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Leaders In Payments
Leaders In Payments
Special Series: Pay Ops - Streamline Your Back-office to Unlock New Revenue Streams Featuring Payabli's Will Corbera & Jo Phillips
Unlock the secrets of mastering payment operations with Jo Phillips and Will Corbera, the Co-founders and Co-CEOs of Payabli. Discover how their revolutionary unified API and infrastructure stack is transforming the SaaS landscape by streamlining the often-overlooked world of payment operations. Jo and Will take us through their inspiring journeys in the payments industry, revealing how Payabli is making it easier for software companies to efficiently manage the complexities of Pay In, Pay Out, and Pay Ops. Learn about the critical behind-the-scenes aspects of processing payments, such as merchant boarding, underwriting, risk monitoring, and fraud prevention, all aimed at enhancing the entrepreneurial economy.
Gain insight into future trends and strategies ready to redefine payment operations. From the sophistication of AI tools designed to combat fraud and streamline underwriting processes to real-life success stories like a property management company revolutionizing its payment facilitation capabilities, this episode is packed with practical examples. Explore the strategic importance of onboarding and empowering merchants, and understand why an API-first approach is key to seamless integration and scalability.
This special series of the Leaders in Payments podcast focuses on the next generation of payments infrastructure for software companies. Payably provides a single, unified API and infrastructure stack to quickly and easily monetize and manage a SaaS platform's payments business built around the three P's Pay in, pay out, pay ops. In this three-part series, we'll dive deep into the three P's, including payment acceptance, paying vendors and suppliers and managing payments operations.
Speaker 2:Payments aren't just about accepting and issuing transactions. They're about efficiency, control and scalability. In this episode, we're diving into the often overlooked world of payment operations and how streamlining your back office can unlock new revenue opportunities. Join us as we explore how Payably's PayOps tools give you full visibility, reduce inefficiencies and help you take control of your payment strategy like never before. Hello everyone and welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast. I'm your host, greg Myers, and on today's episode we have two very special guests Joe Phillips and Will Corbera. So, guys, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Great, great to be here again. Thanks for having us.
Speaker 4:Hi, greg, thanks for having us again.
Speaker 2:Absolutely so. Today we're going to be talking about pay ops. So many of you know who listen to the show regularly. We've had two episodes with Will and Joe about pay ins and pay outs. If you haven't listened to those episodes, I suggest you go back and listen to those. But this one is about payment operations are called pay ops. So before we get into that, joe, if you don't mind, tell our audience a little bit about yourself and your professional journey.
Speaker 3:Sure, joe Phillips, co-founder and co-CEO of Payably Sully, california. Born and raised, but have had the good fortune of living in a lot of places across the country and grew up in an entrepreneurial family, small family business, and was always exposed to business, grew up in my grandfather's jewelry store, went back east for college and then had an awesome experience working for incredible founders. I was at a company called Seamlesscom on the first online food ordering platform in the industry and ran national sales with them for many years, and then at my last company, service Titan, I was the head of sales there and had an incredible experience helping scale that company and through that experience we were inspired to go build Payably to help other software companies like ServiceKite, build and manage their payments business. So that's really kind of me in a nutshell, professionally. Personally live in Southern California today, right outside of Los Angeles, married and have an awesome three-year-old we just celebrated his third birthday this weekend. So I have a lot of fun building Payably and also being a young dad.
Speaker 2:Awesome, awesome. So Will same question for you a little about yourself and your professional journey.
Speaker 4:Absolutely. I've been very fortunate to be an entrepreneur all my life. My previous life to Payably co-founded a payments platform where we were one of the pioneers in property payment. Through that journey, we helped Incubate one of the very first pay fact programs in the country. We ultimately scaled that business to tens of thousands of merchants and very, very blessed to have a successful outcome in 2017 with an exit. Through that journey learned a lot and I've always been dear friends with Joe and it was an opportunity, after my commitments to the company that acquired us, to build what today is Pavely, and it's been an exciting journey from the very first day after I left. And on the personal side, I've been very blessed. I have an incredible wife, three kids I got an 18-year-old, a 14-year-old and then a five-year-old. Love playing basketball, love sports, but really building business and family are my top top priorities.
Speaker 2:Okay, so Will sticking with you for a minute, tell the audience what Payably does.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So what Payably does is we're a single unified API payments infrastructure stack that helps platforms embed and monetize payments. Our focus is really to help software platforms, or what we call tech-enabled ecosystems, to embed payments and be able to monetize, leveraging what we call the three P's pay in, pay out, pay up, payops. I think we'll be talking today about PayOps, but a big differentiator for us and our big kind of hairy problem that we're solving in the industry is how do we unify the fragmented solutions that are out there through one API in an embeddable way as well, so that these platforms can easily stand up their payments business and monetize on it quickly. I think that's where the future is right, and so that's what we wake up every single day for. Our mission is if you're a software company, you're a payments company, and our why statement is to empower the entrepreneurial economy. So we're very focused on executing on that vision and becoming the AWS payments.
Speaker 2:Okay, okay, thanks for sharing that Will. So let's dive into pay ops. So, joe, being in this industry payments, fintech we often hear that term payment operations. So two part question how does payably define that term and why is that important for these vertical SaaS platforms that you guys serve?
Speaker 3:Sure, I've been really excited about this episode, greg. This is now the fourth leaders in payments podcast we've done. I think payoffs is the one that I've been most looking forward to, because payoffs oftentimes gets overlooked. There's so much value that can be provided with modern payoffs tools, but it's just such an underserved aspect of payments. And I think it boils down to when people think about payments, they really focus on the actual transaction, the payment execution, but people forget that there's all these operational aspects required for allowing a merchant to process a payment. There's things like boarding that merchant, underwriting the merchant, making sure that they're a good credit risk, the pricing and billing setups, the transaction risk monitoring once they're up and running, making sure that the payments that are going through there's no fraud and there's not too much exposure for us as the payments company or the software platform, and the list goes on and on, from disputes to PCI compliance to 1099 reporting, right. There's so many aspects of it and I think, again, as I mentioned, it's just been underserved by the industry and we're really excited about building innovative and modern payoffs tools to support these complex use cases.
Speaker 3:In terms of the why we decided to build our payoffs suite and kind of the insights. There again, it goes back to the fact that most software companies, like people, just don't really take into consideration holistically all that goes into running a payments business. They really focus on the payment experience and historically the payments provider are the ones that pay ops squarely lives within them and the insight that Will and I had early on is that the pay ops there's a disproportionate impact on customer experience there. A transaction can go through at the point of sale and that's great. But if a merchant has a hard time getting boarded or a transaction comes in that's much larger than your average ticket, that gets held for an excessive amount of time, it can just really create a lot of havoc for the software company.
Speaker 3:And we saw this world where software would become the modern distribution for payment processing. And if they're going to really build a payments business and really own the payments business, they're going to really want to have more say into the payment operations. So at a minimum we've built API-first pay operations tools that allows our software companies to have a seat at the table and really designing and influencing what the experience looks like, what the underwriting and risk looks like. Right, certainly we have the final say there, but we take their feedback into consideration and allow them to help us design specific programs for that specific vertical. We think that our software partners know their merchants better than anybody, so we really give them a lot of say in the matter and at scale.
Speaker 3:If they want to become a wholesale ISO, a payfac or a program manager on the payout side, they can certainly do that. They can get their own sponsorship with the bank partner of ours. They can basically have their own paper but stay within our ecosystem and not have to build these complex payoffs capabilities from the ground up, sending them a lot of time and domain expertise that they would have to bring in-house in order to manage that kind of build out of that technology. So we've seen it to be very compelling to software companies thinking long-term, how they want to graduate, how they want to see themselves as a payment to business in the long run, and we've been getting a lot of great feedback on the tools we built.
Speaker 2:Okay, okay, sticking with you, Joe. So what would you say makes it different than your competitors out there?
Speaker 3:Yeah, the fact that it's what I would call it's unbundled and API first is a unique differentiator I think a lot of our competitors have either taken most of them are strictly just managing the service on behalf of the software partner and aren't giving them the again any seat at the table or any influence over kind of what the boarding application looks like, what the kind of underwriting journey will look like, or the transaction risk monitoring journeys look like, what those policies I should say are. So we definitely allow them to help inform that strategy, and then the fact that they can ultimately graduate out is another aspect of what makes us unique. No other provider is really doing this at scale and we've already started to see a lot of our partners, even though the majority of them are staying at managed service for us. We are seeing some folks leverage the pay ops tools and become their own payfac or wholesale ISO with us.
Speaker 2:Okay, so Will over to you and, just like what you've done in the past episodes, let's take a deep dive, as we did with the pay ins and pay outs. So let's take a deep dive, as we did with the pay-ins and pay-outs. So let's take a deep dive into the payment or pay-offs. What are the core capabilities of the product and how does that solve or help serve the needs of your customers?
Speaker 4:Yeah, absolutely. I think if you're a platform and you're trying to monetize on payments, right, the first sort of business is how do I onboard my merchants and facilitate them with payment services, so really empowering them with a robust onboarding engine where they have influencer control over what are the data points on that business that we're going to capture, the KYC, kyb info, the different services that are going to be selected or enabled or disabled. Right, control over pricing and billing, various capabilities related to that, like what's the boarding process, what's the e-sign, if there's going to be any PDF mapping, if we're collecting any kind of due diligence forms alongside that boarding process. Right, where are funds going to be deposited into, easily be withdrawn from? So, from a boarding standpoint, we facilitate adding on a single merchant or bulk boarding right. We have certain partners that will want to onboard hundreds, if not thousands, of merchants at a time. So boarding is a really big part of that. Right, and when we build product right, it's always API first. But the considerations that we're always thinking through they're intentionally about is how it impacts our web portal at the same time, our embedded component and our creator tools. So a lot of our capabilities from a boarding standpoint not only are API driven, but they're also embeddable in an online boarding experience. So partners have the ability to push data via API, or they can leverage our out-of-the-box boarding link, or they can leverage a mix of both right, and so we see a fair amount of combination there. So boarding is the first one, greg. Full control for pricing billing is a big one.
Speaker 4:Full visibility into underwriting We've got a lot of cool tools where, if you're in the driver's seat as a platform wanting to see where these accounts stand, we'll have visibility. We'll provide visibility as to did that application get pended or is it in underwriting? Has it been boarded? Is there for some reason in the manual review? So we're investing a lot of resources into enhancing and continuing to build out that process so that our partners have full visibility into where the merchants are in the applications process or the underwriting process until then going live and then they can start monetizing on that money flow right.
Speaker 4:The other cool things that we've built is risk and fraud tools, right. We know that in our space we're a big attack vector, so how do we leverage the data that we capture on the onboarding stage to drive our risk and fraud controls right? Different policy creations that will either automatically flag or stop funding to happen. Right If there's if we think that there's fraud activity or suspicion activity and a bunch of other cool things that we built. We've got a lot of security. You know a lot of reporting and analytics that we can talk about a little bit later, but we have a portfolio manager. We have full visibility into all of your merchants, any sub orgs that you might have on your umbrella of developer tools. So a lot of the payment operation or wherewithal to help these platforms scale their payments business right. It all starts with recording through underwriting, price management all the way to when that merchant's activated. How can it continue to enable other services or barrier-edged services through one single place?
Speaker 2:Okay. So, joe, over to you. Can you give us maybe some real-life examples of how some of your customers have benefited from some of these pay-op tools?
Speaker 3:Sure, Two come to mind that are pretty recent. One I think is just absolutely fascinating and we're probably going to do a case study on it soon is that we recently just decommissioned a payfac in the property management space and I think, if you look back I don't know five, six years ago, there was this narrative in the industry as software companies were starting to monetize payments. There was this narrative or this kind of marketing campaign that people started to buy into. That was, if you were a software company, you had to be a payfac, and I think this is a company that did exactly that. They started seeing meaningful payment volume and they wanted to invest in the payments business. So they went and became a full-fledged payfac. And now come five, six years later, they're coming to us and they're like hey, we want to focus on what we do best. We're sick of the compliance and administrative burden that goes along with this, not to mention the cost and maintaining this payment facilitation designation. We just want the PayFact capabilities, but we want you guys to be getting the actual PayFact, and I think we absolutely subscribe to that. We think there's a time and a place when it makes sense for a company to graduate, but that should be the exception and not the rule.
Speaker 3:So this company came to us, they signed up in late November, they were live by the end of December, which is awesome, and they've leveraged a lot of our payoffs capabilities, but particularly our boarding solution and particularly bulk boarding Will kind of alluded to it where we underwrote each of the management companies and then bulk boarded hundreds of communities instantaneously underneath them, and we did that very frictionlessly. But at the same time, some of the nuance there is that each of these associations have very kind of complex fee schedules. They're charging different service fees with a percentage and a dollar amount. They have different minimums on the ACH side. A lot of them will absorb the pricing for ACH and there's all these nuance in terms of their pricing. So using our configuration profiles tools, we were able to automate the setup of all these complex fee schedules pretty much automatically for them and just saved us a lot of manual headache and something that not a lot of companies could do at the bat.
Speaker 3:The other example that comes to mind is we recently signed, at the end of the year, a top regional bank, very well-known brand, household name in the country, and we beat out some serious competition that was bidding for this business and the reason we won it was predominantly because of our payment operations tools and basically what we're doing with this partner is through an integration with us.
Speaker 3:They're embedding our entire platform into their online bankings portal and allowing their 500,000 plus small businesses to log into that portal automatically, be pre-approved for payment processing Instantaneously. When they log in, they can send an invoice, run a virtual terminal payment, set up an auto pay, pay a vendor. It's all leveraging our tools and they were able to do this, and why they were excited about working with us is because we integrated to their rails, they embedded our platform into their portal and because of our payoff solutions, they control all underwriting, they control all the pricing and billing, they're the ones doing and monitoring all the risk and the transaction flow that's going through there, and it's just been a huge value add to them to be able to offer their merchants this kind of modern payments Effectively. What they're doing is becoming their own square and offering their customers their own square, and without our pay-off suite they wouldn't be able to do that.
Speaker 2:Okay, so Will back over to you. Let's talk a little more about the product. Maybe peel the onion back a little bit.
Speaker 4:Let's talk about it, about how you guys have customers who are benefiting from your compliance, risk management, fraud prevention maybe from that angle, yeah, I think for starters, you know, here at Paylee we've got to do a mandate I think we may have spoken about in one of our prior sessions where our top priorities are security and reliability, and so we invest heavily in our platform and since we're an embedded payments provider, we naturally think of how to help secure our platform partners From a compliance standpoint. We're PCI level one, we're SOC two type one client. From an integration standpoint, a lot of our partners will leverage our embedded components where I was investing heavily in how to make sure that we are reducing or minimizing the PCI compliance exposure that they have, because it's a big investment on anybody's hands and most, if not all, of our partners want to minimize that investment and offload that to us right. And so from an integration standpoint, we work very, very closely with them to prevent also risk and suspicious activity. So we'll, through our risk engine.
Speaker 4:We've got various policies and rules that you can build out with a lot of conditional statements that, based on the running context of that transaction or activity of that merchant, will either alert us or flag or block certain activity from that specific merchant. So heavily investing in there with a lot of cool tools I think Joe just mentioned that we not only on risk and fraud prevention but across all our payoff suite of products, we have configuration profiles behind the scenes, which is pretty neat because it allows us to cascade a lot of these rules or conditions across multiple merchants and books. It facilitates the management and the operational wherewithal of our platforms and ourselves to mitigate against risk and fraud, but also on the other services and payoffs?
Speaker 2:Okay, so Will. What advanced risk and fraud tools do you guys offer your software platforms?
Speaker 4:So we have a spectrum of influence when it comes to managing risk. At Pay-O-D we perform the managed service, where we give our partners a seat at the table and helping establish their fraud controls then on different industry standards, and we ultimately determine a specific risk profile or policy right For their set of merchants or individual merchants right, depending on sizing. If the partner is a full-blown payfac or acquiring bank, they can have complete control of these tools and they can customize their own policies right. So, of course, in line with the sponsor bank network and any regulatory requirement, we can allow advanced risk tools and recording where they could flag and block or hold transactions, block IP addresses, and we do a lot of things in the background where we will detect geolocation or different proxies or the threats that kind of at the surface level of a transaction are hard to detect, right. So leveraging a lot of those tools for us is how do we make sure that we protect not only Payably but also our partners, right, since they're reliant on us?
Speaker 2:Okay, so one final question for you Will what trends do you see that are shaping the future of your PayOps product?
Speaker 4:Well, it's early AI right, You're seeing a lot more sophisticated attempt from bad actors impersonating legitimate merchants or attempting to defraud payers and merchants. Right, we're investing a lot in those AI tools to combat these bad guys. For example, we're valuing ways to surmise underwriting cases with AI to make it easier for underwriters to access the risk signals at our most rather than reading through every single flag. Right, it's very onerous sometimes when you got a lot of volume, but how do we leverage those tools to give them the overall risk analytics to find trends, and that might be faster than kind of the human eye can do? We are currently internally experimenting with a neat MVP on business analytics and kind of AI agent where you could just talk to the AI agent and you could ask a query, and kind of in a human form, right. And you could ask a query in kind of in a human form, right Certain reporting questions or ask for more concise data on any inquiries you have. So, for example, if a partner inquires on the 10 most profitable merchants, what are the biggest fluctuations on volume in the past five days? Right, any reasons for ACH returns in the portfolio, type of thing Provide kind of more intelligent, immediate answers, which is just kind of exporting data and you have to dip through that information.
Speaker 4:Part of our mission is easily embed and monetize payments right. So continue to invest in embedded tools, our creative tool, which we think is very unique and neat and huge differentiator we intend to have dispute management component, risk reporting component, manage your PCI surveys in an embedded way things like that. Right On the payout side of things, risk is huge as well, because once that money leaves the merchant bank account, it's very hard to recover. So how do we make sure that when we're sending money to a specific supplier, vendor, that we are very, very sure that it's that specific recipient that was originally intended to receive those funds? Right, so not an investment, there is happening.
Speaker 2:Okay, so Joe, over to you for one final question. If a software business is struggling with payment inefficiencies, what's the first step they should take to optimize their software performance or their operations?
Speaker 3:I think it sounds simple, but if you're going to subscribe to I'm a software company, so I'm a payments company. It's really to put your shoes in the payments company and think like a payments business. We see this take many different forms. A simple one is with pricing. I think a lot of our partners will come to us and say, hey, we want to offer really low pricing, this kind of pricing to beat out Stripe or beat out whatever kind of ISOs have stronghold in that vertical, and they're missing the point where they're building a fully embedded and a good experience. That has a lot of value and oftentimes, if you do it the right way, you should be able to charge a premium for that. I think the same goes along with having these software companies really try and understand the compliance and risk requirements that are mandated by the sponsor, banks, networks and regulators. So when these platforms understand these considerations, then they can partner with their platform like a Payably and really try and customize the experience as much as possible. The reality is, unless you're working with a modern payment infrastructure partner like Payably, you have very little control over the payment operations. But if you understand the landscape and you have a modern provider like Payably, then we can be very collaborative in understanding your merchant profile, learning from you as a software partner and tailoring the boarding. Learning from you as a software partner and tailoring the boarding, the underwriting, the risk management to make the most frictionless experience, while protecting the software partner, the merchant, and payably and not running afoul of any regulatory requirements.
Speaker 3:I think the other thing is there's just a lot of amazing information online. There's thought leaders and consultants out there, so I highly recommend following people like Arshad Jamil, tony Caudell and Emily Bartels, who are former operators and have a lot of domain expertise that provide a lot of great free content. I'm sure we'd be happy to chat with anybody, and there's also some great consultants out there for people that do want to invest in this. Fintech Fraction is great and Copaya is great. Finserv Advisors is another one that we've worked with in the past that they really have a ton of domain expertise, they're straight shooters and they'll be able to guide a partner, a software partner that's really trying to optimize their payment operations as much as possible. So I highly recommend them. So, understanding the payments business model, if you will, partnering with a payments platform that's modern, that is going to be collaborative and really educate you on the payments business model, and then, obviously, networking with those thought leaders and those consultants that might be able to help you through the journey.
Speaker 2:Okay, so Joe Will, we've covered a lot about pay ops and all the functionality. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up the show? And Joe, we'll start with you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think. Firstly, thank you, greg, for this experience. We've been able to, through this series, dive into the three Ps pay and payout payoffs. I think that's what makes Payably extremely unique is the merging, the unifying of these three Ps, and we're really excited and bullish about the future of Payably. If you're a software partner, a bank partner that's interested in learning more about Payably, please reach out.
Speaker 3:We'd love to educate you on what we're building over here and for folks that may be in the market for a new job, we've got some awesome new roles at Payably. We're scaling rapidly and we're looking for the best and brightest to help us on this quest. So we're looking for a brand new UI architect. We're looking for a product marketer which I think is super exciting, given that there's just so much, especially on the payment operation side to educate our partners on how they can leverage these tools to create a better merchant experience, to have more visibility into their payments business as well. So those are some of the key roles that we're hiring for Got a lot of exciting stuff coming down the pike, not only from a product standpoint, but some big partnerships that we're going to be announcing publicly soon. So stay tuned for more and again, thanks so much for allowing us to participate on this podcast, greg.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. I look forward to hearing those announcements. Will any parting comments from you?
Speaker 4:Well, just thank you for giving us an opportunity to spread the gospel on Payably and kind of our story and why we think we're unique and well-positioned with these three Ps and certainly on the pay-off side.
Speaker 4:As I kind of reflect back when I first started in the industry, the industry has been built around these legacy support models to support how I started off as a feet on the street, if you will, selling door-to-door with different solutions.
Speaker 4:But the world has changed and we deeply, deeply believe that our payments are going to live within vertical staff in a fully embeddable way.
Speaker 4:So we are focusing every single dollar and resource into what we think is the future, which is building that modern stack from the ground up help platforms ultimately then monetize on payments. And doing that is hard right, because supporting ISOs or sales agents is a completely different beast when you're supporting these technology companies that have a whole set of requirements from a development standpoint, from an integration standpoint APIs or embedded components that are needed but also have been able to educate them on payments and letting them know how they can monetize their money in but also money out, and that's very, very fun. But as a scolded business, obviously leverage to use payment operation capability. So exciting time, a lot of hard work, but, as Joe said, we're always looking for great talent, good folks that have, ideally, payments experience but we always love to train our folks on payments but great developers, great engineers, just good people that are very mission-driven. So again, thanks for giving us an opportunity and to the next one.
Speaker 2:All right. So, joe Will, thank you both so much, not just for this episode but for the three others we've done together. I really have enjoyed getting to know both of you and the company. So again, thank you so much for being on the show today.
Speaker 3:It's great it's been such a pleasure.
Speaker 2:Thanks, ray, and to all your listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well. To learn more about Payably and specifically their PayOps product, please visit payablycom. Slash pay hyphen ops.