Leaders In Payments

Ben Turner, CEO & President of Verituity | Episode 384

• Greg Myers • Season 6 • Episode 394

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What happens when you combine identity verification with payment precision? That's the question Ben Turner set out to answer when he founded Verituity, a company transforming enterprise disbursements by focusing on verification at every step of the payment process.

Drawing from his experiences at Network Solutions in the early days of e-commerce, Turner recognized that payment fraud and errors stem from an identity problem. When businesses can't confidently verify who they're paying, millions of dollars are lost to mistakes and fraudsters.

Turner challenges conventional thinking about payment speed and modernization. While most conversations focus on real-time capabilities, he argues that what enterprises truly need is payment precision and cash optimization. "Real-time is more valuable often on the debit side than it is on the credit side," Turner explains, highlighting how businesses want to optimize when funds leave their accounts rather than simply accelerating all payments. This insight transforms digital disbursements from potential risk into strategic cash management tools.

Ready to transform your approach to enterprise disbursements? Discover how Verituity's verification-first model can eliminate payment errors, reduce fraud risk, and optimize your cash management. Connect with Verituity to learn more. 

Speaker 1:

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 Meyers, and on today's show we have a very special guest, ben Turner, the CEO and president of Verituity. Ben has been on the show before, actually in May of 2022, so about three years ago. So, ben, welcome back to the show. Thanks, glad to be back, awesome. Well, let's start out by having you tell our audience a little bit about yourself. Maybe where you're from, where you grew up, where you went to school, maybe where you currently live, where you're from where you grew up, where you went to school, maybe where you currently live. A few things like that, yeah, sure.

Ben Turner:

So I grew up in Southern Ohio coal country and farm country and ended up going to undergrad at Miami University, moved to DC, lived in DC for a couple years, ended up moving to Houston, worked in Houston for about a year and ended up back in DC in my first job in technology working for AT&T a year and ended up back in DC in my first job in technology working for AT&T.

Ben Turner:

Went from there and was part of a startup called Network Solutions, where we were doing we were one of the first early e-commerce companies. As a matter of fact, part of the reason I started Verituity was we were being paid for domain names and websites via checks. We were out how to go from checks to credit cards, which was a massive undertaking because we at one point had one of the world's largest access databases as our billing system. Oh wow. Went from there, ended up getting acquired by a company called VeriSign that was really focused on the security and identity side, and that's where I started to merge this concept of payments and identity and then fast forward. Before I started this company, I helped launch a supply chain analytics company which highlighted the risk in the world of B2B payments and the challenges that enterprises are facing and that led me to launch Verituity, where we're all about solving for businesses their disbursement challenges, whether it's to a consumer or to another business.

Greg Myers:

Okay, well, let's dive into Verituity. For those that maybe didn't listen to the last episode, maybe give us the kind of high-level overview of the company.

Ben Turner:

Sure, sure. So the core principle of everything we do at Verituity is making sure that we're able to know, verify and understand every transaction. We do that for a couple reasons. One it allows us to make sure that we have the precision you need in enterprise disbursements to know that you're using the right funding account, you're paying the right payee, you're paying the right payment account and you're able to do reconciliation in near real time.

Ben Turner:

The second core principle is that those of us in the world of payments have managed to make payments really complex for a whole bunch of reasons, and a lot of it's due to legacy systems or legacy processes that banks have, the proliferation of similar payment types, like what's the real difference between RTP and FedNow, and so we fundamentally believe that we call it the network. The network should handle that complexity for businesses, because businesses aren't in the business of building payment products. They're in the businesses of delivering a package, of issuing an insurance claim, of paying an energy rebate, and so that's our second core principle Let technology handle that complexity so that the business, the consumer, doesn't need to worry about it. And the third is if you understand the identity of the recipient, whether it's a business or a consumer, you can build a lot of trust that you're going to be able to make that payment to the right person to the right payment account. And so today we support everything from insurance claims to energy rebates, to actually ESOP payments, to travel reimbursements.

Ben Turner:

And we purposely built the company to be able to support that range of use cases because we believe that this verification and payment layer should be independent from back-end systems, that it gets the data from the back-end systems but shouldn't be attached to the workflow. So a good example is insurance has its own software to process claims. They should be able to use whatever software they want and we should be able to pick up that file to pay those insurance claims and then enable these safe payments. Mortgage servicing is the same way. They have a different set of software that handles processing the servicing of a mortgage, paying out escrow payments, paying out balances when they close an account. And again, being independent from that allows us to support a wide range of use cases and really meet our enterprise customers' requirements.

Greg Myers:

Okay, and back when we talked a couple years ago, your main, I think, channel you sold through banks and financial institutions. Is that still the primary?

Ben Turner:

Yeah, so we sell through banks and we sell to large enterprises and let them bring their own banks.

Greg Myers:

Okay.

Ben Turner:

So we do that for two reasons.

Ben Turner:

One, in the world of large enterprise disbursements, banks are always going to play a central role because of the liquidity requirements, and so we're about enabling the modernization of those disbursements without disrupting the business relationships that that enterprise needs with their bank to operate their business.

Ben Turner:

The benefit the business gets is they can trust the precision of those payments, that they're going to the right payee, the right payment account. But it also gives them the visibility they need to optimize their cash management From a bank standpoint. It allows the banks to go to their customers and help them solve one of their challenges, which is how do you get rid of errors and frauds in payment and how do they help grow their customer relationships so they can maintain that treasury relationship which is really valuable to a large bank? So I think we recently announced an investment in partnership with Citizens Bank where we're providing the underlying infrastructure for their disbursement product and it's all about that verification layer, making sure that they can support mitigating errors and fraud, making sure they can deliver the visibility their enterprise customers need to modernize their disbursements.

Greg Myers:

And I know we talked last time a good bit about choice, like who chooses how someone gets paid. So curious if that's changed or still kind of the same theory.

Ben Turner:

Yeah, so it's the same theory, but the interesting thing is, payment choice or payment optionality is table stakes. Anybody in the B2B or B2C payment space is going to be able to offer it. What we do that's unique, though, is that understanding every transaction and verifying every transaction provides the information on what's the right payment optionality for a specific payment, and then we layer on top of that is what is that enterprise's preference to offer from payment types, whether it's pay-by-bank, whether it's virtual card, whether it's a combination of both, whether it's Venmo, whatever they matches to their business model? Then we'll have that overlay. So we're making that choice or providing those options to the payee based on risk, based on the enterprise or payer's preferences, and then based on the transaction thresholds for each of the payment types.

Speaker 1:

Okay.

Greg Myers:

And with all the talk lately in the last couple of years faster payments and speed does that become more critical? Or is the security and making sure you get it right more important than the speed?

Ben Turner:

Yeah, I mean, what's really more important is getting rid of the errors and fraud, because the truth is, in the world of enterprise payments it's a negotiated thing, so we actually talk about it as on-time payments. So whether I've agreed to pay my supplier or pay that insurance claim in five days or 15 days or right now, is really what you're delivering against. More importantly, the way we look at the world is you're also trying to optimize the cash management for our enterprise customer. So it's the timing of the debit and credit that really matters. So real-time is more valuable often on the debit side than it is on the credit side, because if I'm going to pay an insurance claim on day 25 or pay a supplier on day 45, I want to initiate that payment either that day or the day before, so the money sits in my bank account longer.

Greg Myers:

Okay, and I think back then two, three years ago, you were able to disperse to 140 countries through your banks. Is that still the same?

Ben Turner:

Yeah, we're north of that now. So you know, internationally we support five different payment types. We've formed a pretty unique partnership with MasterCard around Move, where we're not only domestically but also for cross-border, enabling Move. One of the things that we're able to do because we look at the world as a data problem is for banks we can implement things like push-to-card or cross-border without touching their core systems. It's all about using their existing rails to do the debits and credits.

Greg Myers:

Okay, okay. Well, what would you say? Differentiates Verituity from your competitors.

Ben Turner:

Yeah, it really is this comprehensive approach to verification right.

Ben Turner:

We actually start at the point of that file, that disbursement file, leaving whether it's an ERP or a treasury system or a bank's core system and start the verification process there to catch those anomalies, those errors and the fraud activity before you even start to try to process the payment. And then we focus on making sure we know who that payee is, that we can establish the relationship between the payee and the payment and the payer, that we can make sure they have the right payment optionality or, if they have a payment account on file, that that's a valid payment account, that that payment account is associated with the actual payee, and then making sure the right payment routing happens and verifying that that is whatever the status is. Has it settled yet? Is it in progress? Is something else going on and tying that whole chain together so that our customers can trust and have the precision they need in payments to know they're paying the right pay to the right payment account on time? And that makes us oddly unique in the market.

Greg Myers:

Okay, and where do you see sort of the disbursement industry headed, say, in the next three to five years? What are the major trends you're seeing?

Ben Turner:

Yeah. So what we're seeing is a drive to not only get off check right so there's in the US there's still a significant amount of checks but also getting rid of the cost of operating legacy disbursement systems, because everybody's feeling cost pressures. There's three things that drive that. One is just the flat-out errors and fraud that happen. Oftentimes in a large enterprise. There are more errors than fraud, but the dollar amount of the fraud is larger. The second thing is the bad guys are getting more sophisticated and constantly active.

Ben Turner:

Our entire platform is built around AI. It's not just AI that each part has its own model, it's all linked together so you get a good decision for the enterprise. Then, overlaying that, are the enterprise's policies of what is an acceptable risk, how should that payment be routed? What are the right payment types. What we think is going to happen in the world of disbursements is you have this cost and fraud factor driving the need to modernization. But where we think it's headed is because you're solving for that and because you create better visibility is you can now optimize the cash. A lot of large enterprises are slow to move off check because they like the float. Well, you can create the float in digital if you have the visibility and the intelligence on how to manage those debits and credits, and that's where we think it's headed.

Greg Myers:

Okay, and I think when we talked three years ago, there was some talk about crypto. I don't know if there's been any advances in dispersing through crypto or stable coins or anything but curious what's going on there?

Ben Turner:

We can do it. But we see no demand and my view is that as the regulatory environment shifts a little bit on that and with the current administration's push that will start to change right. But if you think about it as an enterprise, the fluctuation in value risk you don't want to bear. So the way we approach it is the same way we approach cross-border is shift that risk to your payee and let them decide when they want to lock in the rate.

Greg Myers:

Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, I just it's curious there's little demand. I mean I certainly I don't know anyone that wants to get paid with crypto. I mean maybe that's coming in the next few years, but I certainly don't at least hang around with anybody that's getting paid in any kind of disbursements with crypto.

Ben Turner:

No, I mean right now, crypto looks more like a commodity than it does actually a currency. Now, stablecoin is closer to a currency, but you look at the steps the current administration is taking, it's likely it will start to look like a currency. Once that happens, I think you'll see some people put their toe in the water.

Greg Myers:

Yeah, so you mentioned AI and certainly a lot of the conversations and payments that I have about AI it's related to fraud. Are you using AI in other areas of your business or mainly within that?

Ben Turner:

Yeah, so we fully embrace AI. We use it for everything from making our software development process more efficient to providing value to our customers, and so on the providing value to the customer side. We use it to detect errors and fraud. We also use it to monitor transactions and tell the story of that transaction, and then we use it as well to make that decision on what's the right way to handle the debit and credit.

Greg Myers:

Okay, okay, that makes sense, all right. Well, let's switch gears a little bit and talk about you. Maybe talk a little bit. You told us a little bit about your career background, but maybe how you decided to do this business, what was the pain point that you were trying to solve for? Maybe a little bit about the founder story.

Ben Turner:

Yeah, yeah.

Ben Turner:

So the reason I started this business was really informed about my journey from Network Solutions to starting here, and so one of the challenges that we had at Network Solutions was getting off check.

Ben Turner:

So when we went off check, it was before there was any sophistication around accepting credit cards online and checking for fraud, and we had unbelievable fraud rates unbelievable to the point where we almost got shut down by all the card companies.

Ben Turner:

So the way we solved it was we figured out hey, if we can understand the identity on the other side of the card, then we know what to stop and what's okay. And so that became foundational to the way I've been thinking about payments throughout my career, which is it's really about this convergence of identity and payments and verification that allows you to build trust and payments. So when I was at this supply chain risk company, it was the same thing that we were seeing with suppliers. There's not only risk in the supply chain, but the payment part of the supply chain was very challenging because it's easy to insert fraud. So an email compromise event and all of a sudden you're not paying your supplier, you're paying some fraudster's account. Again, that can be solved by understanding the identity, and so it all just kind of converged for us in terms of thinking about how to solve this problem over the last really 20 years leading up to starting the company.

Speaker 1:

Okay.

Greg Myers:

And I don't think I asked this last time, but I'm curious where did the name come from?

Ben Turner:

So myself and my other co-founders, chris Smith and Anthony Renzetti, are not the world's best namers, but I was out on a trail run and I was like, hey, maybe that will work. And so that's how we did it Nothing very sophisticated.

Greg Myers:

Well, good, no, so not the four hour brainstorming on the whiteboard, or anything like that.

Ben Turner:

No, trust me, if the three of us had done that, the name would have been horrible.

Greg Myers:

Great, great Well. You mentioned trail riding and I know last time we talked about some of your personal passions and obviously your family and you also mentioned being outdoors, so maybe let's step back and talk about your passion for the business. What areas of the business are you most passionate about?

Ben Turner:

Yeah, so I love data challenges and really putting trust and precision and payments is a data challenge, and so there's nothing more exciting Matter of fact, we're doing it today is sitting down with our data science team and reviewing a rock curve to see what do we think about false positive rates versus the positive rates. There's nothing more exciting than figuring out how to tell the story with the data that's available to you and figuring out how to fill in the gaps so that you can get safety into that payment, you can get visibility into that payment. To me, that's the fun part of this business. It's all about telling the story through data. The second thing that probably every founder tells you. I enjoy working with our customers, like hearing the problems they have and showing them how easy it is to solve some of them if you think about it as a data problem.

Greg Myers:

So who do you work with at these, like the banks and the large enterprise companies? Is it the CFO office?

Ben Turner:

Yes, it comes out as CFO, so generally the treasurer is the person that's on point, Depending on the organization right, there might be something called a shared services group inside there that's also involved, but it's really driven by the treasury function or the CFO function out of the enterprise and on the banking side it's the treasury teams.

Greg Myers:

Okay, and then you mentioned data. How much of their data do you ingest into your systems?

Ben Turner:

So, to give you a sense, when we go to verify a business, the only thing we're getting from the bank's customer, or from what we collect directly, is the basic profile information you would expect for a business. But we look across more than 210 million data points to verify not only the business but that admin's relationship to the business, the business's relationship to the payment. So that's what I mean. It's one of the fun things about our business is you're telling this big story using data that delivers outsized results about lowering errors, lowering fraud and providing visibility.

Greg Myers:

Okay, well, back to your passion. So on the personal side, you had mentioned family and, obviously, being in the outdoors. Any new hobbies or anything in the last couple of years?

Ben Turner:

It's hard to have a hobby when you're building a business. Yeah, I love mountain biking, I love trail running, I like history. I think one of the biggest things you can do as a business person or a founder is read biographies, autobiographies, whether it's Ben Franklin or Grant or Steve Jobs. It's a great way to learn, but it's also fascinating to see how they went about, particularly Benjamin Franklin, how he went about particularly Benjamin Franklin, how he went about being so successful in so many different facets of society and the creativity and the freeness he had in his thinking.

Greg Myers:

Yeah, I've read not as many of the older people in history's biography, more the current kind of business leaders, and really really enjoy that as well. So final question someone comes to you and says, ben, I'm interested in payments and fintech as a career. Maybe they just graduated from college or maybe they're changing industries and they say what do I need to do to be successful in this industry? What would you tell them?

Ben Turner:

So I would tell them a couple of things. One, it's an oddly technical space from not a software or AI, but just a technical space around the rules of how you can handle payments. And so you have to have a passion to want to go learn that or you really can't be successful. The language is unique, the rules are unique. You just have to learn that as a foundation. The second thing is as a foundation.

Ben Turner:

The second thing is make a decision. Do you like dealing with enterprises as your customer or do you like dealing with consumers? Because those are two different worlds. And then you throw in banks. If you like banks, then you can have a third world, but you really have to pick one of those focuses because you have to become an expert in that broader market. And then the third thing is just look at the world differently. One of the reasons I'm giving a speech soon on what's the similarity between Benjamin Franklin, bob Dylan and Steve Jobs in building a payment business. Well, they all require first principle thinking. They change the world by thinking about things differently, and I think if you're going into a fintech, that's what you want to go in with the mindset. You want to find fintechs that are thinking like that.

Greg Myers:

Yeah, I love that last piece of advice. That's interesting. I think there are a lot of fintechs thinking differently, so there's some opportunity out there. Well, ben, we've covered a lot of ground so far about you and the company. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up the show? No, this was great, okay. Well, ben, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate your time. I know your time is very precious, so thanks again for being on the show today. Thank you, take care, take care. And to all 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.