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Leaders In Payments
Leaders In Payments
Amanda Crocker, COO of SWIVEL | Episode 366
Join us as Amanda Crocker, the dynamic COO of SWIVEL, shares her captivating journey from the sun-soaked shores of Southern California to the heart of Texas, with academic stops in Reno along the way. Discover how Amanda is steering SWIVEL's innovative payment platform to serve financial institutions, credit unions, and the K through 12 market across the U.S. Her insights into targeting mid-market credit unions and smaller community banks with a blend of direct sales and strategic partnerships reveal the company's unique competitive advantage, all under the trusted SWBC umbrella. Amanda's passion for integration capabilities stands out, making Swivel a name to watch in the competitive payments landscape.
Our conversation then takes a fascinating turn as Amanda recounts her diverse career path, spanning industries like mortgage servicing, non-profit, manufacturing, and tech giants such as Microsoft and Facebook. Her experiences offer valuable lessons on the evolution of digital advertising and payment systems, and the importance of building strong company cultures. She also shares personal anecdotes about her love for outdoor adventures with her family and her adventurous pets. Aspiring professionals in the payments industry will find Amanda's advice inspiring, as she emphasizes creativity and the power of teamwork.
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:Hello everyone and welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast. I'm your host, Greg Myers, and today's special guest is Amanda Crocker, the COO of Swivel. So, Amanda, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thank you, excited to be here.
Speaker 2:Great, so let's go ahead and dive 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.
Speaker 3:Sure, yeah. So my name is Amanda Crocker. I currently live in San Antonio with my family. We moved to San Antonio about a year ago a year and a half ago from Austin, so I've lived in Texas for a while. I grew up in Southern California for a long time and then my husband and I met and had all of our children in the Reno-Tahoe area, beautiful part of Northern Nevada. Children in the Reno-Tahoe area, beautiful part of northern Nevada Missed the mountains for sure, but we do love Texas. So far Went to school in Nevada while I was working and raising my children, so I went to school at UNR and then finished online actually, just as online school was starting to come into fruition to help, you know, take care of my kids and work and do all of the things at one time, which is a challenge for working families. But yeah, like I said, I live in San Antonio now with my children and my husband and all of our wonderful animals, and we love the area so far.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Well, thanks for sharing that. Well, let's talk about Swivel. So tell the audience what Swivel does.
Speaker 3:Yeah, wonderful. So Swivel is a payment platform and a payment processing company, but we really focus on the partnership side. We serve two major areas today. So we provide payment services for financial institutions and credit unions who may need payment processing for their loan payments, their new account opening, account to account transfers, but also their commercial and treasury services. So, for example, financial institutions have some members or business clients who process payroll or taxes or those different types of markets.
Speaker 3:We also are in the community payment space. So we serve the K through 12 market currently with e-funds for schools. So if you have children, you know ever since COVID you don't turn in cash anymore and your school, for lunches or fees, most of that has transitioned online, which, for those of us who hate trying to find where our checkbook is, that's wonderful. And so we serve the K through 12 market here in the US and we are expanding that as well to just better serve some of the communities that we've been serving today you know, maybe your band program or your football dues or you have a kid in theater or something like that just to help those communities be able to have a better payment platform.
Speaker 2:And when you say financial institutions, obviously there's a range from super big to kind of tiny. Is there a sort of a sweet spot there?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so our online payments is SwivelPay, our agent portal For credit unions. The sweet spot there? Yeah, so our online payments is SwivelPay, our agent portal For credit unions. The sweet spot is really the mid-market credit unions. We serve a lot of mid-markets. We do have products that serve the smaller markets as well, and so there's a lot more that we can provide to help those smaller credit unions not have to have the technology lift that it comes with integrating our platform, and then our commercial and treasury services are actually better for the larger market. So we have a bunch of different options for the ranges of different sizes of credit unions and, like I said, even some smaller community banks. But the credit unions and the smaller community banks are definitely our sweet spot.
Speaker 2:And about how many employees do you have?
Speaker 3:Swivel right now is about 175-ish employees across San Antonio. We have an office in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and then we also have a lot of remote employees.
Speaker 2:So you focus mainly on the US.
Speaker 3:Yes, we focus mainly on the US. Though we are an SWBC company, we are a proud part of the SWBC family and SWBC does have a location and an office in Monterrey, Mexico.
Speaker 2:Maybe describe your go-to-market strategy. Do you work through partners? Do you have a direct sales team? How do you reach these banks?
Speaker 3:Both, Both. Actually we have a fantastic direct sales team. They are wonderful. They're out there in the community, you know, through different partnerships with those financial institutions and we sponsor a lot of different charities and events that are important to those community financial institutions. So we have a wonderful team across the United States regional vice president sales team. And then we also have partnerships with different home banking providers and solutions. So you know, the Q2s of the world, the Alchemies of the world, so those core home banking or collection services as well, we partner and integrate with those. That's one of the strengths of SWBC and Swivel is our partnerships and our integrations. So we want to make it so that we work with the software and solutions that those credit unions and financial institutions are already utilizing. We don't want them to have to go into yet another system, and so our integration suite is our strength and we definitely work with them in a strong way through different referral programs and things like that. But we also have that direct sales team.
Speaker 2:Well, that's a good segue into the next question, and obviously you're in a very competitive part. The next question, and obviously you're in a very competitive part of the industry. So what would you say, differentiates Swivel from your competitors?
Speaker 3:Yeah, a few things. One, I think, being part of that trusted, known SWBC family and brand, that is a strength for us. For sure, swbc provides a host of other services to these financial institutions and community banks, whether that is collection servicing, that you know, cpi, gap and warranty insurance, things like that, and so because we are part of that bigger family, those financial institutions can have services all taken care of by one company and know that. You know it comes with the safety and the security and the resiliency of that larger company. So that is definitely one I would say. You know, like I hit on the integrations as well. So we have over 38 different integrations today and we're constantly adding new integrations. We focus heavily on our software developer kit so that we can get those integrations up and going.
Speaker 3:There's a lot of new fintechs out there that serve different parts of that business, whether it's your text messaging platform or new chat and AI tools and things like that that these credit unions and financial institutions are trying to put into their services to modernize. Right, that's been a big shift for credit unions in the last five years is modernizing and hitting on the technology that that younger generation uses, and so we really focus on making sure we have strong software developer kits and integrations so that we can get those integrations up and quickly. If a credit union or a financial institution comes to us and says, hey, we use this software, do you integrate with them? Chances are good the answer is yes. And if it is not yes, we can reach out to them and easily get something stood up because we have sort of plug and play software available to them to integrate with us and just provide a much more rounded, seamless experience, not only to the credit union agents or employees but also to the members, and it feels like one seamless experience to them.
Speaker 2:We've talked a lot about the financial institution side and then the credit unions and community banks, but you also mentioned sort of the K through 12. So I don't want to ignore that part of the business. Is that one that you do? You go to direct or through partners? How do you reach those? Because there's so many of them?
Speaker 3:There are so many of them, so a few different ways. We do work with school districts directly, so we partner at a school district level rather than at a school typically, because that school district again wants to have one payment service for everything that they do, whether that's lunch programs or student fees or, you know, one-off fees that they need to collect right. And so we work with those school districts directly. But we also integrate with the school platform, so student information platforms like Skyward or Power Schools. We integrate with those platforms as well and focus on the partnership with them, because those school districts again want to see all of those payments flow through. As a parent, I log in to Skyward frequently for my children and I want to see what are their dues, what do I need to pay? I want to be able to see did my son have three lunches today and go back for another bag of chips or another ice cream? And so I can see that all in one place for all of my children. And so we integrate there that way as well.
Speaker 2:Well, if you kind of step back and look at maybe the 50,000 foot level, where do you see the payments industry headed, say, in the next two to three, maybe three to five years?
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know, I think the financial institution or payment industry has been trying in the United States. It's been trying to figure out instant money movement. Right, you see the PayPal's and the Zelle's and the Venmo's of the world for account to account transfers, or peer to peer transfers, really blow up in the last five years. Even though the money doesn't move instantly all the time, it does in some cases it feels instant to that user or that consumer, and other countries figured out instant payments a long time ago through connecting all of the different financial institutions. The United States is a little bit more complicated than that, because we have multiple, lots of different cores, right, we have the Federal Reserve and we have different areas that don't connect, and so the United States is still trying to figure out instant payments because everybody is either building on RTP or FedNow and those two things don't talk to each other and that's going to take some time because it is also very risky. There's a much higher use of fraud when it comes to account to account transfers. That money is not reversible, and so lots of financial institutions want to be able to receive money instantly, but they don't want to send money instantly. So I think we'll see more things like that trying to come up.
Speaker 3:I think you know we'll see instant payments being used more in the business and the commercial side, while financial institutions, you know, get used to that. But I would also say we've also seen the explosion of digital wallets. Pay by bank is also taking off here in the United States. That's been an industry norm outside of the US for quite a while, but pay by bank is starting to really step up where people want to pay for something directly but maybe they don't want those card fees or something like that. That will take some time as well, due to the integrations that are needed and the user experience of it. Right here in the US, we're still a little weary about logging in with our financial institution on some website that maybe we're not totally comfortable with and that experience can be clunky depending on the vendor that is servicing those things, and so I think it will take some time to change that culture or the familiarity of it for consumers. But I do think we're moving more towards faster money movement, connected experiences and easier checkout systems and streams for consumers.
Speaker 2:I think all of those are things that I hear pretty consistently as far as trends in the industry, so I would agree with everything you said. Well, let's switch gears a little bit and talk about you. So tell us about your professional background and how you got to your role there at Swivel.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I have been in payments for a while, but I am a huge advocate of you know you are a sum of all the different experiences in your career and you should take something from each journey. So I actually started not in payments, but I started in well, way back in the day when I was very young. I was in mortgage. Before the bubble burst I was in the mortgage servicing industry. It's actually where I met my husband and then we decided to leave the mortgage industry because we could see the writing on the wall and some not great things. The bubble had to burst at some point. So we decided to leave and I went into the non-profit space where I got really strong at project and program management and sort of found a passion there. Found a passion for operations, went back to school for another degree in program management because I loved it so much. I got my PMP and went into manufacturing because there is no way better to jump into true program management than to go into a high manufacture-to-order environment. I worked in that space for quite a while, still know way too much about thermonuclear dynamics I can't get it out of my brain and then from there sort of moved into the tech world. So and that's where I started with payments worked at Microsoft for a while when Microsoft bought Yahoo and they were just figuring out some of the digital advertising landscape. The world was figuring out the digital advertising revenue stream that has now become this huge, huge profit monster in the United States, and so they were just figuring out how to put ads on Xbox and Bing, their search engine, and separating out the Yahoo ads business and parsing that off. Went in to also help them with their Windows 10, which that might age me, that's unfortunate, but their Windows 10 launch, the one that everybody absolutely despised and wanted to roll back very, very quickly, but operationalizing that with OEMs, with the manufacturers, as they put them on you know, the different devices and laptops that they sell. And then from there it took a lot about payments and how money moved and how you pay for advertising and how that's invoiced and third party network providers and all of that. And we moved to Texas after that, so worked for a few different tech companies.
Speaker 3:I was at Facebook for six and a half years helping them build up their payment space and that's where I really just found payments and fell in love with it. When I joined Facebook. It was still a little baby startup, if you will, only a few thousand employees, and we were just building the payments programs and rails for Facebook at the time. They only had the advertising product at that time, but it was obviously their main revenue stream and a huge amount of money. That was just you know.
Speaker 3:I like to say we were just some young, dumb kids trying to figure it out in hoodies and powered by energy drinks, and we figured it out. We went globally and we started adding a lot of different payment types so not just you know cards and ACH, because the rest of the world runs on a lot of different payment types, like Boleto, for example and then from there realized that there was a lot of opportunity. Somebody in a hackathon came up with the idea for a donations product being able to accept donations on Facebook and then we expanded it to Instagram and Messenger and WhatsApp and a half years, to a huge, huge business and learned so much about you know global money transmitter, licensing and working with the CFPB and you know different types of payment rails and payment service providers and learned so much over that time. But over six and a half years we really became a well-oiled machine in the payment space, and so I love to build.
Speaker 3:Personally. That is something that gives me joy, and energy is to build something new and exciting. And Swivel happened to call and I wasn't really thinking about what was next, but somebody had given them my name and was really energized by the journey that Swivel is on to grow and expand this payment company and they found something that they service really, really well for financial institutions. But fintechs are growing like crazy and so excited to help them on this journey to grow and evolve the company.
Speaker 2:Okay, great Thanks for sharing that. It sounds like your meta or Facebook experience really helped you dive deep into the payments world, for sure.
Speaker 3:Absolutely did. It was a crash course in payment.
Speaker 2:Yes, so what are some things you're passionate about? Maybe one work-related and one personal.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I would say on a work-related passion, I really love creating strong cultures. It's something that I feel like if you have a really strong culture and team dynamic, you can go so much further. You allow creativity to spark from all different places and when people are creative, they come up with some amazing solutions for members and experiences, but they're also so much more invested in it. So, from a work perspective, I really really love being involved in the women in payments community, but also just building a strong culture and a safe and strong dynamic within a company, but also the partners that you work with. So I spend a lot of time focusing on that and making sure that is a key part of our goals and our outcomes as well.
Speaker 3:I would say that from a personal perspective too. You know it's funny, you don't have a lot of time with four children. You don't have a lot of time to have a lot of things on a personal time frame, but so close lots of teenagers they keep me busy. I would say that we spend a lot of time outside. We spend as much time outside with our animals as we possibly can. You know, when you work a lot, you don't want to only see the inside of your office building. So we spend a lot of time outside. And then I would say marching band keeps our family busy. And then I would say marching band keeps our family busy.
Speaker 2:So I have to ask, since you've mentioned animals a few times, what animals do you have? Dogs, cats, horses?
Speaker 3:We have one dog and then we have three cats, but they are adventure cats. They like to go outside with us, they go on walks with us. I feel like they're more like dogs.
Speaker 2:That's great. That's great. That's great. Well, amanda, if someone came up to you and they're just maybe right out of college or maybe they're changing careers, but they want to build a career in payments and you, as someone who have been in payments for a while, what career advice would you give them to help them be successful in payments?
Speaker 3:Yeah, a couple of things. I think. Stay curious is number one. I think it was Sheryl Sandberg who used to say if somebody's giving you a spot on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat, just get in. And I tend to agree, though I'm a big advocate for being your. You are your best career advocate when it comes to your career journey. But stay curious, ask a lot of questions, stay hungry to learn. You know, when I interview for members on our team, oftentimes I'm interviewing for a way of thinking, how they view the world, how they dig into problems, how they try to solve problems and their critical thinking skills dig into problems, how they try to solve problems and their critical thinking skills. But staying curious and staying hungry to learn.
Speaker 3:A new industry Payments is a relatively tight knit group of people and you can quickly build up a network and this person knows this person, who knows this person, who built this thing. You know, and, and. So when you stay hungry and try to build out your network, you there's so many wonderful people in this industry that you can learn from and you have to stay hungry because the technology is constantly changing. You have to know what's coming next. You have to know what key players are doing, because the days of ACH are gone or they're they're phasing out, though it's always shocking to me how many checks are still written. We are moving more towards digital payments, and so I would say that staying curious is really, really important in using your network.
Speaker 2:So, amanda, we've covered a lot of ground already, obviously, about you and the company and the industry. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up the show?
Speaker 3:No, I think you know. I would just add that I think payments is an interesting space. It's always changing and growing. I like to see new folks get into the industry, and so I'm always, you know, an advocate for this being an exciting industry for folks. We always talk about our kids and where we want them to be and be in software engineering or be in this or that. The industry that's not going to die. Money movement is never going to go away. We need it in this world, and so I think it's growing and exciting, and I just love being an advocate for more people to get into it.
Speaker 2:Okay, great. So thank you so much, amanda, for being on the show today. I know your time is very valuable, so thank you so much and I really appreciate you being here.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely, thank you.
Speaker 2: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.