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Leaders In Payments
Leaders In Payments
Henry Helgeson, CEO of BlueSnap | Episode 358
In episode 358 of the Leaders in Payments podcast, I interview Henry Helgeson, the recently appointed CEO of BlueSnap. Helgeson shares his journey from founding Merchant Warehouse to leading BlueSnap, a global payment facilitator specializing in B2B payments and payment orchestration. He explains BlueSnap’s focus on providing payment solutions in 47 regions, helping businesses with complex global payment needs.
BlueSnap excels in offering local acquiring and reducing cross-border fees, making transactions smoother for businesses with multinational operations. Helgeson also discusses the importance of partnerships with ISVs and ERP systems, highlighting BlueSnap’s ability to cater to mid-market businesses. Looking ahead, he predicts continued growth in card-not-present payments, increased use of AI, and challenges related to fraud as AI tools become more accessible to malicious actors. Helgeson expresses excitement about BlueSnap’s future growth and his decision to come out of retirement to lead the company.
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.
Greg Myers:Hello everyone and welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast. I'm your host, greg Myers, and on today's show we have a very special guest, henry Helgeson from BlueSnap. He's the CEO recently named a CEO, I think, I say, recently, earlier this year. So, henry, thank you for being here and welcome to the show. Thank you, thanks for having me, jack, absolutely so. Just to level set with everyone, we had your predecessor on, but it was in February of 2020. So, just a tad bit of things have changed in the world. A few things have changed. I would assume some things changed at BlueSnap, so I look forward to the conversation. Sure.
Henry Helgeson:Yeah, absolutely. There's been a lot going on here in the last year, let alone the last four years.
Greg Myers:Right, so let's go ahead and dive in, if you don't mind. Tell our audience a little bit about yourself, maybe where you're from, where you grew up, where you went to school, a few things like that, yeah, so.
Henry Helgeson:I've been in payments quite a while. Actually. I'm from New York. I actually dropped out of college in 97 to go sell credit card terminals door to door when that was still a thing Founded a company it originally was called Merchant Warehouse and that company we based it out of Boston. I moved up to Boston in 99. Evolved that company and we did a brand change and eventually it became a company named Cayenne. Cayenne our main product was the Genius platform, which is actually now, if you look through the acquisition. Cayenne was acquired by Tesis and then Tesis was acquired by Global and I think Global announced yesterday or the day before that is their go forward payments platform. So Genius lives on, even though Cayenne is no more. We sold in early 2018, january of 2018, atesis worked on the integration there for a few years and then stepped away, retired and said I was never going to work in payments again. And here I am.
Greg Myers:Great. So let's go ahead and talk about BlueSnap, so tell our audience what BlueSnap does.
Henry Helgeson:BlueSnap is a really interesting company. Actually, to go back to my failed retirement there, I said I was never going to work in payments but I was doing a lot of Series C, series A, investing, sitting on the boards of a lot of these companies in the industry and had a couple of investment theses around payments. I stayed pretty closely engaged with the payments community and I really thought that there was a few opportunities left, and that was global payment providers, payment facilitation. And then I thought B2B was one of the last bastions of growth in payments I shouldn't say last bastions of growth, but that seemed to be where the growth was. Those three things.
Henry Helgeson:And lo and behold, some friends I knew in the private equity community had a company in Boston that they needed new leadership for. That was a global payment facilitator with a B2B twist. Things worked out. I stepped in late last year, early this year it was really when we announced but BlueSnap does exactly that. We are a global payment facilitator. We work in 47 regions around the world that can give you local acquiring, contracted with many banks around the world, and can provide everything from card processing to bank-to-bank transfers, ach, pad, those types of things, as well as a number of alternative payment methods. So if you're a global card-not-present or e-commerce provider looking for a solution, loosesnap is really the fit there.
Greg Myers:Are there certain verticals that you go after more so than others?
Henry Helgeson:There's a number of them.
Henry Helgeson:Really, our go-to-market has been refocused around partnerships and ISV partnership, and in my last world that's mostly what we did at Cayenne.
Henry Helgeson:We focused on ISVs who touched payments or had the merchants that really needed payment processing capabilities, and we would be the back-end payment processing and, to some degree, the front-end with the Genius platform, and we would allow them to bring best-in-class payments to their customer base, and right now BlueSnap is doing that as well, and we're going to market with large ISVs and ERP systems Our typical customers. There's a number of verticals, everything from schools to manufacturing, direct to consumer but most of our customers are usually multinational customers that are domiciled in multiple countries around the world. Think about a business in the US that's headquartered here and then has an office in Canada and the UK and somewhere in the EU or Israel or a number of places around the world, and their payments needs can get pretty complex and we can solve those. So that's really where we're playing is in, not only e-commerce and card not present, but we're especially good with customers that are using one of our ISVs or have global needs.
Greg Myers:So how does sort of that you talked about, I think, global payment, orchestration, embedded payments and B2B how does that all kind of come together? It seems like those are sort of your three lines of business, for lack of better words.
Henry Helgeson:Well, I'll start by saying it's really complicated, and the goal of BlueSnap is to make that very simple.
Henry Helgeson:So if you have customers in different jurisdictions or different regions around the world, you generally have a number of problems, and that is you may get lower checkout rates because you're not presenting in the right currencies and consumers may fall off because they can't do the currency conversion in their head or it just looks like a foreign entity that they're doing business with, and all of these questions and doubts will arrive when you're not presenting in the local currency.
Henry Helgeson:In addition to that, you have cross border fees. You have authorization rights. Fall off a cliff if you try to use an American card for an Israeli transaction or a French card in Canada or something like that. So when these merchants have local entities, we can actually set up local acquiring and that French card will get authorized in France, for example, and bring the authorization rates back up. And when you think about it, these merchants spend a lot of money on marketing, on site optimization, everything else trying to get their conversion rate up and their shopping cart abandonment rate down. Then they'll just use a standard old payments provider that will take 10 to 20% off their sales in a lot of cases by just not optimizing these payments, and we can help with that.
Greg Myers:Okay, how big is BlueSnap?
Henry Helgeson:now. We're not the size of these big global payfax, but we have about 250 employees globally. We have offices in the EU, the UK, israel, the US. We process for hundreds of ISVs doing about $12 billion annually of volume throughout the world.
Greg Myers:Well, what, would you say, differentiates you from your competitors out there?
Henry Helgeson:First of all, there's less than a handful of global payment facilitators. When I say global payment facilitators, a lot of companies will claim to have a global footprint but really that's a collection of acquisitions that just have the headquarters brand all over them. But when you get down to it, you have a single integration, single sign-on, single account really throughout the world. There's very few of those and I think BlueSnap is the one that's most focused on these partnerships and can really lean in with partner and help them with their customers, actually have humans to talk to in the mid-market. A lot of our competitors you look at the big names, the big trillion-dollar processors won't lean in on the mid-market. They won't lean in with partnerships. Our play has been for the last year is to go to market with our partner ISVs and e-commerce platforms and ERP systems and give them a combined solution with end-to-end support for their customers and for them themselves.
Greg Myers:So their end customers are sometimes small businesses. But you're partnering at the partnership level or the ISV level. Is that right? That's right.
Henry Helgeson:We do service small businesses. We do that really well. I've always found that the gap in payments and really software has been in the mid-market, where the smaller merchants don't have a lot of needs. They can usually I'll take retail, for example, an out-of-the-box payments terminal, or we've moved away from payments terminals, these Android-based devices, but a lot of them the out-of-the-box solution is just fine. You move up to the enterprise where you look at a Walmart and everything is very custom for them and they have very specific needs.
Henry Helgeson:The mid-market has always been the part of the market that's been neglected. That does have big payments needs but it always seems to be shoehorned into the SMB solution or close to it and doesn't want to do a custom full stack payment system of their own. And we've found that's a hole here as well, especially in e-commerce. The SMB plus right really that M and SMB never seems to be properly serviced and BlueSnap has found a real niche for those and these companies doing tens of millions and now we're talking to a lot of companies in the low billions in volume do not get serviced well and do not get the right payments products that they need, and that's a lot of where we're playing right now. Great.
Greg Myers:Where do you see the payments industry headed, say, in the next three to five years? That's a big question.
Henry Helgeson:A lot of answers. There's different parts of the market that I think have different opportunities and challenges. Just starting at a very high level, I think the legacy processors that weren't willing to invest for the long term over the last few years or the last decade are going to be really challenged. The acquisition role at play without doing good technical integrations and the ones that are living with a lot of technical debt will be challenged. And these are the payment processors we talked about 15 years ago. Some have done an excellent job, pivoting, I will say. There are some companies I'll even give an example of Fiserv. I think everybody has been very impressed with what they've done with Clover. They've been doing a tremendous amount of work on their backend products and they've invested for the long term. So I don't want to give any examples of the companies who are challenged by not doing that, but I will give that as an example of one that did that. So that's the first part. And the new age tech companies and when I say new age, what used to be a startup, the stripes and audience of the world that are now doing a trillion dollars in business are real threats to those legacy players that didn't invest, and I think we'll see market share shifting over to them within the next three to five years. For sure. Within that, I mean, we're still going to see the move to card not present. It's now a world where we see a lot of consumer present but card not present where these wallets, and there's just a shift towards away from the card and into digital, and I think that's great for BlueSnap and I think we're going to continue to see that. And then there's a lot of other trends within the industry. Right now, merchants are getting much more savvy and hiring people from payments Again, in the mid market, top of the market. You're starting to see these merchants are so much more savvy with payments than they have been in the past and the ability for them to do integrations, be it through gateway or direct processor integrations. We're seeing the skill set at these merchants and these platforms. It's just getting better and better and they're going to be able to bring more of that in-house and do it very competently. Bring more of that in-house and do it very competently.
Henry Helgeson:And then the one thing that I think has to be in every conversation in September of 2024 is AI and how that's going to impact us.
Henry Helgeson:And I think we talk a lot about authorization, optimization and fraud on the back ends and even things engineering assistance like co-pilot, but one thing that we chat a lot about here is it's not just the good guys that are going to have access to these systems. Ai is becoming so prevalent that I really do think it's not a threat to take down the whole system. It's not the global threat. I really think it is going to be painful for us as we start to deal with these AI fraud systems on the bad side that are going to get better and better and causing problems. Some of those might be related to actually using the card numbers, but others we're going to see more day zero breaches and day zero vulnerabilities, I think, now than we have in the past, as the bad guys get better and leverage the AI tools. So something we talk a lot about with our InfoSec and our security teams here is where that is going as well.
Greg Myers:Do you hear much in the market or do you feel like the whole crypto side is on its way back? It felt like a couple of years ago, every conversation I had crypto was mentioned and then sort of went dark for a while. Now it's starting to bubble up a little more. Any thoughts on crypto?
Henry Helgeson:You know, we've spent a lot of time as an industry talking about this over the last 10 years. I still don't think it is in a place where small ticket consumer transactions are really going to be threatened by that. If I was Visa or MasterCard any of the big card brands I wouldn't be threatened by the consumer transaction aspect of crypto at the moment, and for a number of reasons. There are some really neat technologies out there. For example, if you look at Circle and what they're doing with USDC the stablecoin tied to the dollar and actually trying their best to work through non-existent regulations and inventing regulations, they've done a really good job of solving some of these problems. But outside of that, there's still a number of problems. One is transaction throughput. These are still very expensive. Transactions to run require a tremendous amount of compute. We're talking I don't even want to quote the number I heard the other day of the percentage of the world's energy is being used for crypto, but that makes it very expensive to transact on the crypto rails. Second is volatility, and if you look at a business, for example, like Target or a grocery store, they're not crypto speculators and they don't want a 5% turn in the value of their sale the next morning. So that makes it very difficult for merchants, especially low-margin merchants, to accept. They're just not crypto speculators. They want to know a dollar's worth of dollar the next day if they accept it.
Henry Helgeson:And then, finally, the big thing and especially in e-commerce card not present is the lack of a dispute resolution system. The chargeback system is really in our business. What creates trust between two parties who don't know each other and really shouldn't trust each other and we know if there was a problem in that transaction. We have an out as consumers and the crypto system as it sits right now. I know there are some systems right now being tested and you do have things like digital contracts, but I don't think anything is in place that would replace the current chargeback system and without that, I think it makes it difficult to really solve some of the issues that consumers would have.
Henry Helgeson:I don't mean to harp on that. I'm giving you longer answers here. No, it's great, and a lot of the crypto bulls here will say, well, there's already this technology out there. We're seeing some adoption, it's great. But if you scale this across all the millions of merchants in the US, inevitably the bad guys find this very quickly and you'll start to see fraud tick up and consumer adoption pull back without a good chargeback or dispute resolution system in there, which is a real value that the card brands bring to us.
Greg Myers:Yeah, Do you think that the shakeout in the BNPL world is over? And it's kind of a two-part question that, and then I hear about BNPL for B2B transactions. Any thoughts on that?
Henry Helgeson:These systems are usually good until they're not and I think in 2009, going into 2009, for those of us in the industry we saw a lot of merchant lending products. It was essentially factoring very expensive factoring, and if you look at the BNPL stuff, a lot of times it's not always the consumer paying, sometimes the merchant, but these are expensive products. It's typically the subprime customers that will use them In a down cycle. I think we really see a lot of washout in that space, Maybe not complete decimation, like we saw in the 2009 era of merchant funding, merchant cash advance. Until we survive a cycle, I don't think we can say that the shakeout's done.
Greg Myers:Okay, well, let's change gears a little bit and talk about you and your background. You've talked a little bit about starting Cayenne selling that, so maybe let's shift the question to why did you come out of retirement and why BlueSnap?
Henry Helgeson:It's a great question and I'd be lying if I don't say I don't hear it all the time. Things were pretty good and the running joke is that my kids are in school all day and I had nothing to do all day because all my friends work. Really, I figured out that I was more comfortable as an operator and I needed to be part of a team and the Series C, series A investing unless you're part of a venture capital firm, it's really an individual sport. It's not a team sport. I really felt like my fit personally was more being part of a good team and going out and doing things together. I also saw a ton of opportunity in the space.
Henry Helgeson:You have only a handful of real competitors to what Blue Snap does and they are all massive companies. There's not much fun in taking a massive company and making them slightly more massive, but taking a small to mid-sized company and making it big, that can be a lot of fun. So when I looked at BlueSnap, there was enough opportunity here, enough I thought I could contribute to the team and the company that it was worth stepping back in and it was the center of the bullseye as far as where I think the industry is going. So all of those things, and it was also so fortuitous. I'm Boston-based and here this company is Boston-based, with some familiar faces from Cayenne with amazing talent here. It had all the ingredients that I was looking for. It didn't take me much, once I dove into the company, to say, yes, I want to jump on board and be part of this team.
Greg Myers:Well, what are some things you're passionate about? So, maybe one work-related passion and one personal passion.
Henry Helgeson:I think we've already established payments as one of those in this conversation here where a lot of us it's more than a job. I mean, we really nerd out on this stuff and when anything comes up, be it crypto, buy now, pay later, international payments we dive into this and we just chew it up. So I love the payments aspect and I love the product aspect. Where we started in this industry in 1998, being able to build a technology company and a platform it wasn't accessible for the average person who wasn't willing to risk at all, raise a ton of VC money, get super diluted all those things. We're kind of in a new world from where we were 20 years ago and building product with the team, and we even really haven't gotten our feet under us yet. At BlueSnap, since I've been here, the company has had a great trajectory, great product, but as far as being able to really dig in and change the future direction, we're just starting to get really good at that. I would say.
Henry Helgeson:So love that part of the job and then love working with the team On the side. Not to use the corny answer, but I got two kids. That's completely changed life. We spend a lot of time skiing, although as they get deeper into the school years here, teachers will not allow us to do that as much as we used to. For the last 20 years, or the 20 years before I sold Cayenne, I spent a lot of time as a private pilot doing some exciting things with some very exciting people some of which were in payments as well and really enjoyed that, and kind of hung that up in COVID when there was really not as many places to go, one because I didn't have a job and two because we had kids that had to go to school, and three, there was COVID. So getting back into that's a lot of fun as well.
Greg Myers:Great. So obviously you've been in payments for quite a while. So if someone came to you and they said Henry, I'm graduating next year or maybe I'm changing jobs and they look at the payments industry and they want to build a career in this industry what jobs? And they look at the payments industry and they want to build a career in this industry, what would you?
Henry Helgeson:tell them they need to do to be successful? It's a great question. In some ways, this industry like I just mentioned building product it's just so much more accessible to us than it was in the past, but in other ways it's gotten more complex because there's so much more competitors across there. I think, first of all, having a technical or engineering background is going to be helpful now, more helpful than it ever has been before. But that's useless without a good sales mindset. And if you build stuff that nobody's going to buy, it's useless.
Henry Helgeson:And having that balance of what my customers want and what can I build is really challenging and it requires somebody to be really inquisitive and ask a lot of questions. So technical background and then understanding what the customers need is probably, I'd say, what has to happen here. The knowledge itself in payments you can pick up. It's not as easy as going to Amazon and ordering a book on C-sharp coding or anything like that, but you can pick it up if you hang around the right people. But understanding the art of the possible on the technology side and then what the customer wants and thinks is valuable, you really need to learn to put those two things together.
Greg Myers:All right. Well, henry, we've covered a lot of ground, obviously, about you and the industry and what Blue Snap is doing these days, so is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up the show? I don't think so.
Henry Helgeson:We're having a good time over here at BlueSnap. We got a lot of good things coming. You'll see a lot of great things at this company. It's growing like a weed right now. We're really happy with the team and what we're doing. So I think if you check back in a year or two hopefully not four years this time we'll be able to give you a lot more good news and share a lot of things we've done in that timeframe.
Greg Myers:Great. Well, Henry, thank you so much for being on the show today. I know your times are invaluable, so I really appreciate you being here.
Henry Helgeson:Thank you, I appreciate it. Greg Really enjoyed it.
Greg Myers:Yeah, me too, and to all you listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story.
: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.