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Leaders In Payments
Leaders In Payments
Carlos Vega, Co-Founder & CEO of Tesorio | Episode 367
Carlos Vega, Co-Founder & CEO of Tesorio, joins us to share his remarkable journey from Panama to the U.S. and back, offering a fresh perspective on revolutionizing financial operations. Discover how Tesorio is transforming the post-sales processes for industries like B2B SaaS, manufacturing, and professional services by enhancing cash flow predictability. With a fully distributed team across the Americas, Tesorio is addressing inefficiencies head-on, replacing outdated methods with innovative solutions. Gain insights into Carlos's vision and how his experiences have shaped Tesorio's mission, including its seamless integration with financial and CRM systems.
The episode takes an intriguing turn as we explore future trends in the payment industry, focusing on the concept of "convergent evolution" in software development. We delve into how increased competition is shifting focus from traditional competitive advantages to data-driven strategies and brand reputation. Carlos sheds light on how reimagining cash flow as a data problem can optimize forecasts through network thinking and data connectivity. Uncover the challenges of extended payment terms in B2B transactions and the potential transformation of accounts receivable and payable for enhanced efficiency.
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 today's special guest is Carlos Vega, the CEO of Tesorio. So Carlos, thank you for being here and welcome to the show.
Carlos Vega:Hey, thanks for having me, Greg.
Greg Myers:Great, so let's go ahead and dive right in, if you don't mind. Tell our audience a little bit about yourself, maybe where you grew up, where you went to school, where you currently live, a few things like that.
Carlos Vega:All right, yeah, so it's a longer story. I, I was born in Panama, moved to the States when I was three, grew up in New York, went to school in Philly, went to Penn for undergrad. A little bit after college moved back to Panama, met my wife here, then moved back to the States, went to business school at Wharton and then started Tesorio. We got into Y Combinator, moved out to California and now I live in Panama again.
Greg Myers:Oh, wow, third time. Well, let's go ahead and talk about Tesorio, so tell the audience what Tesorio does.
Carlos Vega:Yeah. So basically, you know, our main point of view is that closed one is just the beginning, and the main thing you want to be able to do is you know anything you sell is good for revenue, but revenue is not real until you get paid, and that's when you can start to reinvest in your growth right, and so what we're trying to do is automate all the financial operations all that tactical work that happens after closed one to make sure that you invoice your customer, make sure that the invoice is delivered, make sure you follow up efficiently and all the collaboration across sales, cs and finance happens, make sure you receive payment pretty easily and then finally make sure you're reconciling those payments. And if you do all of that efficiently in one platform connected to all the right systems, you can start to get a lot more predictability in your cash flow. And the faster you do that and obviously the faster you can reinvest those dollars in growing your company. We call it all connected financial operations, but basically it's a SaaS platform that enables all of these workflows.
Greg Myers:Okay, are there certain verticals that you focus on?
Carlos Vega:It's a good question. I think getting paid in cash flow is a pretty universal, horizontal problem. We have had a lot of amazing traction with companies in the B2B SaaS space and also a lot of companies in physical goods manufacturing, wholesale distribution. And the last other vertical is professional services, but we're pretty agnostic. But those are the ones where we tend to gravitate to.
Greg Myers:And how big is the company. You can use number of employees or however you want to define that.
Carlos Vega:Yeah, totally so. We're around 50 to 60 employees. It's kind of cool actually. We're fully distributed, which I know has come into a lot of debate these days again and so we have about half the team in Latin America, half the team in the States and we stick to the Americas. We're fully distributed, remote, but stick to the Americas to maximize team collaboration. We have customers in the hundreds, several billions and billions and billions of dollars of transactions going through the platform every single year.
Greg Myers:So two questions about sort of the service that you offer. One if you don't use something like Tesorio, what do you do? What is the main pain point that you're sort of solving for Totally?
Carlos Vega:the counterfactual it's always a good thing to focus on.
Carlos Vega:Yeah, when we end up running across companies, they tend to be using Excel. Most of the time there are other players in similar spaces, but 90% of the time there are other players in similar spaces. But 90% of the time companies are on a Monday, they export from their ERP all the open invoices that they are owed. They then go through work those with Salesforce, their ERP and Outlook, open copy-pasting in emailing, writing notes. The next day they export again all the payments that they received, do a VLOOKUP, match it in there, remove the invoices that were paid, go through the same process, do that every single day. Then the next week they come along and they start all over again. Now imagine, instead of that getting pinged through Teams or Slack, outlook, all the different areas, you had one single inbox to work from one system that was connected to all your core financial systems and all of those processes after closed one being fully automated. That's basically the world that we're trying to create and have created for a lot of great customers.
Greg Myers:Okay, and the second question that came to mind is you mentioned about being connected to the right systems. What do you mean by that?
Carlos Vega:Yeah, so it's interesting when you think about it. One point of view that we have is that cash flow is more of a data problem than a finance problem, and if you look at, over the last 10 years, the proliferation of Office, of the CFO software, there's a lot of core systems that have your financial data what money is going to come in and out and with AI over the last year and a half, two years, you're actually able to tap into even more data like emails, slack messages, contract PDFs all that sort of data houses what's going to happen with your cash and what has happened in a lot greater detail. And so we plug into some of the obvious systems, right, like, let's say, on the ERP side, netsuite, intact, workday, quickbooks Online. On the CRM side, something like Salesforce. On the email side, something like Gmail, outlook, zora for billing and multiple other systems.
Carlos Vega:But the interesting thing we've been doing lately is using what we call primary source data.
Carlos Vega:So can we pull a signed contract from Salesforce and use AI to understand how the billing schedule is going to be over the next period of time so that you can forecast what your collections are going to be?
Carlos Vega:Can you use that same AI to generate an invoice and deliver it more efficiently to the customer, without the baton drops that happen between sales and finance, where someone forgot to put in a PO number or they put in the wrong contact information or they swapped the billing and shipping address. These are things that happen all of the time and really impact your timeliness of payment, and those things shouldn't happen these days, and so we're plugging into other systems that are not as typical, coming through emails bringing in, for example, from the banks, images of checks. Sometimes not all the banks give you like a pre-processed lockbox feed, they just give you images. Or there's attachments in emails or there's something in the body of the email and things like that, so we can get more into detail. But those are the types of things we're looking at Think of it like tentacles almost going out, capturing all the information it can.
Greg Myers:Yeah, I think the days of thinking about what you do is like just a check coming into the company are kind of long gone right, it's much more complicated than that, but you're able to simplify it. Ai helps with that. So, thinking about how you get business and sort of your go-to-market strategy do you have a direct sales team? Do you work through partnership channels? How do you go to market?
Carlos Vega:Yeah, so the answer is both. So we do have a direct sales team, and then we also work very closely with several PE firms, a couple of the big four accounting firms and obviously Workday NetSuite. Workday Ventures is an investor in our company as well, and so we've partnered with them. And then we've been lucky to have a longstanding partnership with investor in our company as well, and so we've partnered with them. And then we've been lucky to have a longstanding partnership with some of the banks as well.
Greg Myers:And what would you say, differentiates you from your competitors out there?
Carlos Vega:It's a good question, I think. Just as a side note this is just a personal point of view I think there's something I've noticed, at least since the platform shift to AI early last year. There's something I've come to call, basically, the convergent evolution of software, and if you're familiar with convergent evolution in biology, it's this concept of two species that are completely unrelated anywhere on the ancestral tree developing into almost identical animals. And I think, with the increase in velocity for development, the increase in competition coming at you from every angle, I think the times where the traditional competitive moats of UI a couple of product features or capabilities, a couple of connectors and things like that I think those are all dead. I think the competitive moats going forward are going to be completely different a lot more data-driven, a lot more focused on the objective that you're trying to achieve, and so there's a lot of differentiation there.
Carlos Vega:Another thing that's really important is what you're known for, and one of the things that, again, I believe really sets us apart from anyone else is this concept that, look, I said it earlier that for us, cash flow is more of a data problem, not a finance problem. But to unpack that what it means is like look, you know this is the irony of cash flow, right? Like if you're going to pay a bill, you know exactly when you're going to send it. You can choose not to put the check in the mail. You release the payment, even down to payroll, like every single dollar going out the door. You release the payment, even down to payroll, every single dollar going out the door. You control. So the only thing that's unpredictable is when you're going to get paid. The funny part about that is your AR is someone else's AP, so to someone else, your AR is perfectly predictable. And so if you think about it from that perspective and you start to think about take a little bit more of a network thinking perspective can you create the incentives, can you create the software that goes into all the right data sources? For example, what if you have software that can automatically log into Coupa and Ariba at your vendors, get all the information, maybe process all the notifications that you're getting from Coupa and Ariba and the myriad other portals to figure out okay, when am I going to get paid? Is my invoice already approved? When is it expected to be sent? All that sort of stuff, and that all flows naturally into your forecast for when you're going to what your cash flow is going to look like in the near term.
Carlos Vega:That mindset, I think, is a pretty core tenet of what we do. It influences our strategy and, by the way, everything I just said, imagine if we actually do so. I feel like that's a core differentiator. Just to summarize, I think the core differentiators going forward are being known for what your objective is having the right business logic and data connectivity, and it's not just data for data's sake. I say data might be the new oil, but petroleum's pretty useless, right. So what is it that you're actually going to do with that data, the objective, the business logic, and then I know this sounds really basic, but your brand Does it instill trust so that people are willing to give you that data in order for you to do these things?
Greg Myers:It's kind of ironic because I saw today on LinkedIn someone was saying why do we still have a 30-day terms for invoices? And just as you were talking about that, it's like that's one of the challenges, even for me as a small business is, whenever I work with larger companies, I don't know when I'm going to get paid, and sometimes they tell me it's 60 days or 90 days and it's 120 days or it's 30 days, but it ends up on day 31, I don't see any money and I mean it's just that whole challenge. I don't know how directly that is related to what you do, other than I know it's a challenge and I don't understand why we even have 30 day terms.
Carlos Vega:Yeah, that's actually directly related to what we do, which is, again, if you had to boil it down to one thing, one of the things we're most known for is drastic reductions in DSL, right? Your day sales outstanding, which is exactly what you're talking about. How long does it take you to collect a dollar you sold? It's a really curious thing. I think it boils down to working capital, right? So, if you think about the cash conversion cycle on the way out, you've got and I'll just stick to B2B SaaS, where you don't have inventory, but you've got the DPO, which is, how quickly are you paying the people that you owe money to? And then the DSR how quickly are you getting paid? The ideal state is that you collect faster and you pay slower. That way, you don't require more capital or working capital to grow that way as you grow. Basically, if you think about it, it's the reinvestment cycle, so you can invest in growing without requiring dollars to float your business, and that's why you have these net terms.
Carlos Vega:In a perfect world, let's imagine, if you want to go really far out into the future, of what might be possible once you can integrate all these different systems. You're right, ar and AP sound pretty antiquated, because you have all the invoices you sold a deal, salesforce marks a closed one. You create the invoice in your system, in your ERP, your accounting system. You then have to get that over to the customer in order for them to pay you. What's that process like? All right, take that electronic invoice in your system, download it to a PDF or manually submit it into a portal, and someone on the other side then has to add it to their ERp in their system. Right, you know, back when you know people were were definitely talking a lot more about blockchains, you could almost imagine like, wow, what if there were a shared ledger where everyone just kept it, stayed electronic, there was no email kind of go between, and pdfs and all that.
Carlos Vega:But then, if you go back to like the 70s, I mean that was the dream of EDI and so that didn't work. Why? Because everyone had their own custom EDI instance, just like, pretty recently, everyone wanted to have their own blockchain and everyone wanted to own the blockchain. So I think the hope and the solve. Yeah, it would be really great if everything just electronically talked to each other, so ERP to ERP, and you could almost just set, hey, what's your threshold? Like look, here's my weighted average cost of capital and this is how much I'm willing to discount that in order to get paid sooner. Sorry, pay on top of that in order to get paid sooner. Here's how much I'm willing to discount in order to pay faster, and all that sort of stuff. But it's just very difficult when you take all those dynamics into play. So that's why I think the net terms exist. You'd have to snap your fingers and magically shift everyone to this way of thinking, which maybe will happen someday, but I think it'll take some time.
Greg Myers:Well, that's a good segue into the next question when do you see and you can answer this obviously in the context of your business, but where do you see the payments industry headed in the next, say, three to five years?
Carlos Vega:Yeah, so it's a great question, the way I think about it. So, purely payments, I think we're seeing this right. Interchange fees are getting compressed, and so just having a business model purely based on interchange, I think, will get more and more challenging. That's purely on the payment side. I think some things we're seeing is customers are more and more they have a global customer base, and so having the flexibility to be able to collect from or receive payment from, any currency, any modality around the world is critical, and if you're a business saying, okay, I can use this for only 70% of my business, but I need this other platform for the other 30%, or the other 30% has to stay manual because they don't cover X regions that I sell to those types of things. They're becoming more and more objections that people raise, and so I think that's going to get fixed. I mean, there are a lot of companies trying to fix that, both on the getting paid and on the paying on the way out on AR and AP side. I think we'll see that getting resolved.
Carlos Vega:Another thing I do think will emerge is something I've been referring to as sensory networks.
Carlos Vega:If you have all of these different systems that we were talking about before actually connected. They're gathering a lot of information, almost like nodes, about how cash is flowing in and out of your business, and if you're gathering that information about how cash is flowing in and out of your business, and if you're gathering that information about how cash is flowing in and out of your business, you can then start to map the randomness or the unpredictability a lot more clearly, and I'm hopeful that there will be ways to create products that allow these sensory networks between companies to also communicate. There's incentives for them to do so, and so, therefore, you could start to get to that future we were talking about, where you can see preferences being set or needs being surfaced, and companies can make these decisions purely based on cash flow, about when they're going to pay and when they're not going to pay. So that's a little bit more esoteric. You can dive into that if you would like, but I think the other areas are more tangible.
Greg Myers:Yeah, and just one question on that. So do you think AI plays a part in that connection or do you think it's truly like a technology challenge?
Carlos Vega:I think AI 100% plays a role in that in a couple of different ways. When I think about data and what you can do with data now that AI is around, I think about three different areas. The first one is more what you can do with granular data, so being able to dive into. Let's say, I want to figure out when I'm going to get paid and I have access to the entire payment history over the last two years of this customer and I have open invoices from them. Today I can go through and look at very easily with machine learning and AI, all the payment history, come up with a prediction about when this invoice is going to get paid, comparing it also to other similar customers. Now imagine doing that for the hundreds or thousands of open invoices you have of your company instantly, constantly. That's very difficult to do manually, but machine learning and AI allow that. So that's the granular data component. The other component is access to new data. I call it primary source data because it's data that hasn't been messed up by human fingerprints, if you will, and so that's looking at.
Carlos Vega:One example is a contract PDF, others are images of checks, and I say a contract PDF. Yes, humans wrote that, but we find in our customers, 50 to 70% of payment delays are actually fat finger mistakes where someone transcribed something by accident. But think about the contract. You had teams of lawyers both sides paying thousands of dollars to their lawyers to make sure every I was dotted and T was crossed. So what if you could use that information to come up with the invoice automatically without having to rely on a sales rep keying information on the opportunity in Salesforce. That's just one basic example.
Carlos Vega:But also going through that to catch other mistakes and areas and that's a third use of AI, I feel is validation or cleaning of existing data.
Carlos Vega:So what if you could use that contract data to then vet the information that's in your ERP and Salesforce, compare them against each other and see, hey, did you catch a mistake before payment gets delayed? So that's on the data side. The other thing, again also just to go a little bit further into what I actually no longer think is the distant future, I think a really important part of creating those sensory networks is the velocity of integrations. I don't think we're too far, and today you can do this if you focus on it. I don't think we're too far from the point where you can enter an API website, the API docs, and create an integration. If you think about those two things being able to use granular data, primary source data and cleaning up existing data, and then the ability to use AI to connect almost any data source you want at lightning speed that's where you're going to start to see these networks emerge, and all of that's possible today, and that's why I don't think it's that distant anymore to get to that point.
Greg Myers:Yeah, the whole use of AI in payments is a hot topic that I hear about talk about a lot and it seems to always come back to like, oh, we use AI in fraud or whatever. And I know there are so many other use cases and valuable areas within payments. When you think of just payments holistically not like credit card payments, but AR, AP, everything I could sit here and talk about it forever, but I know that the topic is not AI, so we'll move on. But I think it's fascinating and I love your kind of view of it, so I appreciate you sharing that. But let's switch gears a little bit and talk about you. So tell us about your professional background and sort of how you got to your role there at Tesorio and starting the company I started out of college I worked for the CFO of GM's pension fund, which at the time was a $160 billion fund.
Carlos Vega:I worked there for almost two years and then actually took a year off to travel around the world thanks to his inspiration Pretty exciting. He gave me really good career advice early on. I was 23 and I said look, what's this going to look like on my resume? I really want to do it. And he said, hey, if someone doesn't want to hire you because when you were 23, you went backpacking around the world, you probably don't want to work for that person anyway. So that really, as a 23-year-old just starting your career, that was great wisdom to get early on about. Hey, you're also interviewing who you're going to work for, which is something you didn't think about at that point in your career. And then I came back.
Carlos Vega:I worked in reinsurance and then most of my I'd say, professional growing up was doing M&A at Lazard. I was based in Panama, covering commercially the Caribbean, central America, execution-wise, worldwide. That was pretty interesting. While I was there on the side, I had a factoring business, factoring. That was my first company and it was called Elemento Factoring and the idea it was with a peer from Lazard and our idea was hey look, we're going to. Oh, but sorry, I kind of rushed over this, but factoring is when you're financing, you're buying someone's accounts receivable at a discount so that they can get working capital now instead of having to wait to get paid right.
Carlos Vega:So that net 30 example you gave earlier, I'm sure you're familiar with it, but just sharing it for your audience. And so our whole idea was like, man, that sounds like payday lending for business. We don't love it. So why don't we go out there and say, look, we'll give you the factoring now, but we'll help you graduate to a bank line of credit. Here's your cash flow model, let's get you going, let's build up your credit score and all of that. And it was really disappointing. People were like give me the money, I don't care. And that's why I was like all right, this is definitely lending for business. I don't love it. By the way, factoring plays a really important role. But that was just and not to knock the industry super important industry, especially for global trade. But for me, I had this mission that I was on and that's where I went to business school and my goal was to start something that helped people understand their cash flow and could make it more predictable, and that's what got me into starting Tesorio.
Greg Myers:Okay, great. So what are some things you're passionate about? So, maybe one work-related passion and one personal passion.
Carlos Vega:Yeah, certainly At work. I am always intrigued about the importance of communication. It doesn't matter how many times you say something and how many ways you say it, it's never enough and you have to keep going and repeating and repeating and repeating, because people need to hear things so many different ways and so many different times that you're just kind of never done. And I think that's like one thing I'd heard a lot about and until recently I didn't realize, like how critical that was. Outside of work, I love playing tennis, but more material in that, I'd say I'm. Obviously we talked about Panama quite a bit earlier on, about how many times I've been in and out of the country, but I really care about looking at the region, and Panama in particular, and seeing back to communication. Actually, what is the impact of having a lack of a defined country vision? You know, I think the Dominican Republic is doing it pretty well, but I think the best is is is the U? S?
Carlos Vega:I mean, I grew up in the States, you know, was there from three to 23. Um, so it was pretty formative years, obviously, and then college and then grad school. The power of the American dream is something that's uh, it should not be forgotten. It should not be lost, Right. Um, I think that's something that I'm always wowed by and super intrigued by or in Marvel, they call it the origin story right.
Carlos Vega:In all the comic books, the origin story in the US is like look, we had a revolution In 1776, we went and we fought. We fought what was at the time the biggest empire and we won. Right, and that's the origin right. And then now it's like, wow, we fight and we do what we need to do and we will succeed. That's something that is very powerful versus a lack of that narrative right.
Carlos Vega:Again, I wasn't born in the States, but I can talk about the founding fathers. I know the Paul Revere story, I know the Boston Tea Party. All these stories and these narratives are so powerful. All these stories and these narratives are so powerful, and seeing the lack of that in some of the countries in our region is something that I'm constantly thinking about. What if those stories could be told? It's a region with such rich culture, so many natural resources, such a hardworking, high levels of grit societies. What if we could capture that energy, that origin story, that vision for what could be? And that's something obviously I just rambled way more than you probably expected on that topic, but I'm very passionate about that and something I spend a lot of time thinking about.
Greg Myers:No, that's great. Well, if someone comes to you, carlos, and they're interested in starting a career maybe they're sort of where you are at 23 and they're asking you for some career advice and they want to have a career, maybe in payments or fintech or something around what you're very passionate about what kind of advice would you give them to help them be successful in their career?
Carlos Vega:Yeah, I'd say I'll tell you the thing that I missed the most. I wanted to start a tech company but I had never worked in tech. I understood finance super well, but starting a tech company in FinTech or Office of the CFO payments it's very different from working at a bank or working in investment banking or working in a finance job. So my advice would be to find the best company you can get a job at and go work there for the best person. You can Do that for two, three years before starting your company. You're probably going to meet your co-founders there or you're going to learn so many things of what to do, what not to do, that that will save you a lot of time.
Greg Myers:Okay, great. Well, Carlos, we've covered a lot of ground about you and the company and the industry as a whole. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up the show?
Carlos Vega:All I'll say is that right now is actually a super exciting time to be building a company. I'm jealous of anyone who gets to start from scratch. The amount of things you can do, the velocity at which you can develop it's super exciting. Just go for it. Pretty excited to see what happens over the next couple of years and continue to be passionate about the space Awesome.
Greg Myers:Well, carlos, thank you so much for being on the show today. I know your time is very valuable, so I really appreciate you being here. Oh, thank you so much, greg, and to 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 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.