Join me and Andrew Brown, CEO of Check as we discuss the innovative world of embedded payroll. The conversation goes beyond the basics and provides a glimpse into Andrew's path from a tech-enthused Duke student to a pioneer in payroll technology. Discover the unique connection between payroll intricacies and payment technologies, and how this synergy is crafting a new era for financial services and especially software platform. Plus, don't miss out on Andrew's passion for Duke basketball—an energy that exemplifies his leadership.
As we discuss the competitive landscapes of the payroll industry, we uncover the unique challenges and advantages faced by early market entrants against the backdrop of legacy providers struggling to adapt to the embedded payroll niche. Andrew's narrative from coder to industry leader also offers invaluable career insights for those eager to make their mark in fintech.
Join me and Andrew Brown, CEO of Check as we discuss the innovative world of embedded payroll. The conversation goes beyond the basics and provides a glimpse into Andrew's path from a tech-enthused Duke student to a pioneer in payroll technology. Discover the unique connection between payroll intricacies and payment technologies, and how this synergy is crafting a new era for financial services and especially software platform. Plus, don't miss out on Andrew's passion for Duke basketball—an energy that exemplifies his leadership.
As we discuss the competitive landscapes of the payroll industry, we uncover the unique challenges and advantages faced by early market entrants against the backdrop of legacy providers struggling to adapt to the embedded payroll niche. Andrew's narrative from coder to industry leader also offers invaluable career insights for those eager to make their mark in fintech.
Welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast, where we talk to C-level leaders from across the payments landscape. 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. We will also hear stories from our guests about their journeys to the top.
Speaker 2:When I look out at the future and where things are going, I think sometimes folks miss just how much opportunity there is to continue to build new companies and new tools to improve so many things in the world, In particular in our space, really the way that small and medium-sized businesses run their operations and run their teams. I see this every single day where there's so many industries where vertical SaaS companies are getting built up to help with that, but there's still so many that are left where I think there's just massive white space to go build new tools. We feel really just incredibly proud and really lucky to be able to work with those sorts of entrepreneurs to make their journey a bit easier and make the tools they're building a bit more powerful for their customers by being able to offer payroll as well.
Speaker 3:That was Andrew Brown, co-founder and CEO of CHECK. He is my special guest on this episode, episode 292 of the Leaders in Payments podcast, and I'm your host, greg Myers. Check, founded five years ago, created the embedded payroll space. They partner with vertical-based software platforms to build and scale their payroll businesses. Andrew and I talked about the payroll space and how, in many ways, it parallels the payments industry. We talked about what makes CHECK unique and about his professional journey and, of course, his great passion for Duke basketball. We've got a great episode ahead, so let's get started. Hi, andrew, thank you for being here and welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast, greg.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me on today.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. So let's dive right in, 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, a few things like that, and then we'll circle back to your professional journey in just a minute.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. I'm originally from Greenville, south Carolina. Born and raised. My parents are both labor and employment lawyers, met in law school and so growing up I kind of figured I was going to be I don't know probably either an astronaut or a lawyer. Those are probably the two things I was most interested in made my way to Duke, really had no idea what I was going to do, but the iPhone came out and I was just absolutely inspired. I got one really early, was so excited about it and, frankly, also so frustrated by how many things I realized the hardware could do. But no one had built the software for yet. And that was really my entree into really computer science and building apps and that sort of thing started off by basically trying to build apps for my friends. We built a bus tracking system so that I wouldn't get caught in the rain at Duke and could no one run out and get on the bus, that sort of thing and kind of one thing. I do another and I built my career in the tech industry from there.
Speaker 3:Awesome. Well, let's talk about the company Cheq, so tell the audience what Cheq does yeah absolutely so.
Speaker 2:Cheq is the creator of the embedded payroll space. I know this is a lot of payment stuff on here, so I'll say when you hear payroll, your eyes might start to glaze over, but bear with me, I promise you this is actually really interesting. Our view is that payroll is too hard for most business owners today, so this is a space that is primarily served by legacy incumbents that have been around for 50, 60, 70 years, who really have not innovated that much, and what we recognized about five years ago when we started the business is that platforms that serve small and medium sized businesses are really the future, especially vertical platforms who are helping those business owners grow their businesses, and so we chose to take an approach of partnering with those platforms and building out an infrastructure layer to help the platform solve the payroll pain point for their customers. So, at the end of the day, we have one aim, which is really to help small business owners make it simple to pay their people.
Speaker 3:Okay, are there certain verticals that you focus on more than others?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so there's not one particular vertical, but I'll say we do have a bit of a concentration in real world type businesses. So think hourly restaurants, field services, plumbers, electricians, retail your nuts and bolts, meat and potatoes type of businesses that you would see on Main Street. It turns out paying a software engineer is not that hard. You pay them the same amount every couple of weeks, basically you know, all year round. For folks who have shift-based work, hourly work, it's a lot more complicated, and so our partners have built I think we just radically more modern, easy to use tools for those types of customers than what traditionally has existed in the space. So we have a very general purpose solution. But those are some of our partners that have seen the most success.
Speaker 3:And so your customer is the platform or the software company, as opposed to, like, the end user of the product.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right. Let me give an example because I think it will help here. So put yourself in the shoes of a coffee shop owner. You know, imagine you own and run the coffee shop that maybe you stop into every morning on Main Street on the way to work. Rewind 20 years. You were probably running your business on pen and paper, maybe didn't even accept credit cards you know it was cashed based, maybe had a schedule on the wall to find who was working on any given day and, frankly, you probably had a payroll company that there was a good chance. They actually called you on the phone every couple of weeks. It had you basically read in your hours to them.
Speaker 2:It's kind of crazy to think about today, but I swear this is how things you know not that long ago used to work. That's obviously all changed, so that business has now come online. More than likely you have a software platform you're using to power most parts of your business and there's actually a really good chance that that software platform is been built specifically for your industry. So if you're a coffee shop, you might run on a platform called Dripost, which is one of our partners, or if you're a restaurant, then you might run on another one and so on and so forth, and so, as a result of that, you now have this really well built, really powerful application that you can use to run your business.
Speaker 2:Embedded payments, which I'm sure you know many of your listeners are familiar with, was really the call it first best fintech use case for those platforms.
Speaker 2:So not only could you manage your business workflows, you could actually get paid, you know, in terms of accepting money from your customers, paying for their coffees and whatnot, all through the platform. Obviously, you know Stripe and AdYen and others have built up that business and really what Check does is we say, okay, it's awesome as a business owner that I can accept payments from my customers through that platform, but I should be able to pay my team and manage my team through the platform as well. So that's where we come in. We provide all of the software and infrastructure to make it possible to embed payroll directly in that application, which, for the you know employee and the end business owner, makes their life a lot easier. They're not switching between systems, it's just a much more simple, modern experience and for the platform owner, it's a new revenue line for them and a way to provide more value to their customers and create an even stickier solution.
Speaker 3:Makes a lot of sense. So, having been around this space, around sort of these software companies for a long time, there's a lot of them. So how do you go to market? Do you have a direct sales team? Do you work through partnership channels? How do you get to that customer?
Speaker 2:The whole business is, as I mentioned, like very much partnership based. So we are not a payroll company where we go and sign up small businesses. All we do is work with these platforms. They are our customer. We call them our partners, though, because we're working, you know, very much jointly with them, and so for those partners, yeah, it is very much a direct sales type of motion, and, you know, we're always doing outreaches to them dinners, those things of that nature just trying to get in front of them. What's unique about our business, compared to a lot, is that we're not trying to sign up thousands or tens of thousands or whatnot of these platforms. We're talking dozens to hundreds of them over the next few years, and so we've spent basically a half decade at this point building a tool that we know that they need, and we think we've done a pretty good job with that, so we're able to create quite a tailored you know pitch specifically for them.
Speaker 3:Okay, it's a good segue into the next question and you answered part of it, but I'm sure there's more to the answer. What differentiates you from your competitors out there?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think the first thing to understand is that really, before check, you didn't have any option to go and build a payroll service. You could try, but it was going to take you five plus years, probably 50 to 100 million plus dollars, or you could do an acquisition and that was also going to be a multi-year, probably 100 plus million dollar type of an endeavor. So what we said was there were a couple of platforms that had done that Toast and Square among them and we said okay, there are hundreds of other vertical SaaS companies, workforce management companies out there that need this. Let's really abstract all of this complexity away and build it into a platform that they can build on without needing to take years and tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to go do it. So, first and foremost, we created the space. We've been the leader in helping stand it up and, as a result, have been in the market longer than anyone else. As a result of that, over time, folks they see a good idea and they want a part of it. So we've certainly had competitors come into the space.
Speaker 2:There are really two key ways that we differentiate today. One is some of the established existing payroll companies have come to try and offer embedded payroll products and there's some real, I think, just core business model conflict there. For any given customer, are you trying to attract them to your payroll product or to your partner's payroll product? And if you're thinking about investing the incremental dollar in your business, do you put it towards helping your partners or do you put it towards helping yourself? So, structurally, those folks are pretty challenged in terms of how they compete with us.
Speaker 2:Otherwise, the other thing we do and this has been we've been fortunate, I think, again, to be kind of early in this market is we've recognized that, while I think kind of the last few years in fintech we're about building really good APIs and simplifying some of these complex workflows, what we've recognized is you have to do more than that. You really have to create a platform that empowers these platforms to really build a business. Like the phrase we use is you're not just building a product, you're building a business, and so that means, of course, our APIs and our products, our surface areas, our embeddable components are all really critical, but the way we provide our operations is equally critical. So we take on basically migrations, which we call embedded setup, for our customers. We take on support through what we call embedded support for our customers. We handle all risk and fraud for them through our credit and fraud protection program, so it's those sorts of things that just make it a much more robust offering really than what others in the market have been able to put out.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and correct me if I'm wrong and you may agree or disagree, but there seems to be a lot of parallels between sort of the payments industry and the payroll industry. I mean payments you've got some of the newer players who have come out with more kind of the modern day payments infrastructure. You've got, obviously, legacy players who also try to play in this kind of SaaS software platform space, but they're trying to embed things that have old technology and it sounds like in this payroll space there's a lot of similarity.
Speaker 2:There's no question. I think that, look, embedded payments really led the way over the last decade, and I think the next five to 10 years are much more about other financial services, payroll being one of them lending. There's others that are in there. We've watched the playbooks that these payments companies have run and certainly been inspired by them, taking the parts that we think apply. But part of the challenge, too, is also really thinking from first principles and saying, hey, when you think about what payroll really is at the end of the day, yes, it moves a lot of money, don't get me wrong but it's actually quite a different business in that it's much more about taxes.
Speaker 2:Like the reason, especially in this country, the payroll industry exists is that we have a state and local-based system where there are thousands of different tax jurisdictions. It can be all the way down to your local school district, and that's really complicated. You got to know how to calculate those, how to remit those taxes. There's penalties if you get them wrong or they're late, things of that nature, and so it's really building. Sometimes I think about, if you put a thing of the benevolent technologist in charge of the whole US, what system would they build for handling these taxes. That's really our goal and what we've set out to create.
Speaker 3:Okay, where do you see the industry headed, say, in the next three to five years?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's really like the last couple of years, in my mind, have been kind of the beachhead for this next iteration of financial services. I mentioned about payroll lending accounting is in the early stages of becoming a thing too. I think the next few years are going to be about all of those services really going from an initial establishment phase into that kind of core expansion growth phase. I think maybe what embedded payments looked like back maybe 2013, 14, 15, that kind of timeframe. I think that's where we're at now in this 2.0 version of embedded financial services. Beyond just the pure growth there, the other thing I think that we're going to see is you're going to have much more various financial products being connected to one another in a way where, historically, they've been pretty disparate.
Speaker 2:When you think about okay, you've got one platform that now is handling your income in terms of payments from your customers.
Speaker 2:It's handling the majority of your outflows in terms of payroll, in terms of invoices and billing, things of that nature. It's also hooked into your accounting system. Wow, the data and the power that you can have in hooking all of those workflows together is pretty cool. You can see oh I know exactly how much you have in your bank account. I know what your payroll is coming up and I know a customer is about to pay you because you've got an invoice out for them. Maybe you have a brief cashflow shortfall, maybe I can lend that to you a much lower cost way than historically would have been the case, to make it easier just to grease the skits of how you continue to run your business. So it's that type of stuff and really bringing, as we see, more and more adoption of these products, like bringing them all together to provide these cohesive, really powerful experiences for business owners, is, I think, a lot of what the next few years will be all about.
Speaker 3:Totally agree with you. I think from my knowledge and my talking to a lot of leaders like you, that definitely is in alignment with what I'm hearing. So let's switch gears a little bit and talk about you. So fill the gap in between when you were coding some bus apps back at Duke to CEO of Czech, kind of give us the professional journey there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. It's funny. In retrospect it kind of makes sense. But, looking forward, I definitely would not have predicted I would end up running a payroll business. So Rewind.
Speaker 2:I left school, as I mentioned, was really excited about building things. Truly, I had no connections to the startup industry, to Silicon Valley or anything like that, so a lot of my friends were moving to New York. I decided to do the same thing and was really looking for how to get my foot in the door basically in this industry here. So started my career out very briefly at Google. I was fortunate to be part of their APM program, did that for about a year and then decided to strike out on my own and begin my entrepreneurial journey. So I started a company called Oyster, which is a consumer. Think of it as an ebook subscription service, so kind of like Netflix or Spotify, but for ebooks and so we built iOS and Android apps, things like that, to enable you to read this book from our catalog of more than a million titles that we had, and we ran that for about four years before ultimately selling it to Google in 2015. And that whole experience definitely was just a foundational one that I think shaped the trajectory of my career because I was fortunate to work with an incredible team of two other co-founders, work with an incredible group of people to build out this service, create a product that a lot of people really loved, and I found I was like wow, I feel like we found a wormhole in this universe. Like being an entrepreneur is just really incredible. It's hard for me to imagine doing anything else in my career, and so, after selling the business to Google, obviously you start kind of looking around right what's going to be next?
Speaker 2:And for me, while I loved building a consumer product, I recognized that I was more of a B2B kind of guy and I didn't want to run a media business. I wanted to run a software business at the end of the day. So I was looking for basically the biggest, oldest industry. I could find that I felt like if I went and spent 10, 15, 20 years building in it, I was pretty sure we could push the ball forward in terms of the types of experiences that folks were able to offer. I had no idea that was going to be payroll.
Speaker 2:I was looking at a very wide array of different things and sometimes you need to have, I think, just a prepared mind really so that when you kind of see the opportunity come along, you're ready to jump on it. And that was very much the case with Czech. We happened to get to know and become quite close with what became our first partner, a company called Homebase. We really saw the problem through their eyes. So this wasn't a I'm an expert in payroll, let's go build this. This was wow. This company really needs to be able to offer payroll to their customers. It's way too hard for them to do today. Why has no one built this solution yet? And it's one of those you kind of every now and again I don't think it happens that often, but maybe it's every five or 10 years you just see something in the world that you're like this should be different. I don't know why no one else has done this yet, and we were fortunate to recognize that and jump on it and spent the last five years chasing it. Now.
Speaker 3:So you started this with other co-founders, or just yourself?
Speaker 2:I did, yeah, no. So I have two other co-founders here. The vape Patel is my co-founder and CTO. He was at one of our first couple engineers back at Oyster as well, so we've been through thick and thin together, working together for over a decade at this point. And then our third co-founder, eric Stromberg, was also part of the Oyster crew. He was one of my co-founders and the CEO there and Eric helped co-create the whole idea for check as our lead investor for our first couple of rounds at board member and continues to be one of the most thoughtful kind of strategic voices around the table here. Great.
Speaker 3:Well, I like to ask this question of leaders and get their opinions, because everyone's kind of had their own kind of personal journeys that I believe are important to answering this. If someone comes to you and they say, andrew, I'm interested in working in the payroll industry or the payments industry you call it thin tech as a broader term maybe, and maybe they want to work at check what would you tell them they need to do to be successful?
Speaker 2:There's no one playbook in life. There's different ways to go about things, but personally, the way that I think you maximize your success is by being genuinely interested in things and following that curiosity and going really deep. Those are the types of people that I look to hire and that when I look at you know other entrepreneurs that I'm close with and doesn't even have to be entrepreneurs, just people who really successful in their fields. That's what you see. You know, I look sometimes at kind of my parents' generation and folks like that and the folks who are 70 years old and absolutely love what they do and are, you know, reading the new article about what's coming out Like. That's who you want to be and that's how you have success in your space. So if you want to work in payments or you want to work in an embedded payroll, a check, I'd say, one, go follow that curiosity and two, demonstrate to others that you've done that.
Speaker 2:Turns out. The world is a big place and so if you choose a particular topic to go deep on, more quickly than you might imagine, you can become, you know, top 1%, top 0.1%, 0.01% in terms of expertise there, and just doing the work really will differentiate you from kind of the vast majority of people out there and, lastly, that compounds over time. That's really why the curiosity is so important. Like doing that for a week or a month or six months is helpful. It can definitely get your foot in the door, but the way to really have outside success is to do that over a period of, you know, 10, 20, 30 years. I mean. I think the only way you sustain that is if you're genuinely really curious and really excited about it.
Speaker 3:That's great advice. So what are some things you're passionate about? So, maybe one work related passion and one personal passion. All right, well, let's see work related passion.
Speaker 2:I think more than anything else, I'm really passionate about providing, just like, amazing experiences to our partners. This is something we spend a lot of time thinking about and it's really hard, like when you think about an organization design like how do you make sure that you give you know, fast and accurate responses back to people and do that in a way that also makes economic sense and things of that nature. It's like, again, it's when you kind of follow your curiosity. For me it's like all about just being obsessive about providing that sort of thing. On the topic of obsessive, my personal passion is definitely Duke basketball. I was a camera and crazy. I spent two plus months camping out to get into the UNC game when I was there and still a big fan. So you work a lot as a founder. The way I like to kind of relax and recharge is getting myself geared up for the big game.
Speaker 3:Okay, so I haven't kept up with college basketball much yet this year, but it's starting to get there, so how's Duke looking so far?
Speaker 2:You know pretty good, we're ranked like right around the top 10. Took a couple of tough losses early in the season but they were, you know, close games to good teams and I think we've turned the corner. And my family would tell you I'm ever the optimist Duke is always going to win the national championship. I believe that this year, as they do every other year, we've certainly got a shot there's no question about it, awesome.
Speaker 3:Well, andrew, we've covered a lot of ground about check and about the industry as a whole and you and your background. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up the show?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, you know. I would just add that when I look out at the future and where things are going, I think sometimes folks miss just how much opportunity there is to continue to build new companies and new tools, to improve so many things in the world and, in particular, in our space really the way that small and medium sized businesses run their operations and run their teams. I see this every single day where you know, there's so many industries where vertical SaaS companies are getting built up to help with that, but there's still so many that are left where I think there's just massive white space to go build new tools, and so we feel really just incredibly proud and really lucky to be able to work with those sorts of entrepreneurs to make their journey a bit easier and make the tools they're building, you know, a bit more powerful for their customers by being able to offer payroll as well.
Speaker 3:Yeah, maybe one more quick thing. What would be the easiest way for people to learn more about the company and to reach you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. So. We are at checkchekhqcom. Feel free to look us up there and reach out. I'm on Twitter at almost ABC, and you can find me on LinkedIn or evals easy to find too. Okay, great.
Speaker 3:Well, Andrew, thank you so much for being on the show today. I know your time is very valuable, so I really appreciate you being here. No, it's been a lot of fun.
Speaker 2:Greg, Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, and to all you listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well. Until the next story.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments podcast. Make sure you visit our website at leadersinpaymentscom, where you can subscribe to the show and where you'll find our show notes. If you enjoyed listening, please share on your social channels as well.