Ben Haguel, CEO of TCB Pay | Episode 362

Curious about how fintech companies are reshaping the landscape for high-risk industries? Our latest episode of the Leaders in Payments podcast features an engaging conversation with Ben Haguel, CEO of TCB Pay, who provides a firsthand account of his journey from Paris to becoming a prominent figure in the US payments sector. Ben’s insights promise to enrich your understanding of the complex world of high-risk payment solutions, highlighting how TCB Pay’s pioneering technology sets them apart. Learn how this innovative company tackles challenging sectors like telemedicine and crypto exchanges, ensuring compliance and security while driving growth across the US and European markets.

Join us as Ben shares TCB Pay's distinctive approach to creating and managing their own technology solutions, discussing the strategic emphasis on the issuance of prepaid corporate credit cards and efficient payment processing. With a focus on reducing risk through technology and legal compliance, Ben provides a deep dive into how TCB Pay caters to high-volume clients and the rigorous measures employed to uphold integrity. Get ready for compelling insights into the future of payments and discover how TCB Pay is strategically positioning itself to be a leading player in the evolving fintech landscape.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

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: 0:18

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, ben Hagel, the CEO of TCB Pay. So, ben, thank you for being here and welcome to the show.

Ben Haguel: 0:30

Hi, thank you for having me.

Greg Myers: 0:35

If you don't mind, let's start out talking a little bit about you. Maybe tell us where you're from, where you grew up, where you went to school, where you currently live just a few things like that.

Ben Haguel: 0:40

As you can get it from my southern accent, I am from France originally. I grew up in Paris and I immigrated to the US in 2000, a little bit over 24 years ago and I've lived in various places, from Los Angeles, originally, to Las Vegas, texas, actually. Now I reside in Boca Raton, florida.

Ben Haguel: 1:02

Okay, great, so let's talk about TCB Pay, so tell the audience what you do so in a nutshell, tcb Pay is a full merchant service provider, we're a credit card issuer and we're a full fintech. We were founded about 10 years ago and we just got our 10-year anniversary. We do have about 30 people working for us right now worldwide and we're very proud of being a small team, and our core product is technology for the payment industry.

Greg Myers: 1:31

Do you have a certain type of merchant or vertical that you focus on? Absolutely.

Ben Haguel: 1:37

So as a payment provider, we specialize in high risk or high volume, and as a credit card issuer, so we issue prepaid credit cards. We focus on corporate cards for mid and large businesses. What is great also about our issuing business it's 100% free to any merchants. But as a fintech, we're very unique. We do not resell any other company's product or services. We create and manage our own gateway, our own CRM, our own issuing platform and we have many custom integrations.

Greg Myers: 2:09

So how much of your business is the card issuing side versus the payment processing side?

Ben Haguel: 2:14

So we recently released the issuing earlier this year and we're still learning a lot. So I would say right now we're about 90-10, and we hope eventually that we're going to pick up and have a more equitable share of the market, maybe a 50-50.

Greg Myers: 2:32

And when you mention high risk, can you give us maybe some examples of different types of businesses you work with?

Ben Haguel: 2:38

Yes, absolutely so. Originally, when I said high risk, I wanted to be very clear about what we do, because we're actually registered as a high risk and high integrity ISO. We do not deal with businesses that are unregulated. We're not societal either, so when I say high risk, I mean either business that have a very high volume and that can pose a financial issue onto a processor, or a business that has a certain regulation that other processor doesn't want to touch, such as originally it was telemedicine, which now is a little easier to get. We do a money service business, money transmitter. We have done crypto exchanges. We do an extensive compliance on all those businesses and we reduce the risk by actually controlling the compliance.

Greg Myers: 3:29

So you must have a pretty powerful compliance team.

Ben Haguel: 3:32

Yeah, we do, and on top of everything, because we're a small team, we focus on the legal aspect, not on any other aspect. If it's legal, if it's authorized by a card association, let's find a way to reduce the risk. So how do we reduce the risk? Is there a technological tool we can use? Is there legal tools we can use If a business has no license? Do you have a legal opinion that can help us understand why we should consider and tell our banks why you're a good candidate?

Greg Myers: 4:01

And you're focusing today just on the US, or outside the US as well?

Ben Haguel: 4:05

Right now we are an ISO in the US and in Europe. We just started to apply for a money license in Europe, which will give us a little more power to be able to issue a credit card. We're a FinCEN registered MSB in the US as well.

Greg Myers: 4:24

Maybe talk a little bit about your go-to-market strategy. Do you have an internal sales team? Do you work with partners outside of the company? How do you go to market?

Ben Haguel: 4:33

The whole industry is dominated by agents. We have a very small sales team in-house. They do great jobs and I'm very proud of what they deliver. But the majority of our large merchants are relationship-based from our agents and those same agents have a relationship-based contractual agreement with the merchants. So everything is agent-related. Same with the issuing.

Greg Myers: 4:59

And one more question on the issuing. What made you decide to get into that part of the business?

Ben Haguel: 5:04

Yes, the second. I stepped in the business and I'm going to give you this answer. I said I'm in the wrong business. I'm in processing, I'm in acquiring, issuing. Well, we don't have as much regulatory issue. We don't have as much bank issue, we don't have as many financial risks. It's prepaid you either pay us or you either don't. It's very simple. We have a list of qualified, unqualified and prohibited business we cannot bring and if we stay within our lines, the payment schemes are paying us. It's, in my opinion, a very profitable business compared to the acquiring in the long run requires more and more compliance.

Greg Myers: 5:44

Well, what would you say differentiates you from your competitors out there?

Ben Haguel: 5:48

I would like to say that, first of all, we have the high-risk, high-volume. I would like to say that, as a fintech, we take every job. That means we have merchants that come to us and ask us a very specific integration and we'll do it. We have a money transmitter that recently told us I would like to have ANI services. And I look at it and say ANI, what is this? And it's a name verification service from Visa directly. And we reached out to Visa, we did an integration and now everyone is happy.

Ben Haguel: 6:17

We have reduced, on top of everything, the risk on that merchant. Now we have launched our new portal with a great new design. Our art of marketing is absolutely fabulous. So there's an upgraded version of our original gateway with a ton of new features. We do now also process ACH payment. We have a load balancer. We can batch transaction, transaction routing, manage multiple needs under the same account. But one of our biggest differences compared to the industry leader is our customer support, where we offer personal follow-up. Our customer support where we offer personal follow-up to our merchant and we always find a solution to meet their needs, whether they are for consulting or tech. So whoever our merchants are, we're going to find a way. Our job before everything is not only to process, but it's also to train and educate our merchants.

Greg Myers: 7:07

You've been in the industry for a while. Obviously the company's been around 10 years. Where do you think the industry's headed, maybe in the next, say, three to five years?

Ben Haguel: 7:16

In the next three to five years. I often get this question, but I think we're going to see more payments toward digital wallets and mobile payments. There's going to be tons of regulatory enhancements, for sure. We're going to see development of real-time payments. There's going to be tons of regulatory announcements, for sure. We're going to see development of real-time payments. Definitely, the AI is going to be a big part of the risk management. If you want me to develop a little more, we'll see it.

Ben Haguel: 7:38

In Asia, they use a ton of mobile wallets. It's convenience At the end of the day, it's all about convenience and they offer technology and FCQR code, biometric and education. They offer things that their banks won't offer. Now the regulatory announcement there's always the governments that try to regulate a little more our bodies and they will continue to evolve, but this time I think they will address issues like consumer protection, fraud and data privacy. For instance, in Japan, they have revised already the Payment Service Act of 2022. We see that everything is going to that direction.

Ben Haguel: 8:18

Now, on the real-time payment we are not there yet. Europe is there already. So if you go to a country that is in the SEPA zone, you'll get real-time wire and for no fee. The demand is there. You already have real-time ACH in the US and this trend is going to develop even more. Di automation actually, I'm very excited about this part because it will leverage the mid-risk to high-risk industries for us with a better risk management, better fraud detection and a lot more fraud. Personal services At TCBP. Believe it or not, we have 158 velocity controls. We have 158 ways of controlling your transactions.

Greg Myers: 9:00

Do you foresee crypto gaining strength again? I mean, every conversation was about it, then it kind of fell off the cliff and now I'm starting to hear a little bit more about it, and I think you mentioned it earlier. So just curious your thoughts on the crypto side.

Ben Haguel: 9:14

Whether you like crypto or not, at the end it's there and it's not going anywhere. I think that in the five to 10 years actually, we're going to see more stable coin and definitely blockchain. I mean, there's a growing consensus about it. It's very clear, especially around the stable coins.

Greg Myers: 9:43

The stable coins are developing really fast. Will it replace, eventually, fiat currency? I don't think so, but it will be another form of payment for a specific target audience. What a lot of people are talking about right is eventually you'll be able to pay with it relatively easily, but it's going to have specific use cases. So I think that's the consensus and your timing is what a lot of people are saying as well. You know that's more five to 10 years out there. I appreciate you sharing those trends and your thoughts on that. So let's switch gears a little bit. Talk about you, Maybe. Talk a little bit about your professional journey, maybe what you did before TCB Pay and what kind of led up to the company and to where you are today.

Ben Haguel: 10:13

First of all, I've always been into sort of a finance industry Before I was doing mortgages, doing my own mortgages. I was introduced to payments about 20 years ago, which I liked right away. The very important thing is that I understood very quick that the technology would be important, and when I say technology, from owning your own payment gateway to actually having your own chargeback management system. I saw it very early. About 17 years ago I was lucky to meet one of the most talented in the world developers from India. He's actually our CTO right now. He finally switched to be our CTO about a year and a half ago. I used to always have him develop small applications for payment or non-payments. I've done also a lot of real estate in my spare time.

Greg Myers: 11:03

Let's talk about things you're passionate about. So maybe one work-related passion and one personal passion.

Ben Haguel: 11:09

At work. I like to push people. If there's a red button, I like to push it. I like to push people to help them grow, reach goals and hires. I have a very close team of executives and I'm very proud of them, of where they're from and where they've been and where they are now and where they're going At work. I mean, I'm going to sound corny, but that's the truth. It's family. Everything is family. Being with the family is the most important thing.

Greg Myers: 11:34

Does the family have a favorite thing to do While we travel?

Ben Haguel: 11:39

we love history, cooking together everything that a traditional family would do.

Greg Myers: 11:45

Okay, so you've been in the industry for a while. So if someone came to you and they said, ben I'm interested in getting into the payments industry. Maybe they just graduated from college, maybe they want to move into this industry and they look at payments and fintech and sort of like you did hey, I want to get into this industry they came to you and said, ben, what do I need to do to be successful in payments? What would you tell them?

Ben Haguel: 12:05

Well, first I will tell them before you get into any industries and what I'm going to say is almost applicable to any industries. But for payment especially, understand the fundamentals of payments, understand the rules, understand what is a credit card, what is debit card processing? What is a fintech? What is ACH Card issuing? What is it? How does that work? How do I make money from it? Then there's going to be changes, so continuous learning is extremely important. You've got to continue to evolve with the industry. Then networking is very important. Then choose a specialization. You cannot do everything. It's not possible. You got to specialize.

Ben Haguel: 12:48

Payment is broad, covering technology, compliance, sales, strategy. There's people that only specialize in strategy, in compliance, and that's great Areas like fraud prevention, jail, wider compliance with standards that are not only national but international. That will live in a more global society. And then skills. I mean you got to develop skills like sales, customer service, product management within the payment, communication, negotiations with merchants. Those are going to be part of your daily routine and the skills you're going to develop. But the most important is, if you're a CEO, your job is to evolve. Your job on day one won't be the same job as 10 years later. My job today is absolutely not the same job as it was originally. I have an amazing team now that can take care of the daily management and crisis, while I work exclusively on developing the business on a higher scale.

Greg Myers: 13:45

I think all that was great advice and very important advice. I appreciate you sharing that. Ben, we've covered a lot of ground already about you and your background and obviously about the company and what you do there, so is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up the show?

Ben Haguel: 13:59

No, it's been great meeting you and talking with you. It was a great experience. Thank you very much.

Greg Myers: 14:05

Thank you and Ben, I appreciate you being here. You, it was a great experience. Thank you very much. Thank you, and Ben, I appreciate you being here. I know your time's very valuable. Again, thank you so much for being on the show today. Thank you, you have a good rest of your week. And to all you listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story.

Speaker 1: 14:17

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.