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Leaders In Payments
Leaders In Payments
Joe McLean, CEO & Co-Founder of Quavo | Episode 286
Join me, your guide Greg Myers, as I sit down with the visionary Joe McLean, the CEO and Co-Founder of Quavo. Discover how Joe's journey from a computer science enthusiast to a fintech innovator is transforming the landscape of fraud and disputes management in the banking industry. In our extensive dialogue, we traverse the inception and growth of Quavo, illuminating the innovative products like QFD, ARIA, and DRE, which are redefining efficiency and automation in handling post-fraud processes for financial institutions.
Joe emphasizes that while fraud is an inevitable part of the banking sector, the implementation of refined systems is vital in aiding institutions to effectively manage it. The discussion on the future of payments and fraud paints a picture of an industry in the midst of significant transformation, driven by automation and technological advancement.
Joe's journey is a testament to the power of passion and innovation in shaping a career that not only challenges the status quo but also nurtures personal growth. So tune in and be part of the conversation that's charting the future of banking, fraud management, and payment technologies.
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:And then, just in terms of the technology that we offer, we really look at our system as I mentioned this briefly earlier, but as a 100% automated system, and it is a totally different way of looking at this. Historically, every financial institution kind of takes the fraud case as it comes in the door and they have a person that owns this all the way through the process and we simply don't view it that way. We view it as the system owns this. We automate as much of that process as we possibly can and on average we're automating about 90% of it.
Speaker 3:That was Joe McLean, the CEO and co-founder of Quavo, and he is my special guest on this episode, episode 286 of the Leaders in Payments podcast, and I'm your host, Greg Myers. Quavo's disputes as a service offering features automated software, automated intelligence technology and human intelligence services for issuing financial organizations. Joe and I talk about the three products. They offer the value to issuers and the unique problem they are solving. Joe also talks about changes he sees coming in the next few years in the banking space. We've got a great episode ahead, so let's get started. Hi, Joe, Thank you for being here and welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast. Thanks for having me. Greg Appreciate it. 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 jump into your professional career in a few minutes.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, Greg. Hi, I'm Joe McLean. I grew up in Western Pennsylvania, a few miles outside of Pittsburgh. I moved to Delaware when I was 21 to actually go to school. I went to school in Northern Delaware. I got my undergrad in computer science, my master's in information system, from Wilmington University. I've been in Delaware ever since and I absolutely love it. About seven years ago I moved to the beach with my family, so I've got two kids ages 18, 16. My daughter is 14, so we now live in Lewis Beach, Delaware, and we absolutely love it.
Speaker 3:Resort Town very cool spot, awesome. Well, thanks for sharing that. Let's talk about the company Quavo, so tell the audience what Quavo does.
Speaker 2:Great.
Speaker 2:Quavo is a SaaS company that specializes in fraud and disputes management processing for issuing banks. So if you think about what that means to the normal person, perhaps you lose your credit card, some nefarious character gets a hold of it and uses it to buy a television at Best Buy. Our reaction is going to be to call the bank and shut that card down and try to recover some of those funds. And that's exactly what our software does. We help banks and account holders recover those funds, to get them back in your account, as well as issue you a new card. Secondarily, we also help banks quite a bit by making sure that they don't take the loss. In an ideal world, they would hand that loss off to the merchant for accepting a fraudulent form of payment. So, at a high level, that's what our company does.
Speaker 2:We've got three separate products that help us accomplish that. The first is our Quavo Fraud and Disputes Management Platform, which really is an automated system that helps that entire process along the way from that account holder intake through that recovery to the bank. And there's a lot of pieces in between. There. There's government regulations, there's mandates from Visa and MasterCard that really tie that whole process together and make sure that consumers are treated fairly and QFD really manages that entire case flow and life cycle.
Speaker 2:We've also got a product for automated investigations which, surprisingly or maybe not surprisingly for some of you A lot of folks will actually call in to their bank and perhaps not know what this transaction is and we'll say it's fraud and maybe one of their kids did something that they didn't know about.
Speaker 2:So we've got a sub-product or a companion product to QFD called ARIA, that really tries to figure out if something is what the industry calls first-person fraud, which is a situation where the cardholder themselves is claiming fraud on a transaction that's actually legitimate. And then our third offering is what we call DRAE or Disputes Resolution Expert, where some financial institutions will actually outsource their entire process to us. So through our automated process, there are exceptions created where maybe a person has to review a document back from a merchant or review a document from an account holder, and some of our clients have actually asked us to take on that responsibility alongside of the software. So, in summary, on the products, it is QFD for case management and workflow for fraud and disputes, it is ARIA to automate the investigations and it is DRAE where our clients want to outsource the entire service to us, including the people.
Speaker 3:So is it fair to say that you're not necessarily on the front end preventing fraud. You're providing all the services that help your clients after fraud is taking place.
Speaker 2:That's exactly right and that's what's such an interesting dynamic for us. So myself I've spent 25 years in this space with large firms and then the last seven years with QAVO, and there are a lot of players in that front of the house fraud prevention, fraud detection space and we are really it when it comes to the back office piece and helping banks manage through that process, and it was actually the impetus for us starting our company. We saw this as an opportunity in the market where there really was on the solution that comes out of the box, that is, a SaaS offering where banks can just buy the software and then manage that process in that back office. And we manage all the communication with the account holders. We manage all the accounting as you can imagine what has to happen moving money around from cardholder accounts into ledgers and other things along those lines. So we manage that entire stack in the back office on behalf of our clients.
Speaker 3:And I assume you're integrated into the bank platforms like a Jack Henry and people like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah you got it. So all of the core banking engines, so, as you mentioned, jack Henry, both on the credit union and the bank side, with their silver like product, fis, fiser, tisis, all the big ones as well as we've moved into sort of the fintech processing space with companies like Galileo and Marqueta and integrating into their solutions as well. That really helps us pull back all the account holder information, transaction information, all of those pieces. Additionally, we're integrated into Visa, mastercard and American Express on the network side, where really that can just help us gather incremental information or automate more functionality through the process.
Speaker 3:And your primary customers are issuers within. You mentioned the fintech side as well, so are those your two primaries? So that's sort of a two-part question. And then second part is does the size of the issuer make a difference?
Speaker 2:So for the first part, issuers is really where we started our company, on the credit union side actually, and then moving into regional banks and then enterprise banks.
Speaker 2:But we also look at those processors as clients as well and we do have a handful of them that we do service up our software for because generally they all have outsourced shops and they will work these cases on behalf of their clients.
Speaker 2:So really anybody that's working fraud and disputes within the financial services industry we do look at as a potential client, even folks that just service, that don't actually manage the money themselves, would just service work on behalf of financial institutions. We also consider those as part of our client base. And then in terms of size, generally what we look at obviously we've got to run a business and we don't charge for implementations, which is really part of our differentiators. But what that means is we do actually have to have a certain size client where that investment from us makes sense upfront. As part of that journey we go pretty far down market, especially with the Drey offering where we're working the cases on behalf of our clients. If you consider banks, be anybody generally over two or three billion in assets, which there's a lot of banks and a lot of credit unions that fit in that space and then as far as services from processors anybody that's managing more than a couple of thousand disputes a month we would talk to as well.
Speaker 3:And are you focused just on the US market right now?
Speaker 2:We are definitely focused on the US market, but we have some clients that are certainly dragging us global, specifically with the Americas. So we do support Canada and we do support several countries in Central America and South America as well. The software is pretty flexible. That way. We handle multi-language, multi-currency. We have a carve out for different regulations in different countries that we can support with the intent of going global and, like as I said, some of our clients really just drug us there because as they go global we go along with them. But the interesting part, greg, about the focus, is we've talked about global probably every year, and every year we decide whether we're going to put it on our strategy or not. But there's just so much opportunity in the US that we have a hard time justifying that sort of investment in our company when we have so much space to grow here domestically.
Speaker 3:I read a stat that said for every dollar in fraud losses, it costs banks $4.36. So that $4.36, I'm assuming is what you're focusing on helping them. I won't say save, but not have to spend to fight the fraud after it's happened. Is that a good way to look at it?
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and we talk about that a lot in our value proposition. We really look at it a few different ways in terms of value prop and that expense is certainly at the top of the line, especially if you're dealing with operations executives. We actually have a great stat, that is, for every 100,000 disputes, how many users do you need to work through that amount of disputes for every 100,000 a year? And industry averages right around 10 to 12, right, and that all goes into that loss that they're taking that these banks are consuming 10 to 12 per every 100,000 disputes. We get that number down to three to four and some of our best clients are below two.
Speaker 2:So if you think about what that means, we're cutting out that expense in the back end by 80%, 90% in some cases with our really strong clients and this is part of our value prop. We also are really good about presenting information to the system or to investigators manually to help deny some of those disputes that come in the door to ward off, as I talked about earlier, that first person fraud. So in terms of expenses, you're writing in banks for every dollar that comes in. They're spending a heck of a lot more or losing a heck of a lot more to fight this problem, and we're really trying to combat that. We know this isn't a profit center for anybody, but we can make it not such a burdensome cost center. I think that's what most of our clients are looking for.
Speaker 3:Nirvana would be. There would be no fraud. But we know that's never going to happen.
Speaker 2:Yeah, fraudsters are very, very good at what they do. I mean, banks are also very good at picking up on trends and trying to fight it. But I don't see really a way out of this at any point anytime soon. Right?
Speaker 3:Well, you mentioned one of your differentiators, but could you maybe talk through some of the other differentiators you have over your competition?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I believe what I had mentioned was that we don't charge for the implementation. The other big differentiator for us is that we are a SaaS company. Everything else out there, you're either building from scratch or you're buying a framework that you have to build on top of and then maintain and service on your own, and there's a lot that comes with that maintenance. Every year, visa, mastercard, mx are pushing new rules out. The regulations are changed or reinterpreted, so there's a lot of maintenance that goes on. So for us, just pricing or business model perspective we really focus on that. We don't make any money from you until you're actually seeing value out of our software, and that is our number one differentiator. Right, until you're using this and you're saving, we're not taking any money off the table from you. So there's not that huge investment up front. And then, just in terms of the technology that we offer, we really look at our system as I mentioned this briefly earlier, but as a 100% automated system, and it is a totally different way of looking at this.
Speaker 2:Historically, every financial institution kind of takes the fraud case as it comes in the door and they have a person that owns this all the way through the process and we simply don't view it that way. We view it as the system owns this. We automate as much of that process as we possibly can and on average we're automating about 90% of it through the lifecycle across all of our clients and then the automation just kicks out exceptions where it needs to, where a person is truly required, and then we educate or train our clients' users to work really in an assembly line fashion, which is what makes them very, very productive. Right, you don't have that context-swishing, you don't have to manage this entire case from end to end. You're just working one particular piece all day long, and it allows those users to be extremely efficient when they're using our software. So I think our cost and pricing model, our implementation model and our level of automation is just beating anybody else in the industry.
Speaker 3:Where do you see the industry headed, say, in the next three to five years? And certainly you can answer that from a broader payments perspective or much more focused on, kind of maybe, where you see your business and the trends in the next three years or so.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can talk a little bit about both right, when I look at payments, I mean, obviously a couple of years ago everybody was very excited about crypto and that sort of thing. I don't see that level of excitement and it's hard to tell if it's just come normalized or people are using it for what it's good for or what it's not. But really, what I'm seeing in the industry, and what I absolutely love because it allows consumers to have so much more diversity, is this banking as a service offering that these companies are pushing out now, which really allows a lot of merchants to act as their own bank, right? So if you're doing business with that merchant, you can transact with them in a more meaningful way that you had in the past, and what that means is that merchants sort of it can offer you more as you're using their products, right. We see this a lot, especially in the FinTech banking as a service space. So I mentioned earlier Galileo and Marqueta. There's companies like Green Dot out there that are getting into this banking as a service space. There's a large credit card as a service space.
Speaker 2:So to me, that is where I really see the industry changing, and what it does is it diversifies the market in a way that we haven't seen in the past. I mean you look at sort of the top 10 banks having an 80% market share or something along those lines right In banking. I see that changing. Just like you look at the lodging industry changing with Airbnb and the RBO and those types of folks, that sort of micro economy that it created, or Uber and Lyft, right and the micro economy that it created there I really see that coming out in banking and in payments right. That sort of micro economy where any merchant can be an act as its own bank. And I think it's really cool and it's really exciting and I see what our clients are able to offer to their account holders that they couldn't do going through a large bank and being backed by a large bank in the past.
Speaker 3:What about trends or things you're seeing in kind of your fraud space?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, fraud is interesting. It doesn't stop. When we started this company, we kind of expected to see some amount of year over year growth in the fraud and dispute space from our existing clients. And what was really crazy is this past year I would say from the past 12 months, from Q4 of 2022 into the early Q4 of 2023, we were seeing some of our clients growth in fraud as much as 6% month over month, which is a staggering amount of fraud and disputes coming in the door For us.
Speaker 2:We see that as a lot of it being first-person fraud, which is something that has always been there, but I think maybe is growing faster than people would care for and we can certainly help our clients combat a lot of that and making sure that they're not responsible.
Speaker 2:You see these ebbs and flows of transaction types where maybe ACH is hot for a moment in the fraud space and then ATM is hot for a moment and then back to card fraud and you kind of see it go through these progressions as fraudsters try to figure out what's happening and then banks try to combat that and change their strategies up front and I would expect to continue to see that right. Fraud unfortunately isn't going to slow down. We joked about it a couple minutes ago, right, it's part of doing business as a financial institution and I expect to sort of see that continue. And for us, right, we're here to kind of help banks deal with it, Because it's going to happen whether you want it to or not. So we want to help banks deal with it as efficiently as possible, Right.
Speaker 3:Well, let's switch gears a little bit and talk about you. So maybe you walk us through your journey of professional career and then how you co-founded the company, and maybe a little bit about your role there as the CEO.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. As I mentioned at the top, I made long term banker. I started at MB&A when I was 21 years old. I moved from Pittsburgh to Delaware to work there because they would pay for me to go to college. There wasn't much more to it than that. I sort of run out of money and I needed some help. And there's a girl there in the story somewhere and she brought me out to Delaware and I got a job working outbound fraud detection. I had been in the fraud space for this entire time and I absolutely fell in love with it. I saw a ton of opportunity.
Speaker 2:The time I was getting my undergrad degree I started building macros in Excel and that's exactly how that journey started. I was automating the accounting and automated letter sending all through these Excel macros and obviously one thing leads to another and you continue to move up through technologies and cut to. By the time Bank of America bought MB&A, I was in charge of the credit card fraud back office automation. That was my job at that conversion. So Bank of America came in. Luckily, they continued to use the software that myself and my team had built through the years and I continued to grow my career through there, through MB&A, then into B of A. Obviously, that automation turns into something bigger and better. Right, we're now doing the on credit card, we're doing deposit work and we moved from fraud into billing disputes. And by the time I left Bank of America in 2016, it was a significant role I was the tech exec for what we called complex consumer case management, so the fraud and disputes case management piece, as well as FCRA, which is the credit bureau, disputes, active military duty, customer complaints, anything with those sorts of long pails on them. I was managing the tech teams to solve those problems at B of A and then, really, with Quabo, myself and a few other folks I worked with, saw an opportunity in the market. We were building these solutions out at Bank of America and we were kind of like how do other banks deal with this Right outside of the top 10,? How do credit unions deal with this? How do regional banks deal with this? And we realized pretty quickly that there wasn't a solution out there to help banks with fraud and disputes. They were basically just throwing bodies at this and it was a lot of people and a lot of expense to solve the problem. So that was 2016. We left.
Speaker 2:It was a long journey to get from where we started to where we are today with the company, and as successful as we are today. But we continued to plow through, we continued to refine our product. We continued to work with different types of institutions prepaid, credit card, debit card, right, you name it. If you're willing to pay us, we're willing to do the work for you and expand our product to solve your use cases. For me it's just been a phenomenal journey, and I always joke with people once you get in front of disputes, you can't get out. I'm living, breathing proof of that. Once you know that space, you're in a very, very special group of folks that know it and are passionate about it, and that's really why we have succeeded, because a lot of the folks that we hired we brought in. I have that same knowledge and that same passion to solve this problem in the space.
Speaker 3:What's a great segue into the next question. What are some things you're passionate about? Maybe one business related passion in one personal passion.
Speaker 2:I'll start with business and it's not nearly as passionate about anything in business and what I'll talk about my personal passion. But for business, I love being innovative, I love being a thought leader in this space. I love talking to people in the industry and trying to make this better and it's kind of what we do at wabos. I really been fortunate that my passion is what my company does, what my partners do. We're all fully bought in. We have a goal of automating 100% of this process, like it's early work 90. Some of our clients are around 95. What we have goals. That goal is 100% automation of all fraud and disputes and I don't know if we would ever get there, but now with new technologies around gen a, I, some of those types of things were really starting to see where the market can take us and we're starting to see that path to 100% automation in front of the spews.
Speaker 2:That's really my work passion. My out of work passion is my kids. If I could, that's where I would spend all my time, but you know that's not realistic and they're teenagers. I'm not sure that's what they want either, but that's where I am. I live and die for family vacation and we can together and sitting around at night and Doing dinner together and hearing about their days, and I love driving them to their activities and finding out what's going on in their lives. It's really what drives me and, I think, ultimately what drives me at work as well. So without those guys, you know, I'm not sure that I would have maybe done any of this right, because it's really the impetus for wanting to be a better person is what I can do for my kids, absolutely.
Speaker 3:If someone is starting in the payments industry or they want to get into the payments industry and they come to you and they say, what do I need to do to be successful in this industry? Maybe they're looking for a job and they come to you and looking for some advice what would you tell them they need to do to be successful?
Speaker 2:I would say get your hands dirty. That's the best piece of advice I have, and there's a lot of payment jobs that are out there. It's a pretty diverse space when there's a lot of things that you can focus on it. Be an expert at. Find a place that will let you dig in. Get your hands dirty, really get into problem solving, find the problem that you like the best and focus on nothing but that and solving that problem for as long as you can. I mean that's exactly what I did. I love that. Immediately got my hands dirty, got creative. Payments isn't exactly a space with a lot of cutting edge type of technologies and solutions and there's just a Time, a ton of opportunity for people that are willing to grind it out, solve the problem, change the mindset of the folks have been doing this for 20 or 30 years and come up with creative solutions to make the payment space better.
Speaker 3:I think that's great advice. Joe, we've covered a lot of ground so far about the company yourself, your background, maybe a little about the future. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up the show?
Speaker 2:Greg, not at all. I mean, I thought your questions were great. I appreciate you ask and I appreciate you give me the opportunity to speak on the top of a little bit, so there's really nothing else. I mean, I could go on for hours but nobody's listen to that. I appreciate your time today and I appreciate you. Let me speak.
Speaker 3:Absolutely so. Thanks so much for being on the show. I know your time is very valuable, so I really appreciate you being here.
Speaker 2:No problem.
Speaker 3:Again, thanks for the opportunity absolutely into all your 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 leaders in payments dot com 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.