Latest / Leaders In Payments / Barry McCarthy, President & CEO of Deluxe | Episode 400

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Barry McCarthy, President & CEO of Deluxe | Episode 400 · Leaders In Payments

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast, where we talk to C-level leaders from across the payments landscape.
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: We'll be discussing the products and services that impact the payment space today, as well as trends and predictions for the future of payments.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: We will also hear stories from our guests about their journeys to the top.
• 0:18
  Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: I'm your host, greg Myers, and this is episode 400 of our show, so it's a milestone that I'm very proud of and one that I want to thank my listeners for always listening the input that I've had.
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: I really appreciate that.
• 0:34
  Speaker 2: So, to commemorate the 400th episode, I wanted to have on a special guest.
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: So joining me today is Barry McCarthy, the president and CEO of Deluxe.
• 0:42
  Speaker 2: So, Barry, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the show.
• 0:45
  Speaker 3: Well, Greg, thanks for having me.
• 0:46
  Speaker 3: It's quite an honor to be here on the 400th episode.
• 0:49
  Speaker 3: Thank you.
• 0:50
  Speaker 2: Absolutely.
• 0:50
  Speaker 2: So let's go ahead and dive in, if you don't mind.
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: Tell our audience a little bit about yourself, maybe where you grew up, where you went to school, where you currently live, a few things like that.
• 0:58
  Speaker 3: Sure.
• 0:58
  Speaker 3: So I grew up outside of Chicago Illinois, up outside of Chicago Illinois, Went to the University of Illinois as an undergrad, I went to Northwestern Kellogg for business school and after undergrad I started my career at Procter and Gamble, and one of the things that people always seem to find humorous is that I was the top shampoo salesman during my time at P&G.
• 1:21
  Speaker 3: I climbed the ranks from calling on grocery stores on up to having brand and product management and marketing and customer management responsibility at P&G and made my first jump into FinTech and payments when I joined Wells Fargo.
• 1:37
  Speaker 2: And we'll jump back into a little bit more of your career in a few minutes.
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: But let's talk about the company Deluxe.
• 1:41
  Speaker 2: I love the banner behind you.
• 1:43
  Speaker 2: Tell our audience, like most people are going to know, the name.
• 1:46
  Speaker 2: Deluxe has a great brand name and some people might remember it from the check printing days and obviously you've transitioned that business quite a bit.
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: But maybe tell us what Deluxe does in kind of the markets that you're in today.
• 1:57
  Speaker 3: Sure, greg, I think Deluxe may be one of those companies that, if you knew it five or ten years ago, it's a very, very different company today than what it was five or 10 years ago and certainly, if you have a memory longer than that, it's a very, very different company.
• 2:12
  Speaker 3: And so today the company really has transformed itself into becoming a payments and data company, and the company operates four businesses.
• 2:19
  Speaker 3: We have a merchant processing business that we acquired in June of 2021.
• 2:23
  Speaker 3: We have a B2B payments business where we manage accounts, receivables and account payable and digitize those transactions.
• 2:30
  Speaker 3: And we have a data-driven marketing business where we help businesses target market to find their next customer.
• 2:39
  Speaker 3: And, of course, our fourth business is the legacy business that most people are familiar with, which is check printing and printing of forms and other things like that.
• 2:46
  Speaker 3: The revenue is pretty balanced now between the legacy print businesses and our payments and data businesses, but it's been a long time since the check part of our company was the biggest source of revenue and very proud of that transformation.
• 3:00
  Speaker 3: In aggregate, the company processes around $3 trillion a year in payments volume across our merchant business and our digital, ar and AP businesses.
• 3:10
  Speaker 3: I'm very, very excited about the future for the company.
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: Okay, and on the merchant services side, since this is obviously a payment show, we'll talk more about that, but is it focused on small business or do you have solutions across the board?
• 3:24
  Speaker 3: So where we really compete is in the very big and profitable middle market.
• 3:30
  Speaker 3: So there's the guys at the top of the market, the giants I worked for one of them for many years 14 years and then there's the guys that are really focused more on micro merchants and increasingly people are moving towards that middle market space.
• 3:43
  Speaker 3: But we really target businesses that have significant ongoing volume.
• 3:49
  Speaker 3: So the art fair or craft fair on Saturday is not really our target market, although we certainly have customers there, and we certainly don't have a Walmart or a Target at the other end.
• 3:59
  Speaker 3: But businesses that have millions to hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue or billions of dollars of revenue are our customers and we distribute through multiple channels.
• 4:11
  Speaker 3: Of course we serve integrated software vendors and ISOs.
• 4:14
  Speaker 3: We have a significant bank channel that's leveraging the strength of the company's history.
• 4:19
  Speaker 3: We have a nice business in state and local government, not-for-profit and certain parts of specialty retail like automotive repair among others, and so it's a very, very balanced portfolio of solutions that delivers great cash flow for the company and delivers some nice growth as well.
• 4:38
  Speaker 2: So maybe touch on the B2B payment side.
• 4:41
  Speaker 2: Now a little bit about what that business does.
• 4:43
  Speaker 3: Sure.
• 4:44
  Speaker 3: So most people would understand the merchant business listening with us today.
• 4:48
  Speaker 3: And the other part of our payments business is in.
• 4:51
  Speaker 3: Again, we call it B2B, but it's really around accounts, receivables management and, to a lesser degree, about payables.
• 4:58
  Speaker 3: So what the company has is about eight different packages of software that help a business manage again a mid-sized business manage their receivables Everything from managing a lockbox to doing remote deposit capture, to managing exceptions and disputes and reconciliations and archiving, and so these different modules historically have been sold individually, like software where you buy the package of software upfront for a big license fee and then you pay annual maintenance.
• 5:32
  Speaker 3: And we're in the process of transitioning to software as a service, and so instead of buying each one of those software packages independently, we've combined them together in one great integrated note the word integrated package of solutions to manage the receivables on behalf of a mid-sized business.
• 5:53
  Speaker 3: So today, if you are using our SaaS business, you log in single sign-on, you have access to all of the tools in our suite.
• 6:01
  Speaker 3: Even if you're only using one of the tools in the suite, you have the opportunity to access and start using the others as well.
• 6:08
  Speaker 3: All with single sign-on, with a single user interface.
• 6:11
  Speaker 3: That's very consumer-friendly, great UI, ux and allows you to manage and see what's happening across the landscape.
• 6:19
  Speaker 3: So part of that business also.
• 6:20
  Speaker 3: We run that software on behalf of many of our clients clients where we actually host the software on their behalf and then often they will hire us to manage the payment processing.
• 6:30
  Speaker 3: For example, in the lockbox operation, when somebody writes a check or writes a credit card number and puts it in the mail, somebody has to manage that process beginning to end and make sure that the money actually moves at night, which we do, and that the money gets posted to the right place on the general ledger.
• 6:45
  Speaker 3: We do all of that on a turnkey outsource basis, using the software that people also can get as a software, as a service, for their own use.
• 6:55
  Speaker 2: Okay, and these payments businesses?
• 6:57
  Speaker 2: Are they mainly in the US or more global?
• 7:00
  Speaker 3: So almost exclusively in the US.
• 7:02
  Speaker 3: That is our focus.
• 7:03
  Speaker 3: We think the market space is huge here and we think we've got a really meaningful share.
• 7:07
  Speaker 3: So between our merchant business and our AR business, like I think I said at the early part of the conversation, it's about $3 trillion a year in volume, which is nominally mid single digits, 15 or so percent of the US GDP.
• 7:28
  Speaker 3: So again, this company that you think of as this legacy check printer has very quietly become a material player in digital payments.
• 7:39
  Speaker 2: Okay, and I don't want to lose sight of the data part, because I know it's important as part of your tagline and main messaging, at least on your website.
• 7:46
  Speaker 2: So maybe touch on the data part.
• 7:48
  Speaker 2: Are you getting the data from the payments for the businesses or where's that coming from?
• 7:53
  Speaker 3: So this is another thing that most people don't know.
• 7:55
  Speaker 3: That's inside of Deluxe, but we have a material business where we aggregate over 100 different sources of data to build what we believe if it's not the largest, one of the largest consumer and small business marketing databases.
• 8:10
  Speaker 3: So we know virtually everything about you as a consumer or you as a small business.
• 8:16
  Speaker 3: So if you had a change in life meaning that you got married, you got divorced, you bought a house, sold a house, rented a car, bought a car, leased a car, sold a car, you have a kid in college, you have a kid in diapers, you have parents that you are aging, parents that you're caring for, and so we have all of this massive amount of data.
• 8:35
  Speaker 3: We have built very robust AI tools that sit on top of that data and allow us to identify and build lead lists that convert at a very, very high rate.
• 8:46
  Speaker 3: So for financial institutions or other organizations that have a high lifetime value, meaning that they're also going to spend a lot of money to market we help them specifically identify who to target.
• 8:57
  Speaker 3: Should they target Greg Myers for a home equity line or a high rewards credit card, or is he has an auto lease that's about to come due.
• 9:07
  Speaker 3: So should we start marketing to him a new lease?
• 9:09
  Speaker 3: And we do that at scale.
• 9:11
  Speaker 3: Most of the major financial institutions in the us partner with us to provide that solution.
• 9:16
  Speaker 3: A number of other verticals, everything from home security and home automation to online home goods retailers that are trying to come to the physical world, property and casualty insurers so anybody where there's a high lifetime value, that it costs a lot to bring that customer to your business.
• 9:34
  Speaker 3: We help those companies target very, very tightly down to an individual on what product they should offer that would convert at a high rate.
• 9:44
  Speaker 2: Okay, and what would you say?
• 9:46
  Speaker 2: Differentiates Deluxe from your competitors out there?
• 9:49
  Speaker 3: It's such a good question, and so what?
• 9:51
  Speaker 3: I would tell you that each of our businesses there are some differences.
• 9:54
  Speaker 3: So in the data-driven marketing business that we just spoke about, we have more data, broader data, and we have the best AI tools in the industry so that we have the highest conversion rates of anyone trying to direct market to a customer.
• 10:11
  Speaker 3: In our B2B space, the receivables business, we just simply have more scale than anybody else, and so our products have more features.
• 10:21
  Speaker 3: We have more products, and now that they're all coming together in one integrated whole and an integrated receivables way, we have a robust UI UX.
• 10:31
  Speaker 3: So, unlike others that are trying to put a UI UX over this and try to connect to other people's modules, we actually have all the modules that are doing a massive amount of what's happening in the marketplace, and now we've put the great wrapper and a UI UX over it all in one integrated way.
• 10:47
  Speaker 3: In our merchant processing business, we have what we think is one of the most robust and flexible platforms for a business to build their business upon, so we provide businesses more flexibility to adjust what their market or product offering is for the market.
• 11:05
  Speaker 3: We have great relationships with a number of FIs and a number of ISVs and ISOs.
• 11:12
  Speaker 3: But a huge differentiator that a lot of people talk about we actually can prove it is the ability to provide great customer service and support.
• 11:20
  Speaker 3: So there's an organization called ATSI A-T-S-I that's more or less the equivalent ofa JD Powers that you and I might be familiar with from buying a car or other customer satisfaction measures, and ATSI measures the effectiveness of telesupport and how a customer experiences a brand.
• 11:41
  Speaker 3: And we are, I think, for at least the last decade, we have been the top award winner for ATSI in our merchant services business.
• 11:50
  Speaker 3: So at a time when other processors are de-emphasizing service or trying to shunt everything to self-service, we have plenty of self-service too, let's be clear.
• 11:59
  Speaker 3: But sometimes you actually need to talk to somebody.
• 12:02
  Speaker 3: Our service is best in class and we can prove it.
• 12:06
  Speaker 3: And when we bring people to our Fort Worth Service Center it's unbelievably compelling.
• 12:11
  Speaker 3: So you combine the fact that we've got a great platform, a great product and we have great service and we have great relationships across the industry.
• 12:19
  Speaker 3: We win, and we win significantly.
• 12:22
  Speaker 3: And since we've been in the merchant processing business that we bought into in June of 21, we've grown that business successive quarters, especially great in financial institutions ISVs, isos which is really the heart and soul of that part of our company's business.
• 12:39
  Speaker 2: Okay, great.
• 12:40
  Speaker 2: So when you step back and look at the payments and fintech industry as a whole, where do you see it headed, say, in the next three to five years?
• 12:47
  Speaker 3: Do you know what?
• 12:48
  Speaker 3: I think like everybody, maybe not everybody, but I fundamentally believe that what's going to happen is that payments is going to become more fully integrated the popular word is embedded but that payments are going to work like the power company works, meaning that it's always available, you never think about.
• 13:09
  Speaker 3: You walk into a room and you flip the light switch and it's dark and the light comes on.
• 13:12
  Speaker 3: You don't think about it, it just happens.
• 13:14
  Speaker 3: And I think that payments are going to become the same and the degree to which businesses can integrate their offerings so you make it easy for a business to accept payments from any source, anytime anywhere, or make payments similarly anytime anywhere to anyone, and do that in a very integrated, streamlined way.
• 13:36
  Speaker 3: I think that is the future of payments where it becomes more deeply embedded, more deeply integrated.
• 13:44
  Speaker 3: Where it becomes more deeply embedded, more deeply integrated, and the point of competition is going to be how well integrated you are and how well and easily you can embed so that you can deliver a service that is just omnipresent, it's just there and it just works all the time, and if you're the business owner, it's easy to manage a full view of your cash and your payment flow.
• 14:11
  Speaker 2: Okay, and you mentioned AI earlier, so I obviously have to haven't done a podcast in the last year without talking about AI, and I'm sure you're using it in your business.
• 14:20
  Speaker 2: But there's also a lot of buzz, especially recently, MasterCard and Visa both making some AI announcements.
• 14:25
  Speaker 2: So what's your view on how not the operational side of your business, but more how you see it play holistically in the industry?
• 14:34
  Speaker 3: So I think that AI obviously is the hottest thing of the moment, but I don't think that AI is just of the moment.
• 14:44
  Speaker 3: I think this is a transformative time in our society and for business, because AI is going to make a routine out of low value work that is happening sometimes in a very manual way.
• 15:00
  Speaker 3: So I don't think AI by itself for our industry, ai as an independent thing, is what's going to be impactful for our industry.
• 15:10
  Speaker 3: But how people take AI tools and apply them to payment industry challenges is going to transform our industry, and I'll just give you a few examples of how we're already applying AI.
• 15:20
  Speaker 3: So we're managing billions of transactions every day for consumers or businesses making payments, mailing a payment and phoning a payment and et cetera.
• 15:31
  Speaker 3: But often you'll receive a payment but you don't have the payment advice.
• 15:35
  Speaker 3: So you don't know what this $1,000 check is supposed to do.
• 15:38
  Speaker 3: What is it supposed to be applied to in the general ledger?
• 15:41
  Speaker 3: And if you have billions of transactions, any percentage, any tiny percentage that doesn't reconcile, is a huge burden and cost on the system.
• 15:53
  Speaker 3: So we are applying AI tools and we believe that we have best-in-class AI tools that allow payments to be matched.
• 16:01
  Speaker 3: We call it the matching process, of matching a payment actually to an invoice or to where it should be applied on the general ledger.
• 16:11
  Speaker 3: And we're doing that already at massive scale and we're doing that in our lockbox operation.
• 16:16
  Speaker 3: But we're also using AI to work on fraud reduction and we're using AI in our data business to help identify the next customers.
• 16:25
  Speaker 3: And what's so powerful about it right is that because we're using generative AI, it gets better and smarter every time.
• 16:33
  Speaker 3: Maybe the simplest way for people to get the scale is that when in our data business super simple.
• 16:41
  Speaker 3: I know this is a payment podcast, but this will be a really simple way to think about this.
• 16:46
  Speaker 3: In our business we are running the largest bank in the country.
• 16:51
  Speaker 3: We think is probably running nominally 400 campaigns marketing campaigns a year where they're trying to target people campaigns marketing campaigns a year where they're trying to target people.
• 17:01
  Speaker 3: Our business, because we have so many customers, is running 4 000 of them a year.
• 17:04
  Speaker 3: So you do that for a number of years.
• 17:07
  Speaker 3: You have exponential improvements in conversion of a lead to a customer because you just get so much smarter, so much faster, and that is the advantage of the scale that Deluxe has.
• 17:21
  Speaker 3: It'd be very hard for others to replicate, because in this case we're doing 4,000 a year versus one bank doing 400 and smaller banks doing many fewer than that.
• 17:30
  Speaker 3: The gap between the conversion rates that we can deliver rapidly expands.
• 17:35
  Speaker 3: It'd be very, very hard for any individual entity to keep up with that.
• 17:39
  Speaker 3: That is the power of AI.
• 17:41
  Speaker 3: The same is true for our matching software and our matching AI tools in the B2B space.
• 17:47
  Speaker 3: It is about exponential increase and improvement, and those that have scale and are already moving are going to have perhaps a long-term structural advantage, and clearly that's where we're aiming for Deluxe.
• 18:00
  Speaker 2: Great Well, let's switch gears a little bit and talk about you, and you mentioned a little bit about the start of your career, getting into FinTech at Wells Fargo, so maybe walk us through that point in time to where you are today and why you're at Deluxe.
• 18:13
  Speaker 3: Sure, so I spent about 12 years at P&G and we talked about my hair care days.
• 18:18
  Speaker 3: I so I spent about 12 years at P&G and we talked about my hair care days.
• 18:21
  Speaker 3: I got a phone call from a headhunter about this bank on the West Coast, wells Fargo.
• 18:24
  Speaker 3: It had not expanded nationally, this was a West Coast bank at the time and they had done this great job of moving customers out of the teller line to this new thing called an ATM.
• 18:34
  Speaker 3: And they had done a great job of moving people out of the teller line.
• 18:38
  Speaker 3: But they kind of messed up their customer relationship the ability to have a conversation with the customer, deliver more product, to find a consumer product, consumer marketing guy, a brand guy, to come and help them reposition that distribution channel for consumers to make it a consumer preferred device and experience.
• 19:11
  Speaker 3: That's exactly why I went to Wells Fargo Left P&G.
• 19:14
  Speaker 3: They're looking for a consumer guy who's a consumer guy.
• 19:16
  Speaker 3: They wanted to transform their customer experience and make it much more user-friendly and we were the first bank to deliver web-connected, internet-connected, cloud-connected today that's what we would call it cloud-connected ATMs and the experience that you would have at a Wells Fargo ATM today where there's full motion video, a variety of features, all the banking transactions that you can do there.
• 19:40
  Speaker 3: We did even novel things like selling postage stamps and selling discounted ski tickets and making specific offers to you that were targeting to you on the screen.
• 19:51
  Speaker 3: That's the work that I did at Wells Fargo and that was just about the peak of the internet craze.
• 19:59
  Speaker 3: I moved to San Francisco and I had entrepreneurs through my office all the time and one of them said, hey, I just took a company public, but I think there's another company inside my company that we think you're the guy to come and lead and to break it out of our company.
• 20:12
  Speaker 3: And I co-founded a company called MagnaCash, which was a micro payments company, does exactly what itunes checkout does today aggregating many one dollar transactions.
• 20:26
  Speaker 3: Instead of 10 one dollar transactions, do one ten dollar transaction, because we all know that it's a cheaper way to manage the transactions that flow.
• 20:34
  Speaker 3: And we were the first ones in the market.
• 20:36
  Speaker 3: We had usa today, all the gannett media properties, a number of other properties that were using our payment tool, and I sold that company to another company that ended up getting sold to Digital River, and that's how I became a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and started a micropayments company.
• 20:54
  Speaker 3: Now we were a little bit early because if it had been a little later we would have made even more money for shareholders, but we did pretty darn well getting business off the floor and flying and get it sold.
• 21:06
  Speaker 3: So after that was done, I was recruited to run the VeriSign internet payment businesses and VeriSign, which is still out there today important company, does the little lock in the bottom corner of your screen which is the SSL certificate that provides security.
• 21:22
  Speaker 3: And so VeriSign had bought all these different payment assets to start getting credit cards to be accepted online.
• 21:28
  Speaker 3: All of them were losing money, all of them had fraud problems.
• 21:31
  Speaker 3: They hired me as a payments guy to come in, integrate them, put them together in a meaningful way, reduce the fraud losses and grow the business.
• 21:39
  Speaker 3: And we put that together.
• 21:40
  Speaker 3: The brand name is called Payflow Pro, got those businesses all put together.
• 21:45
  Speaker 3: It got it profitable.
• 21:46
  Speaker 3: Ultimately, that business gets bought by PayPal and it still runs inside of PayPal as their gateway for credit card and debit card payments.
• 21:55
  Speaker 3: So if you're a business and you want to use a, you need a gateway.
• 21:59
  Speaker 3: The Payflow Pro Gateway, now by PayPal, is still operating today, largely as designed that the team designed back in the day.
• 22:06
  Speaker 3: Of course it's been modernized but largely designed as it was back then Spent a short time after that in private equity helping a couple of companies get healthy one around parking, another one in healthcare the healthcare business I became the chair.
• 22:23
  Speaker 3: That company got purchased by Henry Schein, a giant medical supply company, and then I got a call from this company called First Data, and First Data for everybody that maybe isn't familiar was at the time the largest payment processor.
• 22:38
  Speaker 3: Subsequently, of course, merged with Fiserv and now is part of the behemoth of Fiserv and I ran virtually every part of that company's business.
• 22:46
  Speaker 3: I started in the product organization and merchant.
• 22:48
  Speaker 3: I ended up along the way running the entire card issuing business.
• 22:53
  Speaker 3: I ran the businesses in Asia, in Europe, in the US.
• 22:56
  Speaker 3: I have responsibility for the three joint ventures in merchant processing B of A Wells Fargo PNC, and in the last role I had something called network and security solutions, which were all of the supporting features, functions, everything from a prepaid card, prepaid debit cards, prepaid open loop cards, a star debit network.
• 23:20
  Speaker 3: There was a variety of things.
• 23:22
  Speaker 3: All that were incredibly profitable and an important part of the product mix at First Data.
• 23:28
  Speaker 3: And then I got this call about Deluxe and honestly, greg, I have to tell you when the headhunter called me and said, hey, this company, deluxe is looking for a new CEO and we think you're actually a really good candidate, honestly I kind of laughed and I said I don't think you understand.
• 23:45
  Speaker 3: I spent the last 14 years of my life trying to get rid of checks.
• 23:49
  Speaker 3: I'm running the third largest debit network in the country, running a card issuing business why are you calling me about a check printing company?
• 23:59
  Speaker 3: And they said you really need to go in there and look at the assets that are there and maybe you're going to change your mind if you have a big enough vision for what can be.
• 24:10
  Speaker 3: And what I saw was this incredible company.
• 24:14
  Speaker 3: At the time it was about 105 years old plus or minus and it had 4,000 financial institution customers with master service agreements.
• 24:25
  Speaker 3: It had 4 million small business customers.
• 24:28
  Speaker 3: It was serving hundreds of the world's leading brands and at the time I thought it really was a sales and marketing challenge to really get the company moving in the right direction Along the way.
• 24:41
  Speaker 3: Before I got here, they'd made 52 different acquisitions, hadn't really integrated any of them.
• 24:46
  Speaker 3: Very disparate set of things.
• 24:49
  Speaker 3: There was a web hosting company bought in Australia.
• 24:52
  Speaker 3: There was a logo design company in the UK.
• 24:55
  Speaker 3: There's a payroll processing company in Canada.
• 24:58
  Speaker 3: There was a search optimization company in the UK.
• 24:59
  Speaker 3: There's a payroll processing company in Canada.
• 25:00
  Speaker 3: There was a search optimization company in Southern California.
• 25:03
  Speaker 3: There was this wide range of things that maybe didn't all fit together, and so we fundamentally changed the strategy to get very, very focused on what is the company's legacy, the company's history.
• 25:16
  Speaker 3: Where do we have the right to win?
• 25:17
  Speaker 3: And where we have the right to win is in payments and data.
• 25:21
  Speaker 3: That's the company's history.
• 25:22
  Speaker 3: As a check printer, we were the original non-cash payments company.
• 25:27
  Speaker 3: That's what our founder built.
• 25:29
  Speaker 3: Now we understand we have all moved well past checks.
• 25:32
  Speaker 3: We're still happy to print checks, but that was the legacy.
• 25:34
  Speaker 3: That was how we have built trust with all of these millions of small businesses, millions of individual consumers, thousands of banks, and so our job was to take that strength and that legacy and point it more specifically towards payments and data.
• 25:50
  Speaker 3: So we exited all of those other businesses and we got down to the footprint that we have today.
• 25:55
  Speaker 3: We exited dozens of them, we sold them, got down to the footprint that we have today.
• 26:00
  Speaker 3: We actually did dozens of them.
• 26:01
  Speaker 3: We sold them, we got down to the four-legged stool that we have today, which is merchant services, b2b payments, data driven marketing and, of course, our legacy print businesses.
• 26:07
  Speaker 3: So it is a fundamentally different business than people may have known long ago, certainly different business than they would have known five or 10 years ago, and what we are today is a payments and data company that has a really nice print business on the side that generates a lot of cash that we're investing to grow the digital payments and data company.
• 26:28
  Speaker 2: So when you looked at all these assets to come on board, was it sort of a no brainer that, hey, there's something there something there.
• 26:38
  Speaker 3: I don't know there was a no-brainer, but I really fundamentally believed that with that distribution footprint, the trust master service agreements help a lot, that if you can get the story refined and targeted and to make sense to everyday bankers, everyday consumers, we had a real shot.
• 26:57
  Speaker 3: And I've been a person always through my whole career is run to the fire.
• 27:01
  Speaker 3: I really love to go and work on things where you can make a meaningful change.
• 27:05
  Speaker 3: I've never been somebody that likes to sit in the back and just kind of make marginal I call it dial twisting, marginal twists on the side.
• 27:12
  Speaker 3: I want to take and make bold steps and that's the journey we've been on at deluxe and it's been a ride.
• 27:18
  Speaker 3: I'm so proud of what our team has been able to accomplish.
• 27:21
  Speaker 3: I don't know that a lot of people thought we could actually do it, but here we are.
• 27:25
  Speaker 3: You know we have, we continue to increase the share of our revenue that comes from our payments and data business and very, very proud of that and I think our future is very, very clear as a payments and data company.
• 27:37
  Speaker 2: Well, that's a good segue, I think, into the next question, because you talked a little bit about kind of what you enjoy doing.
• 27:41
  Speaker 2: So what are some of your passions?
• 27:43
  Speaker 2: So, maybe a work-related passion and a personal passion.
• 27:47
  Speaker 3: Work-related.
• 27:48
  Speaker 3: I really fundamentally believe in this idea of convergence, integration, embedded whatever word you like to use but the notion of making it simpler and streamlined and deeply integrated into just how the world works.
• 28:07
  Speaker 3: I think that is the future and I have a lot of passion for that, and you probably can hear in the conversation I had about what we're trying to do with our especially with our B2B business around convergence and getting everything together in a single user interface, single sign on.
• 28:22
  Speaker 3: I'm able to do everything in one place.
• 28:24
  Speaker 3: I'm a fundamental believer in that.
• 28:26
  Speaker 3: I'm very, very passionate about that from an industry perspective, I think personally, I'll just give you one sort of in the greater good of the community, I'm very passionate about education and financial literacy.
• 28:40
  Speaker 3: I believe as people in our industry, we understand money better than most anybody, and so if we can help people less fortunate understand money as well, they have an opportunity to really improve their lot in life.
• 28:53
  Speaker 3: And I think education is similar.
• 28:55
  Speaker 3: So if we can help, especially middle school to high school kids really launch, give them financial literacy but also give them broader education, we really have an opportunity to change lives and change the trajectory of families.
• 29:07
  Speaker 3: So very, very passionate about that.
• 29:09
  Speaker 3: Then, personally, the stuff that I like to do is I really like to snow ski and be out on the water doing water sports with our family.
• 29:18
  Speaker 3: Very proud of my family.
• 29:19
  Speaker 3: I've got a beautiful wife, 34 years this year.
• 29:23
  Speaker 3: Puts up with me, continues to put up with me.
• 29:25
  Speaker 3: Amazing.
• 29:25
  Speaker 3: I have three adult children 22, 24, and 26, all doing really great in life and very, very proud of them all.
• 29:33
  Speaker 2: Awesome, awesome.
• 29:34
  Speaker 2: Well, thanks for sharing that.
• 29:35
  Speaker 2: So if someone comes to you, barry, maybe they just graduated from college and they're looking at payments and FinTech as an industry choice.
• 29:42
  Speaker 2: They want to build a career.
• 29:43
  Speaker 2: What kind of advice would you give them to help them be more successful?
• 29:47
  Speaker 3: The first thing I would tell them is you are in the right place.
• 29:50
  Speaker 3: This is a secular, growing industry.
• 29:52
  Speaker 3: It is indispensable.
• 29:54
  Speaker 3: There are lots of other cool fun stuff you can go do, but if you want to be standing in the intersection where commerce happens, we are the intersection.
• 30:03
  Speaker 3: The intersection goes through fintech and payments and we represent the future of commerce, so you're in the right place.
• 30:09
  Speaker 3: First of all, congratulations on the right place.
• 30:13
  Speaker 3: Second thing I would tell you is find a role where you have measurable impact in our industry Meaning.
• 30:20
  Speaker 3: I want to be able to say, before I came on the job, the number of new merchants we were boarding was X.
• 30:24
  Speaker 3: After I left that role, it was Y.
• 30:27
  Speaker 3: Or fraud losses were X and they went to Y.
• 30:30
  Speaker 3: Or our exceptions had to manage X.
• 30:33
  Speaker 3: We reduced it to Y, so that you're able to, within every role, look back and say I can measure the contribution that I made.
• 30:41
  Speaker 3: That'll be a huge differentiator.
• 30:43
  Speaker 3: Especially for young people climbing the ladder.
• 30:45
  Speaker 3: It's incredibly important to be able to say what you actually accomplished.
• 30:49
  Speaker 3: Not in fluffy nice, I did this nice thing like measure it.
• 30:54
  Speaker 3: That'll be a huge differentiator because most people are going to show up and say they did these nice fluffy things you want to be able to say this is what I specifically delivered.
• 31:01
  Speaker 3: The second thing is always deliver way more than is expected.
• 31:05
  Speaker 3: I think young people often try to aim at what's the minimum threshold to meet the prerequisite, and that's not how people get promoted.
• 31:15
  Speaker 3: Real life is not like college, where if I just get a passing grade in this class, I pass 101, now I can go to 201, and then I can go to 301, and then I get a diploma.
• 31:27
  Speaker 3: Careers aren't like that.
• 31:28
  Speaker 3: People don't just pass from 101 with a passing grade to 201.
• 31:33
  Speaker 3: They have to be the best at that to be selected, to be considered, to be considered, to be selected for the next role.
• 31:40
  Speaker 3: So always over deliver.
• 31:43
  Speaker 3: So if somebody says, get this to me by Friday, deliver it on Thursday.
• 31:46
  Speaker 3: If they say I need this, I need 10 of these, deliver 12.
• 31:50
  Speaker 3: Always prove that you can deliver more than the minimum requirement.
• 31:56
  Speaker 3: Again, be hugely differentiating.
• 31:57
  Speaker 3: And the third thing I would tell you is I call it running to the fire and the notion is go and find roles where there's real change that needs to happen.
• 32:08
  Speaker 3: Don't try to take the easy path.
• 32:11
  Speaker 3: The simple thing Go someplace and choose roles where you can drive change and really have an impact.
• 32:20
  Speaker 3: It makes your life more interesting, it makes your career more interesting and it gives you a chance at a rocket ship, because you've proven that you can take on a hard task maybe a task that other people don't want to do and then execute on it.
• 32:32
  Speaker 3: And so if you do those three things, I think you've got a huge opportunity to have a runaway career and have a lot of fun along the way.
• 32:41
  Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, I think that's great advice.
• 32:42
  Speaker 2: Thanks for sharing that.
• 32:43
  Speaker 2: So before we wrap up, we've obviously covered about Deluxe and the company, about you, your story, a little about the industry.
• 32:53
  Speaker 2: Is there anything else you wanted to talk about before we wrap up?
• 32:54
  Speaker 3: Do you know what?
• 32:55
  Speaker 3: I would just tie it all back together to this notion of being really choiceful about where you choose, as a industry professional, to invest your time.
• 33:04
  Speaker 3: Don't just choose all the safe, easy stuff that's a really crowded space.
• 33:08
  Speaker 3: Find places called the notion of run of the fire.
• 33:12
  Speaker 3: Find places that need transformation.
• 33:15
  Speaker 3: Find opportunities where you can have massive impact.
• 33:18
  Speaker 3: It's what I've done in every step of my career.
• 33:19
  Speaker 3: Every step of my career, I made those choices to choose things where we could make a difference rather than just modify and adjust.
• 33:27
  Speaker 3: I think that leads to a happy life.
• 33:29
  Speaker 3: I think it leads to a really enriched life and leads to great career progress.
• 33:33
  Speaker 3: So what brought me to Deluxe?
• 33:34
  Speaker 3: I think that's why so many of the top talent in the industry are coming to join us at Deluxe and all the leadership roles and at the board level because they want to be part of this.
• 33:44
  Speaker 3: They want to be part of something bold and transformational and change, and there's lots of places you can do all the other slower stuff.
• 33:51
  Speaker 3: Choose stuff and find a place to go.
• 33:53
  Speaker 3: Do something bold and great.
• 33:55
  Speaker 3: It's worthwhile.
• 33:57
  Speaker 2: Well, Barry, thank you so much for being on the show today.
• 33:59
  Speaker 2: I know your time is very valuable.
• 34:00
  Speaker 2: So again, thank you so much, especially being here on the 400th episode.
• 34:04
  Speaker 3: I certainly appreciate it.
• 34:05
  Speaker 3: It's a great honor, great to be with you.
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: Thanks, greg.
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: Okay, and to all your listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story.
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: Make sure you visit our website at leadersinpaymentscom, where you can subscribe to the show and where you'll find our show notes.
• 34:23
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