Latest / Leaders In Payments / Joshua Silver, CEO of Rainforest | Episode 276

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Joshua Silver, CEO of Rainforest | Episode 276 · 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: Fast forward to today and we've seen a convergence of those.
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: No longer do small businesses look to procure software from one vendor and procure payments from their bank.
• 0:28
  Speaker 2: They really expect most software platforms today should have payments embedded.
• 0:34
  Speaker 2: So I think that makes it for an interesting question, because now, instead of payments being distributed one merchant at a time by a salesperson at ISO going door to door or making phone calls, you have SMBs that are just essentially opting in for payments as part of turning on their software.
• 0:59
  Speaker 3: That was Joshua Silver, the CEO of Rainforest.
• 1:01
  Speaker 3: He is my special guest on this episode, episode 276 of the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 1:06
  Speaker 3: I'm your host, greg Myers.
• 1:07
  Speaker 3: Rainforest helps software companies embed payments into their platform.
• 1:11
  Speaker 3: Joshua and I talk about the company and what makes them unique and different in the marketplace.
• 1:16
  Speaker 3: We also talk about Joshua's professional journey, including his passion for helping customers.
• 1:20
  Speaker 3: We've got a great episode ahead, so let's get started.
• 1:23
  Speaker 3: Hi, joshua, thank you for being here.
• 1:31
  Speaker 3: Welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: Thanks, Greg, for having me.
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: It's great to be here.
• 1:35
  Speaker 3: Great, so let's dive right in.
• 1:36
  Speaker 3: If you don't mind, tell our audience a little bit about yourself, maybe where you grew up, where you went to school, where you currently live, and we'll circle back to your professional journey in a minute.
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: Absolutely so.
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: I grew up just outside of Atlanta, Georgia, and went to school at Georgia Tech and have basically lived in the Atlanta area since then.
• 1:54
  Speaker 3: Okay, great.
• 1:55
  Speaker 3: So let's talk about the company Rainforest.
• 1:57
  Speaker 3: So tell us what Rainforest does.
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: So Rainforest is a payments as a service company.
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: We help software companies add payments to their products and so any time, as a consumer, you go to a restaurant and they present you with the bill at the end and they're using their restaurant point of service system, it could be us powering those payments behind the scenes.
• 2:17
  Speaker 2: Or any time you go online to make a donation to your favorite charity, or any time you go to pay a healthcare bill any of these different types of scenarios where payments is embedded inside of software.
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: We provide the infrastructure for all the payment processing for those software companies.
• 2:33
  Speaker 3: Okay, are there specific verticals that you focus on?
• 2:36
  Speaker 2: So, we work in a lot of different verticals, but we do have a few that we tend to specialize in.
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: Healthcare tends to be a very common one field.
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: Services and professional services, member management and nonprofit, and then we also work in a lot of emerging markets like transportation, trucking, logistics, construction.
• 2:57
  Speaker 3: How do you differentiate from those companies out there that are payfacts or payfacts as a service or payfact light?
• 3:03
  Speaker 3: I mean, we've all heard those different terms.
• 3:05
  Speaker 3: Are you similar to those different?
• 3:07
  Speaker 3: Can you speak to that?
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: It's pretty interesting.
• 3:09
  Speaker 2: The market over the last few years has been so many new players popping up and so many is the term earlier today.
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: It's a pretty noisy market and I would agree with that.
• 3:17
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of people trying to provide these services.
• 3:20
  Speaker 2: I think really where we specialize is in focusing on direct software companies, so we don't ever go and sell merchants directly.
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: We don't have a lot of ancillary products.
• 3:31
  Speaker 2: We're hyper focused on helping software companies add payments to their product and monetize it.
• 3:38
  Speaker 2: But one big difference between us and some of the others out there is that we are the registered payfac and we take on all the risk and liability.
• 3:46
  Speaker 2: And when I'm out in the market talking with software founders and leadership teams, a recurring theme that comes up time and time again is they want to focus on what they do best, which is writing software and serving their customers.
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: They don't want to get involved in all the nitty gritty details of payment processing and registration with the card networks and banks and money movement and things like that.
• 4:08
  Speaker 2: And so I think we've all seen in the industry the last few years that the number of new payment facilitators that are vertical software companies is continuing to slow and in fact, many software companies who became payment facilitators themselves have actually elected to move to other models more similar to Rainforest, where they have a payments partner that's taking on more of the responsibility.
• 4:29
  Speaker 2: So we're pretty bullish on the model that we offer, which is, again, we're taking all of the risk and compliance burden off of the software companies.
• 4:40
  Speaker 3: Okay, and how long has Rainforest been around?
• 4:43
  Speaker 2: So Rainforest got started in 2022 and we spent several quarters building the core platform and we were very fortunate, early 2023, to launch a product and launch all of our initial customers over the last couple of quarters and you recently closed a funding round.
• 5:02
  Speaker 3: Can you speak to that?
• 5:03
  Speaker 2: We did.
• 5:03
  Speaker 2: We're very excited.
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: We announced our seed funding round, which was led by Excel, with participation from Infinity Ventures and Arden Partners and the Box Group out of New York and FinTech Fund and many, many other strategic angels and smaller funds out.
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: There was an oversubscribed round and a lot of interest in looking at new payments companies like Rainforest, despite all the other companies out there in the market.
• 5:31
  Speaker 2: When all of these investors talk to their portfolio companies and talk to software founders, they hear time and time again that nobody has really solved the problem in the market and there is still a dearth of options.
• 5:44
  Speaker 2: And that's why I think all of our investors were just so fantastic with their support for us, and so we're certainly thrilled to have such a great cap table.
• 5:54
  Speaker 3: And you talked a little bit about this already but what else differentiates you from your competitors out there?
• 6:00
  Speaker 2: So we really look at our differentiation, coming across three different pillars Product and technology is pillar one, the second pillar is service and the third pillar is the commercials and economics.
• 6:13
  Speaker 2: From a product and technology perspective, we've done a lot to ensure that we are building all of the core components of technology ourselves.
• 6:21
  Speaker 2: A lot of our competitors are just wrapping other types of payment processors out there, which means you're only as good as the large incumbent that you're wrapping.
• 6:30
  Speaker 2: We really dispense with that model.
• 6:32
  Speaker 2: We went straight to banks and got sponsorship.
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: We built our own ledger.
• 6:36
  Speaker 2: We built our own merchant onboarding system, all the different touch points we built and own and control, and that allows us ultimately to have much more flexible routing of funds, much more flexible capabilities and functionality.
• 6:51
  Speaker 2: Actually, the product and technology on the service side, one of the biggest challenges that the industry faces today is with adoption.
• 6:58
  Speaker 2: If you're a software platform, you may have a thousand customers but only a hundred of them may be using your payments product, meaning you have a 10% attach rate or adoption rate.
• 7:08
  Speaker 2: What we work to do is, with software companies, improve that attach rate and increase adoption from 10% to 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 80% or more, and that translates to millions of dollars that flow straight to their bottom line because they're processing so many more payments, and there's really no other company out there that has focused as much as we have on this white glove service approach, not just in a reactive way to be responsive to tickets when they come in, but really in a proactive way to partner with the software platforms on their strategy.
• 7:40
  Speaker 2: The third pillar is on the commercials and the economics.
• 7:43
  Speaker 2: We're really proud to have an extremely transparent pricing model.
• 7:48
  Speaker 2: You can visit our website at rainforestpaycom and you can click on pricing and see exactly what your pricing will be, as well as an ROI calculator.
• 7:56
  Speaker 2: We don't have any minimums, there's no exclusivity, there's no monthly charges that you would incur.
• 8:03
  Speaker 2: It's entirely consumption-based, and so we've aligned our success entirely with the success of the software platform.
• 8:09
  Speaker 2: If the software platform is getting many, many merchants to sign up and use the product, then they will make a lot of money and we will participate in that, and if, on the other hand, they're not as successful, we're not having success when they are not.
• 8:22
  Speaker 2: And so again, across those three models or three pillars, I should say we're very different the product and technology, the service and then the commercials.
• 8:31
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I want to dive deeper on the adoption part that you mentioned.
• 8:35
  Speaker 3: So do you work with them to put together marketing programs to get that adoption rate from 10 to 20 to 30 percent?
• 8:43
  Speaker 2: We do.
• 8:43
  Speaker 2: We have a platform success team that is staffed with really experienced payment professionals who have worked at many different software companies, whether it was being ahead of payments themselves, whether it was being a payments consultant and working with lots of different companies.
• 9:01
  Speaker 2: They have deep expertise in figuring out what levers you can pull to move the adoption curve and we work with everyone from the very beginning to make sure that it's a successful implementation and integration into our platform.
• 9:16
  Speaker 2: But we also work with the software companies to look at their product and say what can you do to optimize the sign-up flow?
• 9:24
  Speaker 2: What are the marketing messages that you need to be sending out to your customers to get them to move over?
• 9:29
  Speaker 2: One of the most interesting things about Payments and having success in payments adoption is the very last thing you should talk about is payments.
• 9:37
  Speaker 2: It's kind of counterintuitive, but we find that when you really just talk about better payment processing, people tend to lose interest.
• 9:44
  Speaker 2: When you can talk about all the additional benefits that will accrue to the users of that software whether it's better reconciliation, higher payment acceptance rates, better reporting, better little reconciliation, different types of devices all of these different features, capabilities that accrue to benefits to the, to the software users.
• 10:03
  Speaker 2: That's when you start to see people really sign up.
• 10:06
  Speaker 2: And that's what we do, is we really help people craft those strategies and make sure that their product is fully optimized for that.
• 10:15
  Speaker 3: In the payments and fintech industry, merchants and their customers have increased Expectations around omni-channel commerce.
• 10:20
  Speaker 3: So, in collaboration with NMI, the fully integrated payment solution built to scale, we've launched the be solid campaign where, in this series, we'll explore the ability to accept payments anytime, anywhere, using any device, will dive deep into mobile acceptance via Contaclus, tap on phone, qr codes, wallets and more.
• 10:38
  Speaker 3: We will hear from companies like Othvia, canelo, google and more to listen to the latest episodes, visit leaders and payments calm or NMI calm.
• 10:48
  Speaker 3: Slash resources, slash podcasts.
• 10:50
  Speaker 3: In a world full of squares and stripes be solid.
• 10:54
  Speaker 3: So where do you see the payments industry heading saying the next maybe three to five years?
• 10:59
  Speaker 3: I definitely think we will see continued consolidation.
• 11:02
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of companies that are processing payments in commoditized manners, that haven't spent a lot on their R&D side of things, and so we'll continue to see consolidation and guts point one.
• 11:14
  Speaker 2: Point two I think we'll start to see the concept of data ownership come to the forefront right now.
• 11:21
  Speaker 2: I talked to companies and software platforms all the time who are really trapped with their current processor Because their processor won't give them access to all the merchant onboarding data that they would need to move to another payments platform.
• 11:36
  Speaker 2: Rainforest is very proud to be one of the first, if not the only, payments companies out there that not only offers Full portability of merchants, but we actually guaranteed it will export to the market.
• 11:49
  Speaker 2: We actually guaranteed it will export your data.
• 11:51
  Speaker 2: It's right at the forefront of our contract and United.
• 11:55
  Speaker 2: We'll start to see more and more discussions of this in the industry, just like we did a couple years ago with Payment cards used to be that if you were using a payment gateway and you were allowing that payment gateway to store your cards or to vault them or to tokenize them, many years ago there was kind of a fight over whether that data was yours or the gateways and people ultimately won out, and pretty much every gateway Now will export the card data.
• 12:22
  Speaker 2: I think we're gonna see a very similar trend with merchant data.
• 12:26
  Speaker 2: It's just the next cab off the rate, so to speak, in the fight for Data freedom, and again, rain forest is certainly leading the way there.
• 12:34
  Speaker 3: What do you think about the trend towards sort of the pay-by-bank or account-to-account payments?
• 12:40
  Speaker 3: Do you see that in your conversations with software companies?
• 12:44
  Speaker 2: yet it really is industry specific.
• 12:46
  Speaker 2: You know, I think in certain industries and certain payment flows, pay-by-bank can make sense.
• 12:51
  Speaker 2: There's different risk characteristics, there's different fee profiles that are crude to those type of payment methods versus a payment card, and so I think we will continue to see some adoption there.
• 13:02
  Speaker 2: However, I'm not a big believer that pay-by-bank or bank rails is the solution to every problem.
• 13:09
  Speaker 2: We've had payment cards and credit cards for a very long time now.
• 13:14
  Speaker 2: They're pretty universally accepted.
• 13:15
  Speaker 2: It took a long time for that to happen.
• 13:18
  Speaker 2: It kind of just works.
• 13:18
  Speaker 2: There's no friction.
• 13:20
  Speaker 2: You put out your card and you tap that at the cash register to pay, and it just works.
• 13:24
  Speaker 2: Where you enter that card number online, or do you use Apple Pay or Google Pay or any of these other wallets, there's really almost no friction there.
• 13:31
  Speaker 2: I have yet to see, even as a consumer, a completely frictionless pay-by-bank solution.
• 13:37
  Speaker 2: So I think once the banks really embrace this open banking architecture and allow other service providers to Create user experiences that reduce friction, we may see greater adoption of that.
• 13:52
  Speaker 2: But we're not there yet and I think we're a long ways away from it being a material percentage of the consumer spend in the US.
• 13:59
  Speaker 3: Curious your view on Kind of this term death of the ISO right.
• 14:04
  Speaker 3: This industry was built with.
• 14:06
  Speaker 3: Isos were a huge Part of that and they're after learn how to pivot given some of the new Dynamics of our industry.
• 14:13
  Speaker 3: But just curious your view on how do the ISOs play in this space with all these changes?
• 14:18
  Speaker 2: If we read Ryan 10 years ago, it was pretty clear that you had two choices to make if you were a small business.
• 14:26
  Speaker 2: The first choice was what Software platform I'm gonna use to run my business or in those days Maybe you didn't even have software, it may have just been an offline, paper-based process.
• 14:35
  Speaker 2: The second choice you had was how am I gonna get paid?
• 14:39
  Speaker 2: And the overwhelming majority of small businesses 10 years ago got payments through their bank or through an ISO who was effectively a reseller of the bank.
• 14:50
  Speaker 2: Fast forward to today and we've seen a convergence of those.
• 14:53
  Speaker 2: No longer do small businesses look to procure software from one vendor and procure payments from their bank.
• 15:00
  Speaker 2: They really expect most software platforms today should have payments embedded, and so I think that makes it for an interesting question, because now, instead of payments being distributed one merchant at a time by a salesperson at ISO going door to door or making phone calls, you have SMBs that are just essentially opting in for payments as part of turning on their software, and so I think that leaves the industry with some pretty meaningful questions of well, what are all these sales people going to do who used to sell merchant accounts one at a time, when that's not really how people are buying it anymore?
• 15:37
  Speaker 3: I think it's an interesting discussion that the industry is having.
• 15:40
  Speaker 3: Any other industry trends that you want to mention?
• 15:44
  Speaker 2: I am pretty excited about faster payments.
• 15:46
  Speaker 2: I think there's a lot of excitement these days about RGP and FedNow and other types of bank rows like fell.
• 15:55
  Speaker 2: It's interesting because I think many in the industry don't really take into account the fact that most of these mechanisms are push payments only.
• 16:04
  Speaker 2: In other words, you can't, with FedNow, pull money from a consumer bank account.
• 16:08
  Speaker 2: It's really a push.
• 16:09
  Speaker 2: The consumer has to push it out, and so you run into some of the same problems you had with pay by bank that we talked about before.
• 16:15
  Speaker 2: However, that being said, for B2D payments, for merchant payouts, for any money that's going out to a consumer, whether it's a refund or a rebate or any type of payout, I do think we're going to continue to see more and more volume over these faster payment routes, and it's certainly something that Rainforest is looking at closely and figuring out.
• 16:39
  Speaker 2: How can we add the most value there In the B2B world, where the different participants in a transaction both the payer and the receiver have very different incentives on when to remit that payment, whether they want to hold on to it longer or move it slower, and so I think that's the other thing that plays into that faster payments debate, but I do think overall, we will continue to see money move faster.
• 17:02
  Speaker 2: I also think we will continue to see the rise of alternative payment methods and other types of payment networks, whether it's a buy now, pay later, whether it's a paypal, whether it's a local payment method, whether it's pay by cash, whether it's a fleet card or a fleet check or a healthcare-specific payment instrument.
• 17:21
  Speaker 2: I do think we're starting to see the specialization of payments.
• 17:25
  Speaker 2: Whereas credit cards are general, broad-purpose, open-loop products, I think we'll continue to see some more specialized New York products that help fill the gaps at different price points, at different risk profiles, et cetera.
• 17:39
  Speaker 2: So I think we should keep a close eye on that.
• 17:41
  Speaker 2: Other countries in other parts of the world have really led the way on that.
• 17:46
  Speaker 2: I think the US is a bit slower to adopt those, but nonetheless they're actually growing interest in some of those types of payment methods.
• 17:54
  Speaker 3: Well, I appreciate you sharing those insights.
• 17:55
  Speaker 3: Let's switch gears a little bit and talk about you, so tell us about your journey to your role there as the CEO.
• 18:02
  Speaker 3: Absolutely.
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: So I have been in the intersection of software and payments my whole career.
• 18:08
  Speaker 2: After graduating from Georgia Tech with a computer science degree, I actually co-founded a healthcare payments company here in Atlanta called Patient Care and spent over 10 years building up an extremely robust payments and billing platform for large health systems, and we innovated a lot in this space.
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: Healthcare is a very regulated, very complex environment that has really unique money flows, and we built a product that kind of worked in that environment and helped hospitals collect more and collect more efficiently.
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: So I learned a lot during that time about how to build and scale payment companies, as well as how to take care of customers, which these days, it seems is a lesson that many companies still need to learn.
• 18:55
  Speaker 2: After founding Patient Care and moving on from that venture, I ran a consulting firm again that was focused on helping software companies with their payment strategy, and over the course of a few years I worked with dozens and dozens of software companies, helping them craft their strategy, figure out whether they should be a payment facilitator or use pay-back light, to use your term, or to work with one of the new modern processors.
• 19:21
  Speaker 2: I also helped them figure out what are some of the other ancillary products they can add beyond just payment acceptance.
• 19:27
  Speaker 2: Can they get into the issuing space, into the digital vault space, can they open up bank accounts, can they add lending or factoring or buy now, pay later.
• 19:35
  Speaker 2: And it was pretty eye-opening to see from the buyer's seat.
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: Time and time again, vendors were just offering disappointing solutions, whether it was lack of good product, no service, not being responsive.
• 19:48
  Speaker 2: We're just poor economics or commercial terms.
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: And that really was the genesis for me starting Rainforest in 2022, was seeing all of these software companies that had amazing opportunities to add payments into their products and make a lot of money doing so add functionality, keep customers happy, increase client retention tons of benefits and, on the flip side, just seeing the incumbent payment vendors disappoint time and time again.
• 20:16
  Speaker 2: So actually recruited a pretty all-star team to help me start Rainforest.
• 20:21
  Speaker 2: A lot of the engineering and product out came from my last company, patient Co, with me.
• 20:27
  Speaker 2: Others were folks I had met while consulting over the previous couple of years and were really deep back first in the payment space, and we merged all those different types of people together to create an amazing team that has really honestly, over the last 18 months, built the product that we always wish had existed.
• 20:45
  Speaker 2: We were all looking for this payments platform, and it's not uncommon for people on recruiting to tell me they love coming to rainforest because there's unfinished business, meaning they started with another company, maybe helping them implement payments or being on the buyer side, and never really were able to finish in a way that left them satisfied, and so they kind of look at rainforest as an opportunity to continue down the path of that same vision with a fresh start well, anytime that I hear a cooler, unique name of a company, I have to ask the question how did you come up with the name?
• 21:17
  Speaker 3: rainforest?
• 21:18
  Speaker 2: for sure we're really excited about the rainforest name.
• 21:21
  Speaker 2: We picked it because it really evokes a sense of growth and the lush ecosystem and what we're trying to do is help software companies, which are that core foundation, the core trunk, if you will.
• 21:35
  Speaker 2: We want to help them build foliage and growth and lush ecosystems around them and we firmly believe that the next wave of their growth is going to come from payments and other financial services products and we want to be the provider for those and be at the forefront of that, and that is why we chose the rainforest name.
• 21:54
  Speaker 2: I think also, it is a name that is distinctly non-technical and that's important from a service perspective, because we don't want to be just a nerdy payments company.
• 22:06
  Speaker 2: We really want to be a company that helps software platforms solve problems.
• 22:11
  Speaker 2: Even though we have a fantastic developer experience and a fantastic developer relationship team, ultimately what we're doing is we're providing great service all around, between the go-to market to development experience, pricing help and so on and so forth, and that's really why rainforest is that, you know, distinctly non-technical name great, I love it.
• 22:32
  Speaker 3: So what are some things you're passionate about?
• 22:34
  Speaker 3: Maybe one personal passion and one business passion, for sure on the personal side, I am a huge travel junkie.
• 22:41
  Speaker 2: I travel quite a bit for work and always take time when I'm in different cities to experience the local culture.
• 22:46
  Speaker 2: But I also travel quite a bit personally and I find every time I travel it really opens up my eyes when you start to see things from different people's point of view.
• 22:55
  Speaker 2: Many, many times I'm able to take those insights back, whether it's in my personal life or work life, and bring those learnings in, and I'm just a huge fan of getting outside of the office, getting outside of your local environment and getting into a very different one, whether that is going into southeast Asia and eating from the street vendors there or going to some other high-tech hub around the world.
• 23:19
  Speaker 2: From a business side, you know, I'd say my biggest passion, honestly, is taking care of customers.
• 23:24
  Speaker 2: That is a long forgotten art that, over the years, many companies and cost-cutting measures have not done a great job with, and so we pride ourselves here at rainforest of taking excellent care of customers, and that means both spending time with them and going to visit them and doing things with them not just fun things, although we do lots of those too, but also working with them face to face, but also one of the number one rules we have at the company is don't fuck with the money part of my language, but we feel passionate about that because so many payments companies don't get the basics right and it's really hard to talk about offering any bells and whistles, features or what we like to call the sizzle, when you don't get the steak right.
• 24:06
  Speaker 2: You have to get the base right, and that comes down to you.
• 24:10
  Speaker 2: In the payments world, the money has to be right each and every single time, and you know, I tell every employee who starts here on day one the number one thing you can do is take care of customers, and one of the biggest ways you do that is don't mess with their money.
• 24:25
  Speaker 2: Make sure that the implementation is right, make sure that our code doesn't have bugs, make sure that our documentation is clear.
• 24:31
  Speaker 2: It's a huge passion line and it really has flowed down, I think, throughout the whole company and I get notes all the time from prospects and customers that they are amazed at the level of service we provide and that's honestly the number one reason why people choose to work with us that's great.
• 24:46
  Speaker 3: So final question here and I love to get people's perspectives because they always bring kind of their own unique perspective and, as someone who's been around payments for a long time, curious to your answer our industry is still continues to be a great place to work.
• 24:59
  Speaker 3: I think people are starting to seek it out, or have been the whole fintech and payments space.
• 25:04
  Speaker 3: So someone comes to you maybe they're coming right out of we'll use Georgia Tech as the example.
• 25:09
  Speaker 3: They they're coming out of Georgia Tech and they're coming to you and saying, joshua, I want to build a career in payments and fintech.
• 25:15
  Speaker 3: What advice would you give them to help them be successful?
• 25:20
  Speaker 2: it's a great question two major pieces of advice I would give them.
• 25:23
  Speaker 2: Number one is you want to look for companies that align with your values and align with your speed, and by that I mean you want companies that are moving in the same direction as you and trying to solve problems that you're interested in, for example, with rainforest.
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: I've talked about time and time again on this podcast that taking care of customers is critical, regardless of the role you're in.
• 25:46
  Speaker 2: If you are not passionate about taking care of customers, this may not be a great place for you.
• 25:51
  Speaker 2: They want to go somewhere else where there may be a greater focus on all technology or on something else.
• 25:57
  Speaker 2: On the speed aspect, choose whether you want to work for a startup that's going to have a much, much faster pace.
• 26:03
  Speaker 2: Maybe you want to work for a consulting shop that you get to see many different viewpoints from different customers, or maybe you're more comfortable in a more skilled company where you can have lots of different opportunities within that company to move around.
• 26:18
  Speaker 2: Making sure that you're matching both the speed and the values of the company is super important.
• 26:23
  Speaker 2: The second thing I would say is be curious.
• 26:25
  Speaker 2: Payments is such a vast ecosystem and there are so many different areas that you can go into and so many things to learn.
• 26:35
  Speaker 2: I find myself, having spent nearly 20 years knee-deep in payments almost every day, I still learn things each and every day and that's because I take time to be inquisitive and curious and don't take things at face value.
• 26:50
  Speaker 2: When someone says, hey, here's how this piece of technology works or this is why the payment networks have done it this way, spend the time to really interrogate that and investigate.
• 26:59
  Speaker 2: Why is that?
• 27:01
  Speaker 2: Go, find experts to talk to.
• 27:02
  Speaker 2: I guarantee if you follow those inquisitive streaks and really ask those questions, you will gain a tremendous amount of respect from those around you, but also it's going to help your career in so many different ways.
• 27:15
  Speaker 3: Both great pieces of advice, for sure.
• 27:17
  Speaker 3: Well, we've covered a lot of ground already, obviously, about you and the company and your view of the industry.
• 27:22
  Speaker 3: Is there anything else you'd like to cover before we wrap up?
• 27:25
  Speaker 2: I think we've made really good progress.
• 27:26
  Speaker 2: My advice to software companies as they're choosing partners to work with is at the end of the day, payments is a people business.
• 27:35
  Speaker 2: It's so easy to look at feature checkboxes on a spreadsheet and say they either have this feature or they don't, or look at pricing and say someone else is offering it slightly cheaper.
• 27:45
  Speaker 2: But you really want to know who's going to be on the other end of the phone when you call them with a problem, because regardless of how perfect a company is, they're always going to be some type of issue.
• 27:55
  Speaker 2: It's really important to make sure that you know who you're working with and that you like them and that you feel that they're going to be a good partner to help you.
• 28:02
  Speaker 2: So I think that probably applies even outside of payments as well.
• 28:06
  Speaker 2: But at the end of the day, it's a people business and make sure you work with great people.
• 28:11
  Speaker 3: I think that's a great way to wrap up the show.
• 28:12
  Speaker 3: So, joshua, thank you so much for being here today.
• 28:15
  Speaker 3: I know your time is very valuable, so again, really appreciate you being here.
• 28:18
  Speaker 3: Thanks for having me on Absolutely, and to all your listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story.
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 28:28
  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.
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: If you enjoyed listening, please share on your social channels as well.