you listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story.
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to this episode in our special series Be Solid, brought to you by NMI, the fully integrated payment solution built to scale.
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: For more information on what happens in payments before the transaction and this episode, please visit nmicom.
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: Forward slash resources, forward slash podcasts.
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: And remember, in a world full of squares and stripes, be solid.