Leaders In Payments
Booshan Rengachari, Founder & CEO at Finzly | Episode 319
The banking industry, long characterized by its stability and resistance to change, is currently undergoing a radical transformation, primarily driven by the rapid advancements in financial technology. The latest episode of the Leaders in Payments podcast, featuring Booshan Rengachari, Founder & CEO of Finzly, offers a deep dive into this seismic shift, particularly focusing on how mid-sized and community banks can harness the power of fintech to revolutionize their operations.
A significant part of the discussion centers on Finzly's ascent as a formidable player in the finance technology space. Booshan recounts the initial focus on foreign exchange and international banking, leading to the development of a unified platform for various payment systems. Finzly's innovation allows banks to transition seamlessly from outdated systems to cutting-edge infrastructure capable of real-time processing and adaptability. This technology leapfrogs the constraints of legacy systems, empowering banks to offer sophisticated financial products rapidly.
In summary, this Leaders in Payments Podcast episode is more than just an exploration of financial technology; it's a story of transformation and the people who drive it. As the industry looks towards a future where money moves in real-time and banking operations become more customer-centric, pioneers like Booshan Rengachari and companies like Finzly are at the forefront, shaping the new financial landscape.
The banking industry, long characterized by its stability and resistance to change, is currently undergoing a radical transformation, primarily driven by the rapid advancements in financial technology. The latest episode of the Leaders in Payments podcast, featuring Booshan Rengachari, Founder & CEO of Finzly, offers a deep dive into this seismic shift, particularly focusing on how mid-sized and community banks can harness the power of fintech to revolutionize their operations.
A significant part of the discussion centers on Finzly's ascent as a formidable player in the finance technology space. Booshan recounts the initial focus on foreign exchange and international banking, leading to the development of a unified platform for various payment systems. Finzly's innovation allows banks to transition seamlessly from outdated systems to cutting-edge infrastructure capable of real-time processing and adaptability. This technology leapfrogs the constraints of legacy systems, empowering banks to offer sophisticated financial products rapidly.
In summary, this Leaders in Payments Podcast episode is more than just an exploration of financial technology; it's a story of transformation and the people who drive it. As the industry looks towards a future where money moves in real-time and banking operations become more customer-centric, pioneers like Booshan Rengachari and companies like Finzly are at the forefront, shaping the new financial landscape.
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:It comes down to the reason why banks have fallen behind. Typically, what they do is they just take a version of the system and then they keep customizing it, they keep changing it and then later, two years, three years, five years down the line, they were never able to upgrade to the next version because it's just too expensive for them to upgrade. With our operating system, it is just like your iOS the upgrades are invisible, it just happens, and banks have to just accept that upgrade and then just go live.
Speaker 3:That was Bhushan Regachari, the founder and CEO of Finsley, and he is my special guest on this episode, episode 319 of the Leaders in Payments podcast, and I'm your host, Greg Myers. Finsley helps banks break free from the constraints of legacy core and launch new financial products with unprecedented agility and speed. Bouchon and I dive deep into Finsley, including what makes it unique and different in the marketplace. We also discuss how and why Finsley was started and how they are helping banks with payment modernization, international banking, digital banking and banking as a service. We've got a great episode ahead, so let's get started. Hi Bhushan, Thank you for being here and welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Greg. I'm very glad to be here. Thanks for the invitation.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. So let's go ahead and 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, Perfect Great.
Speaker 2:So I'm from India. I studied in India. Born and brought up in a Weaver family, I went to school without shoes, but I had big ambitions even from my childhood. I always wanted to be something bigger than what I was. So I went to engineering in India. One year later I was here in the US, worked in the telecommunications sector. Then later I joined Wells Fargo. It was about 18 years ago. I worked there. It was Wachovia at the time Wells Fargo Wachovia Merger. I was a leader for international banking. Leader at Wells Fargo, went through a lot of things during that merger, liked certain things, was challenged with the technology and then at the time I realized, hey, it has to be better. So that's the birth of Finnsley. 12 years ago I started Finnsley with the ambition of transforming the banking sector financial technology, making it easier for banks to launch new products and services.
Speaker 3:And that's what we are doing and been really doing good, so you started Finsley in 2012. Let's talk about some more of the details. So tell the audience sort of exactly what product services you offer and who your target audience is.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So when we started 2012, right, it was all about foreign exchange, international banking. That's what I did a lot at my previous job. It was, you know, the big banks, like Wells and other players. They have an army of people and a ton of money. They can throw anything they want to do in terms of making the processes better, making the user experiences better, and what I realized was it was 30, 40-year-old technologies. Again, there is no other new player in that field and all we ended up doing was just creating patches over patches and making it look good for the customer, and the operations team had a terrible time in dealing with those platforms outages and missed payments and reconciliation issues that kind of and a lot of challenges, totally outdated technology and being an engineer, I felt like, hey, this is a terrible system, let's do something better, let's do something great for any bank, right? Big banks can throw money and they can build it out. How about mid-sized and other regional community banks? What do they do?
Speaker 2:So our journey started in building that international banking platform. So we focused on foreign exchange buying, selling currencies, sending payments and it's just not international payments, right? Foreign exchange is a lot more than just sending a payment. For example, let's say you are sending an invoice to a vendor or supplier in Europe and they are going to make a payment six months from now, which means you are going to receive about 10 million euros six months from now and you don't know what is the dollar value when you receive that payment. You can go and hedge that one with a forward contract and you know you can lock in that price today and your bank will honor that price whenever you receive that payment six months later. So this is a very complex but very sophisticated international banking, foreign exchange and international payment system. That that's what we built and we have been very successful in that space. We are the market leader today with respect to international banking and foreign exchange trading platform.
Speaker 2:Six years down that line we realized, hey, this space that we are operating is a smaller market opportunity. It's not a lot of banks have that kind of sophisticated customers who want such sophisticated products payment. And then we realized, hey, we are doing already a lot of payments and why don't we extend our platform to do other type of payments? So that's when we thought about we just didn't want to build another payment system. Our goal is not to displace other payment platforms that are already there. But our goal is to look at hey, what is the pain points of the banking? What are the pain points of payments today? At the time, it was about five, six years ago.
Speaker 2:What we realized was what we discovered was, as part of that research, banks today, even now, they operate different, different payment rails, like ach payment system and then wire payment system, and then fx payment system, and then recently you can add zell, rtp, fed now. So banks are operating like six different payment systems internally. That means they have six different payment operations team. So if there is an issue with ACH payment, you have an ACH operations team and you have wire operations team just to process wires, and then FX operations team to process FX payments. Right, you have that many teams. And now, if you look at the customer experience, you have that many teams. And now, if you look at the customer experience, you have that many experiences.
Speaker 2:It was like, wow, this is unbelievable. And at the time it was like it is like why is it not like FedEx? You know, you go to FedEx, you want to ship a package. You don't have to tell them ship it by flight or by train or by truck. But the banking experience is exactly like that and we realized that it has to be like a FedEx experience. I just have to tell the bank where we want to move the money and how fast economy express or real-time and let the bank decide however it wants to move the money.
Speaker 2:So that was our vision.
Speaker 2:That's what we wanted.
Speaker 2:We started thinking about vision.
Speaker 2:That's what we wanted.
Speaker 2:We started thinking about that.
Speaker 2:That's how we started building about.
Speaker 2:It was a very adventurous journey and I realized why it was kept so differently, because every payment rail has different complexities, rules and workflows and bringing all of them together is like bringing a dinosaur, an elephant, a cow and a horse and putting it all together in one platform, one cage. So it was hard but that was needed and we did that one very well, successfully, and we are the only player who can do all of those payment systems and we can displace any of those payment systems and help the banks to provide that FedEx experience and they can have just one payment operations team. They don't need to have ACH, wire and other so many operations team. They don't need that many experiences. It is one experience, one team, one platform, and that's what the banks need and that's what we are doing, and we are getting phenomenal review about what we have built, because it was a failure. A lot of people have tried what we have built and a lot of them have failed, but we are very proud to say that we have done that very successfully.
Speaker 3:Is there a certain size bank that typically buys your product?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's a great question. Our goal is to build a product for the banking and the size it really doesn't matter. But we started with a smaller, mid-sized banks category because that's easier to sell, easier to convince. You know larger banks, it's just a very long sales process, but the problem is the same problem even with the larger banks.
Speaker 2:The thing is with larger bank it's it's like, you know, when we looked at how we want to which, what kind of market we wanted to target, our thought was like hey, you know, let's think about how other players have disrupted a similar industry. So if you take a CRM system, earlier almost every bank, every business had their own CRM system. And then Salesforce enters the market and they say they built that very nice, extremely configurable, extremely superior CRM platform and small businesses start using it. And now almost all the major banks also use Salesforce target banking, which means if you deliver quality product with an extremely highly scalable, configurable platform, then you can sell banks of all size. That being said, right now we target banks of any size, over a billion dollars.
Speaker 3:And you mentioned all of the different products that they can get from ACH to Zelle to RTP. Is it a menu or do they have to get it all at the same time?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's another great question. The reason it is important and why it is a great question is because Every bank has a different need. Right, I spoke with a bank and they were like, hey, I really need to get your wire platform now and tomorrow because we are having a lot of challenges with our wire platform. The reason is like when I was having this conversation, there was a production issue and the executive had to leave that room to take that call to do whatever it needs to be done. The problem was there was one bad wire and it was not able to get processed and that was blocking all other wires from getting processed. So it was sitting in a queue and the front guy who just blocked that entire counter, he's taking so much of time and he's not getting out of that queue and everybody else is waiting in that queue. That was a very, very bad technology and you know that was that bank's problem and for them, the need is I really don't worry about, I know all of I need all of those things, but my immediate need is to fix that wire issues and need to provide a better wire platform. So you know, we said, yes, you, you turn on wire.
Speaker 2:We do the implementation only once and they turn on wire. And the next time they want to do RTP, fednow it is just here, checking the box and then testing and launching the product. That is, again, not very common in the banking sector, right? Any new product that you want to launch, it takes about two years, three years, if they're lucky. They go live, otherwise they scrap the project.
Speaker 2:But with us what we do is it's kind of an operating system Just like your iPhone you like an app, you add it and you know, you test it out and it works Just like that. We, you know, we first implementation, we do that. After that, any time they want to add new products or new services, they just turn on the new, click the button, it's available. And the beauty of that is banks will never be falling behind in terms of innovation because it's an operating system. We keep adding new products, new solutions, which means banks can continue to compete with any players, any fintechs, any large banks, and that's super important, right. So to your question. It's an app store model and with multiple banking apps and banks can choose what they want and when they want and they can go at their own speed what they want and when they want, and they can go at their own speed.
Speaker 3:As you know, and the audience probably knows, most banks have a core system right, Maybe for deposits or whatever, but they all have a core and there's a group of those that have built that over the years. Do you sit on top of that or do you replace that?
Speaker 2:So we sit on the side of that core. Okay, a lot of these core platforms. Again, it was built like 40, 50 years ago, not real time, not built for what we need today. A lot of the cores today they go down for almost one or two hours. In fact, we have built such a good infrastructure monitoring system. We send alerts to our banks telling them hey, your code is down because it just goes down Unbelievable.
Speaker 2:So as part of the operating system, we have a few offerings. Earlier we talked about the payment, unified payments, consolidating all the payments, which we call it Payment Galaxy, and we have also released a product called Account Galaxy. It is for creating virtual ledgers, virtual accounts. So, for example, I'm an escrow management company. I want to create a lot of new accounts.
Speaker 2:Every time I want to create an escrow account, I don't want to go to my bank or call my relationship manager to create those accounts. I can just go to this virtual account manager and create as many accounts as I want. I want to create a different account for expense management. I want a different account for accounts payable, accounts receivable. You can basically bypass the core. In other words, you can have just one FBO account in the core and then you can create as many virtual accounts as you want in FinCLE's core and that becomes your modern virtual core, which is real-time, powered with all payment rates. So that's the option that we provide and, again, banks can continue to use their legacy core platform if they want to, and we just sit on the side for payments. So there are multiple options, multiple ways, and that's why we call ourselves a bank transformation player, because bank doesn't want to get disrupted, right, nobody wants to disrupt their customers. Disruption is a bad word in banking, but transformation is the most important thing that needs to happen.
Speaker 3:Well, what would you say? Maybe the top two or three things that truly differentiate you from your competitors out there?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So for us, we help the banks to stay competitive, to stay innovative. They should be able to offer any fintech products they want to offer. So today, if you look at it, a lot of banks they have fallen behind and the fintechs are ruling in terms of the customer experience, in terms of new product offerings, and banks have become a back office. And banks have become a back office and we are changing that one with a platform and operating system that allows banks to compete with any fintechs, any large banks, and our capabilities. We can compare with Goldman Sachs, jp Morgan type of capabilities when it comes to the virtual accounts, payments and foreign exchange capabilities.
Speaker 2:That's one thing. That's one of the major benefits that we bring to the customers, and the other one is continuous innovation. Right as citizen operating system, we continue to deliver new products, new services, and the banks have the flexibility to add, whenever they want, whatever they want. All they have to do is just add the product, test it out and then go to market.
Speaker 2:And the third one is it comes down to the reason why banks have fallen behind. Typically, what they do is they just take a version of the system and then they keep customizing it, they keep changing it and then later, two years, three years, five years down the line they were never able to upgrade to the next version because it's just too expensive for them to upgrade. With our operating system it is just like your iOS the upgrades are invisible, it just happens and banks have to just accept that upgrade and then just go live. So these are the very modern engineering magic you can say that is important for banks and we are very proud and we are the only player who can do such capabilities, who can help banks to transform like this.
Speaker 3:Well, where do you see the payments industry headed, say, in the next three to five years?
Speaker 2:So you know payments is very interesting. You know, two days ago I just saw the news ACH volume is continuing to grow and I'm also observing how many new payment rails, how many new banks are adding and signing up for FedNow. The future is all real-time, connected, embedded. So that's where we are heading to. Which means you file an insurance claim, the insurance company approves that payment. Now the payment is in your account within seconds and you know, future is all about real-time taxes, real-time tax returns. You don't have to wait for a year to pay those taxes. You don't have to wait for months to get those returns and you have your new baby born in the family and it's a tax return time and you don't have to wait till that year end or April to get those returns. It has to be happening real time. There's a disaster happening and government should be able to distribute that yearly benefits even before the disaster strikes that place. So, which means that almost all the people businesses must be connected, must be real-time. So anytime I want to move the money, it must happen real-time. So that means that there's going to be a lot of activities that's going to happen in RTP Fed.
Speaker 2:The adoption rate has been slow. That has been the history with any payments in the US or any developed economy, because people have invested a lot in the previous technologies, previous payment rails, and it's changing right. It's like building the road and then, after you build the road, you need to have gas stations, you need to have convenience stores, you need to have restaurants, so all these things as it comes up, then you'll start seeing more people starting to use those highways. So that's what is happening in this space. I would say in another three, four years, you will see more and more adoption of real time payment, real time payments, and there will be less and less use of outdated payment options. That is out there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I would agree with you there. Well, let's switch gears a little bit and talk about you, and you told us a little bit about your your journey already, but maybe walk us through. You know about your journey already, but maybe walk us through. How did you get into international banking? What was the reason for that?
Speaker 2:And then maybe kind of walk through how you went from that to starting Finsley. Yeah, you know I'm an engineer and I love engineering. I started doing computer programming at the age of 12 and I just loved it. So when I did my engineering engineering again I picked up computer science and you know I love solving problems. And when I picked up a job I wanted to be in research and development. I I picked up a job in that similar area and that happened to be in the networking and communications and spent, you know, a few years, really good years, and it was. I enjoyed it. It was like super good, true engineering work and I was at the time I was working in new jersey.
Speaker 2:So there were a lot of job opportunities coming from finance and I was like I don't want to be in the finance because my you know I was doing, you know, core like creating the network equipments, how to communicate between the network equipments, and I didn't want to be creating web pages, accessing database. It was not true, that's not challenging. I didn't find that to be very challenging. So the dot-com burst, a lot of network companies just kind of went bust and there were not many opportunities and I was forced to enter into the finance field and I was very, very pleasantly surprised how beautiful the finance world is. And you know, I got exposed to quantitative math and it was like I never used the math beyond my college because I did study derivatives, integrations and all the calculus stuff. But I could never be able to apply that in the real life. And I saw those quantitative analytics, quantitative math, being used in finance really well and I was like super interested in that one. And then I started learning more and more about what it is applied for CFA and did. One level of CFA just gave me more exposure to what it is is. And accounting is one thing that just kind of made me so, so happy about how well accounting works to reconcile the balances between two parties. It was like so good, and so I basically I fell in love with finance again.
Speaker 2:After my tindert wells forgo I realized there is a lot to be done. Technology has been very, very much behind at banks and so is in other major sectors. I wanted to change. I was the only breadwinner at my family and all I had was one year worth of savings and I told my wife hey, you know, I want to do this. One Worst case I will lose all of this money, but I will not have any regrets of not trying. So you know she gave me thumbs up and then I just started this journey and it has been wonderful.
Speaker 2:You know, spent first one, one, one and a half year developing the product, consulting, because you know I'm being in charlotte, it's not like silicon valley. I didn't have a lot of, you know, it's not. It was like 12 years ago At least now it is better there were not enough venture capitalists and I didn't have any exposure to raising capital. I didn't have any advisors who can advise me of that. But I just wanted to try. So you know I have to live on my own income. So I did some consulting, I did the product and then after one and a half year I got my first client. So at the end of two years we went live.
Speaker 2:After that it becomes more of a easier to sell, because it is hard to sell to banks because they are very highly regulated. They are very conservative, very risk averse. But you know, I think it's all good fortune, I have to say, because it all kind of all aligned up. I found a great banker who is ready to take that risk with me and because of my experience that I had at Wells, you know this guy knows what he's doing and you know we just partnered and we went live and after that, you know, every three, six months we started adding new clients, and here we are now. You know we started adding new clients and here we are. Now we are disrupting this industry. We will be the number one player in another five, six years when it comes to the banking technology and payments.
Speaker 3:Well, what are some things you're passionate about? So, maybe one work-related passion and one personal passion.
Speaker 2:I mean, since the last two years, work has become my part of it. I never go home without thinking about work. It is hard to switch it off. But outside work, I do enjoy hanging out with friends spotting and I enjoy doing workouts. I do martial arts and I watch cricket. Cricket is a game popular in India, so those are my other hobbies.
Speaker 3:What about work-related?
Speaker 2:Work-related, work-related. I just love creating something interesting, something magic. Engineering is all about magic. If you're just solving the same problem the same way, you know it's not magic. You need to do something totally different. What makes me so happy is when I go to a customer and then I hear their problems and then say this is how I solve it, and then their face just like kind of lights up, gets excited. You can do that and that makes me so happy because that, you know, looking at that problem five years ago and creating a solution, we know that's going to be a problem and makes me feel that, hey, you know what we realize is going to be. The problem is really happening now. You know that's a good direction. You know I love people right now.
Speaker 2:One of the things at Finsley is that we care about our customers and we care about our employees really well both of them. Without them we wouldn't be here. Every customer is important and every employee is important. We make sure our employees succeed in their goal, in their ambitions, and they enjoy their life. So I enjoy creating a great team, great culture. We want to make a difference. So that's all I'm for and I enjoy doing that.
Speaker 3:Well, as you know, the fintech and payment space is quite an exciting place to be, and it has been for a while and, I think, will continue to be. If you had someone come to you and say hey, I'm coming right out of college and I'm looking at building a career in fintech or payments, what would you tell them? What would your advice be to help them be successful in their career?
Speaker 2:I think if you want to start any company, starting a company has been my goal even after I left my college. I did try several things, but it was not a great success. But before you start a company, you need to know what problem you are going to solve. If you have a very strong and compelling problem that you want to solve, you can go after that one, irrespective of whether you are a fresh college graduate or you're 30 year experienced person, because I do hear a lot of people regretting that hey, I always wanted to start a company but I could never start.
Speaker 2:I was like you know, start now. You know, if you know there is a problem and if you want to start it, there is no better time than now. You know, when I started, I had a you know six year old son and a two year old daughter, and it was a lot of responsibilities for me. But I said, you know, I cannot wait, I have to start. So I think you know anybody who wants to start, they need to have a really good problem to solve and they should be very passionate about solving that problem. Nothing else. You know everything else will follow, like, for example, you want investment or you want to have great returns, everything money will follow, but you need to be passionate about what you do and you need to be solving some big problems.
Speaker 2:Solving small problems, anybody. That could be too many competition. Anybody can solve smaller problems, but bigger problems are hard to solve. I think that's what I would advise people to go after.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think that's some great advice. Well, we've covered a lot of ground so far about you and the company and the industry as a whole, so is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up the show?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's great and great conversations. I think we are very happy about the difference that we are making here in the banking space because all of the banks they really needed help because they want to compete with the fintechs, they want to provide these modern experiences, they want to compete with bigger banks and they need to simplify their operations because, if you look at most of the banking systems, the bankers behind the scene, they keep it running. They have a very terrible work experience because all those systems are totally outdated. So you know, we are very happy to give a better experience to the bankers. That's a better experience to the customers. You know, very excited about building this open, real-time, connected finance. So that's the future and that's what we are building. Really appreciate engaging and asking such great questions.
Speaker 3:Oh no, thank you. Thank you so much for being on the show today. I know your time is very valuable, so I really appreciate you being here. Thank you, greg. Yes, absolutely, and to all you listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well, and 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.