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Leaders In Payments
Leaders In Payments
Brandon Spear, CEO of TreviPay | Episode 434
Dive into the transformative world of B2B payments with Brandon Spear, CEO of TreviPay, as he reveals how their platform is revolutionizing trade credit for businesses worldwide. Operating across 32 countries and primarily serving enterprise clients, TreviPay has created a comprehensive solution that manages the entire order-to-cash cycle - from credit applications and underwriting to invoice generation, collections, and cash application.
What sets TreviPay apart? Their global underwriting platform delivers real-time credit decisions while combating sophisticated fraud schemes that have become increasingly convincing in the AI era. By generating invoices on behalf of merchants, they enable powerful data management capabilities that solve industry-specific challenges. For automotive manufacturers, this means enforcing contract pricing across dealership networks, reducing pricing errors from one-in-three to approximately one-in-thousand. For businesses expanding internationally, it eliminates the complexity of producing tax-compliant invoices across diverse jurisdictions.
The pandemic marked a turning point for B2B payments, exposing the vulnerabilities of manual processes when employees couldn't be in the office. Rising interest rates further accelerated adoption as working capital became more expensive, pushing companies to optimize receivables management. These market shifts have positioned TreviPay for explosive growth - they estimate a $20 billion revenue opportunity emerging in their target markets over the next 5-7 years.
Perhaps most importantly, Brandon emphasizes that payment experiences directly impact customer loyalty: "Experience loyalty is becoming more important than brand loyalty." Businesses that offer accurate invoices and flexible payment options capture a larger share of wallet - a powerful reminder that even the most technical aspects of payments ultimately come down to creating exceptional customer experiences.
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 on today's show we have a very special guest back, brandon Spear, who is the CEO of TreviPay. Brandon, thank you so much for coming back on the show and welcome, and I'm glad we're going to get to catch up again today.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thanks for having me, Greg. I can't believe it's been a couple of years since we last spoke, but it's good to be back on the show and thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. So I looked it up, it was May of 2021. You were episode 84, and I'm on episode 432. So it has been a while, so we have a lot to catch up on Before we dive into the company. If you don't mind, let's talk a little bit about yourself. So tell the audience a little bit about yourself, just a quick snapshot maybe where you grew up, where you went to school, where you currently live, just a few things like that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, sure, of course I'd be happy to. So, as you can probably tell from the accent, I didn't actually grow up in the US. I grew up in South Africa and most of my background has been in software and technology businesses of various flavors. And then I actually was in a role in the early 2000s that brought me to the US. The company was headquartered in Dallas, we were doing procurement software and that brought me to the US about 20 years ago now, and Dallas was the first city that I was in. And then subsequently I've taken on this role with TreviPay, which was about 10 years ago now actually a little over about almost 11 years ago now and that role brought me to Kansas City, which is where the business is headquartered. And so I've been here for the last 11 years and, like I said, mainly software and technology businesses. Trevipay was my first foray into a business that also had payments as part of it. There's obviously a big part of the business that's software as well, but it was my first foray into payments.
Speaker 2:So I think we've talked about this before and you were in Dallas, so now Kansas City. So Cowboys Chiefs, or how do you handle that?
Speaker 3:You know you've got to have an AFC team and an NFC team. So fortunately that's kind of how my wife and I are. My wife is a huge Cowboys fan, lived in Texas for most of her life and so a very big Cowboys fan. So every four years it gets complicated when they play each other. Then you basically have to decide who you're really supporting. But it's been fun having both teams.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I get it. I'm in Dallas, so it's all Cowboys all the time. That's just the way it is here. Well, thanks for sharing that. So let's dive in and talk about the company. So remind the audience what TreviPay does in and talk about the company.
Speaker 3:So remind the audience what TreviPay does.
Speaker 3:Trevipay is really focused on helping merchants offer trade credit to their business customers, so it's B2B business and it's really all around that entire business process of offering trade credit, which is usually referred to as the order to cash cycle.
Speaker 3:And if you offer trade credit to your customers, if you're producing invoices, then you have to deal with things like how you provide credit lines, how you manage credit lines, how you actually generate those invoices and deliver them, how you deal with disputes, how you deal with collections activities and then ultimately, at the end of the cycle, how you deal with cash application. And we do all of this for these merchants using our platform. It really, then, enables the customers. We have to focus on what they do best, which is selling their products, selling their services, and not having to deal with that order-to-cash cycle. That's the service we provide, and we do it in a number of different industries and we do it in 32 countries. So the other angle we can bring to bear is help many of our customers extend their offerings into a broader set of markets, into a broader set of customers.
Speaker 2:So you mentioned it's pretty much all B2B. Are there certain sizes of companies that the product works better for?
Speaker 3:Yeah, great question. So, generally speaking, we have focused on larger clients. So we've focused on more enterprise type of customers, larger clients. So we've focused on more enterprise type of customers and in most cases, that's really because those are the types of organizations that often have the biggest challenges with this. It's also been just in terms of our own energy and our own return on investment. It's been the best place for us to focus, because we essentially get more bang for our buck in terms of sales and sales and marketing when we work with those types of clients. So, generally, most of our customers are larger. So, to put a number on it, we're usually focused on businesses that have more than 100 million revenue. That's sort of where we draw the threshold for us.
Speaker 2:What's the pricing model? So is it like subscription-based, or how does that work?
Speaker 3:Yeah, great question. So our pricing model is a transaction fee that's based upon the percentage of the invoice, and there's a couple of things that influence what that price will ultimately end up being. We have, like I mentioned, a platform that supports the whole order-to-cash cycle. We also have a number of what we refer to as intelligent network apps, which you can think of as essentially add-ons or additional modules that make sense in certain industries or in certain geographies, and those are additional that not all customers have but some customers choose. And then the final component of our offering is we're also depending on the customer, the merchant, and what they're looking for. We're also able to facilitate them getting paid early, and so there's a working capital component to our fee as well. So some customers of ours take all three of those capabilities. Other customers of ours might just take the base platform, but it's essentially a transaction fee based on the invoice value.
Speaker 2:Okay, what would you say is the biggest challenge that you solve for your customers?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so it varies a little bit by industry, but maybe if I can give you some practical examples it'll help bring this to life for you and for your listeners. So in some of the industries that we serve automotive is one, for example automotive manufacturers their challenge is, when they're working with large national accounts, large national fleets, how do they have a uniform contract price when they sell to those fleets? So you can imagine the challenge. If you're an OEM, you have dealerships that you essentially sell through, because all of the parts and maintenance that goes into looking after a vehicle is done through the dealership network. But those dealers all run on different software and so there's no easy way to get contract compliance across all of those different platforms. That's one of the big capabilities that we have, is we would help those OEMs put in a uniform contract price. And so how this works is you can imagine, if you're a large fleet, somebody like UPS or FedEx you take your truck in for maintenance as part of that servicing process.
Speaker 3:When the dealer actually goes to create an invoice. They create effectively a pro forma invoice. They run it against our platform. We check every line item on the invoice for contract price accuracy and then, once we've confirmed that, we actually create the invoice on behalf of the dealer and then deliver it to the correct place inside that large national account. So to give you a sense of this, before our solution goes into some of these situations there's as many as one in three invoices that are incorrect because the pricing is wrong. You can imagine what that does for a dealer in terms of delayed payments and delayed working capital just a process that's complicated and messy. After our solution goes in, this tends to drop to about one in a thousand invoices where there's a pricing problem. So it significantly improves the lives of the dealers, the lives of the fleets and obviously for the OEMs. They're basically able to sell more as a consequence.
Speaker 2:And what would you say? Differentiates TreviPay from your competitors out there?
Speaker 3:I think there's a handful of things that I'll talk to. So the first one is we have a global underwriting platform, which you would think the big credit bureaus. It would be easy to go and get a global solution. It's actually really quite difficult if you operate in multiple countries to be able to underwrite clients all over the world. So we have a global underwriting platform that's very effective. It's real time, it's completely digital. Many of the customers and industries we serve they often have manual processes still and paper based processes, and so you kind of completely transform that onboarding experience.
Speaker 3:The other thing that's happening in that area is there's an increasing amount of fraud there. You can imagine, as you start to acquire more and more customers online, there's more and more scope for bad actors to be looking to apply for lines of credit and what they do. They're very sophisticated, greg. It's really challenging because they do business impersonation, where they actually pretend to be a real business. There's synthetic fraud, where they actually create fake shell companies and they endeavor to get credit lines that way, and it's a real arms race for many of the customers we work with that they just can't keep up with the pace of these bad actors and what they're doing. And you can imagine, with the proliferation of AI and the speed that AI is moving at, that's only getting worse. And these bad actors, like I said, are sophisticated. They can create completely fake websites. I mean, everything looks real. So helping identify a fraudulent application through our underwriting process is kind of a key piece of our secret sauce, as well as the actual overall underwriting process itself.
Speaker 3:And then the second thing that's really different about us is we produce the invoice on behalf of our customers. Now the reason that's relevant is it allows us to do some really cool things with the data. For example, I've mentioned that situation with an OEM that's got national contract pricing. That's very hard to do if you don't have a centralized platform that holds the contracts that can create the invoice. But we can also do some really clever things. So, for example, if some of those buyers come to us and say I would really like my transactions aggregated by state because that's how I pay taxes and so I don't really want to get different invoices, I want to get one aggregated invoice once per week and by state.
Speaker 3:Our platform is essentially in a position where we can aggregate the data that way, so we can collect the information and aggregate it and put it on the invoice in a fashion that the buyer wants to receive it. And so creating the invoice is a key part of our secret sauce because it allows us to do those cool things for the data. It also allows us to help customers that want to expand internationally, for example, but really don't want to figure out how to create a tax-compliant invoice in Mexico or Canada or all the various VAT-compliant invoices that are required in Europe. They don't have to deal with that, so we do all of that on their behalf. So I'd say those two things are probably the key differentiators. And then we have these intelligent network apps that I mentioned before, that we've built over the years, that are particular to certain industries or particular to certain geographies, that really allow us to solve some of the challenges that those clients have in those markets or those regions of the world.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Just as you were talking. It made me think about you're sending these invoices on the vendor side if they want to pay a certain way. I mean, there's so many payment methods now and then you guys are doing business all over the world. Multiply what we have here in the US times 30. How do you handle that part of the business?
Speaker 3:worry about well, how am I going to accept payment in all these different countries? So we accept all of the major payment types around the world in all these different markets. We're also able to deal with foreign exchange requirements and variations that our customers might have. So some of our customers, for example, may want to get paid in US dollars but have invoices in Europe that are in euros or Swiss francs or Swedish krona, british pounds, and not have to deal with that conversion and not have to deal with the currency risk, because obviously, if you create an invoice today in pounds and you're only getting paid in 30 days or 60 days time, there's a potential currency translation risk that you might have when that payment actually happens.
Speaker 3:So we're able to deal with all of that complexity for our clients too. But to your point, we accept wires, achs, checks, e-checks, efts all of the various forms of payment in all of the different markets. And then our suppliers choose and for the most part they're getting reimbursed through ACH or FedNow or the other real-time payment types that exist in some of the other markets. They choose how they want to get settled, but there's only one payment type that they have to deal with and then we deal with all of the rest of the complexity of all the payment types that they buy us.
Speaker 2:Okay, great. Well, let's talk a little bit about the future. What is the maybe one biggest opportunity for growth for you guys in the future?
Speaker 3:the things that we believe is going to happen over the next 10 years or so is that B2B is going to catch up to where the consumer space is, and what do I mean by that? Well, there's very little, or there's a surprising amount of manual processes that still exist in B2B, and it's everything from underwriting to how you produce and deliver invoices, to how you deal with collections, that whole order to cash cycle, and so we believe there's going to be enormous opportunity to digitize all of that in all of the industries that we serve, and we feel that momentum building it's one of the most interesting things to have watched. I've been in the company over the last 11 years and for a long time we were talking about what we did, and you would talk to a prospective customer and they had no idea that a business like us even existed or that we could do the things that we do, and that's starting to change. It feels like there's a shift occurring where more and more companies are actually asking this question like why do I do this receivables process myself? Why do I have to manage it myself? It's not necessarily a core business competence.
Speaker 3:Part of the catalyst for this, by the way, was during the pandemic. It really highlighted manual processes, because when people weren't in the office, a whole bunch of those swivel chair processes broke. I think the second thing that's been really interesting is that, with rates increasing, having had essentially free money for so many years, there really wasn't as much of a focus on well, how efficient is my back office around receivables, what sort of job am I doing in collecting invoices on time, and that is again kind of completely pivoted. As rates rose, more and more companies got stretched and their working capital became expensive and so they needed to do a better job managing it. We're tremendously excited about the opportunity. We think B2B is on the cusp of really automating the accounts receivable processes, and we're well placed, obviously, to be a part of that.
Speaker 2:Well, what does success look like for you guys in maybe the next three to five years?
Speaker 3:We feel like to some extent, we're just getting started, greg, because, like I mentioned, we've had all of this initial kind of inertia to overcome in the B2B space. But for us, we think and we actually commissioned one of the big four management consulting firms to do a market study for us, and when they looked at the markets we serve and the propensity for those markets to work with partners like us and so on, we believe, just in the spaces that we're in, that there's a $20 billion revenue opportunity that's going to come to market in the next five to seven years, and so we are doing everything we can to get as much of a share of that as possible. That's the revenue opportunity, so it's not like the size of the market or anything else. That's actually the revenue that could be produced there. We couldn't be more excited. I think that it's on the verge of really breaking out and being a significant part of the overall payments landscape.
Speaker 2:I used to work for a CEO and he talked about our businesses Kind of we built the best blender in the industry. Now we just have to put more fruit in the top of it to make it Sounds like that's sort of where you guys are. It's not about, hey, we got to go create a whole bunch of new stuff. There's just plenty of market out there available.
Speaker 3:If you think about the various stages of market evolution, we've got great proof points with countless early adopters in a whole range of different markets and we're only really now starting to penetrate the next stage of the adoption curve, which are they're not the early adopters, they're the mainstream market, and that's where obviously most of the volume is and where the really big prize is. And so we feel like we're in the process of crossing that chasm and coming a little more well-known. You might've seen, we did a big announcement yesterday we're partnering with Walmart to deliver their whole B2B solution to their clients. When you get endorsements from companies like that the biggest company in the world, saying TriviPay is a good partner for us for B2B, that's the sort of thing that's A inspiring and B we believe endorses the solutions that we have that we think a whole range of customers can benefit from.
Speaker 2:Congratulations on that. That's got to be a big win for you, oh yeah, so when you step back and look at the payments industry kind of as a whole, what do you think are the trends that are reshaping payments?
Speaker 3:I think there's a couple of them, obviously, and they're super topical, you know. So, on the one hand, you've got the evolution of all the real-time payment infrastructure. The US has obviously been a little bit behind Europe in that regard, but, you know, fed now is really accelerating and I think that is going to become the future of how most people do payments. There's also the overlay of what role do stable coins play here, and it's kind of an interesting blend between government-backed cryptocurrencies and private-based currencies. I think it's going to create a whole bunch more efficiency in international currency transfers. I think that those businesses are going to be significantly transformed over the next several years.
Speaker 3:We spoke a little bit about it, but I think AI is going to be transformative here. It's going to be transformative in a lot of back office areas. We're definitely seeing it in our teams and how we're deploying it for our customers. But I also think that it's going to accelerate what I was talking about around fraud and some of the bad actors, and that the speed with which you can stand up a fake website or you can pretend to be a real business all of those things are just going to go so much faster and it does feel like there's going to be a bit of an arms race there. How do you keep up with preventing or being careful as you onboard new customers and I think that's going to make its way into payments ultimately is just being very aware of these bad actors and what they can do. So I think, between stable coins, real-time payments and AI and its role in fraud, those are pretty significant trends that we're watching very, very closely.
Speaker 2:Yeah, on the stable coins. Are you kind of viewing stable coins and I hear this a lot from banks is they kind of view stable coins as just another method of payment? I mean, is that kind of how you view it, or is it deeper than that?
Speaker 3:I think, ultimately, that is what it will become. I think what's transformative about it is that it's going to operate at an entirely different cost level. So that's a part of it. And then I think the second part of it is you're going to be in a position where you can leverage some of the other cool things that blockchains can do around smart contracts. And if you think about some of the processes that exist in B2B where you have to sign a proof of delivery to make certain that something was actually delivered, you can imagine how those processes start to get digitized.
Speaker 3:If you're selling something to someone overseas and your payment is going to be premised on when it's delivered, when that signature happens, it could happen digitally, and then the funds are released immediately. There isn't a process of saying please send me the money. The money is essentially almost like in an escrow, waiting for the right triggers from the smart contract. So I think it's going to be transformative in that regard, because if you think about our payment infrastructure today, it's really just about moving the money with a little bit of data on the side. I think the payment infrastructure in the future, you're not only going to have the ability to move the money, but you're going to be able to do a lot more with data and leverage.
Speaker 2:things like smart contracts and other triggers that can basically determine when the funds flows occur can basically determine when the funds flows occur, yeah, and then it seems that around AI, obviously it's a buzz and everybody's talking about it, but it seems to be the fraud application I hear about all the time in payments. I think that's a real use case. But the other area that I hear about a lot is anything that has a lot of data, and you're dealing with tons of data that AI is really going to be transformative.
Speaker 3:It definitely is. So, to give you a sense of what we're doing in this regard, we have a number of customers and we sort of sit on top of all of their transactional data with their clients and we've built machine learning models that are now providing feedback to our customers on we think this customer is about to check. So our primary customer is the merchant and we've built these ML models that now allow us to give this feedback to our clients to say, this customer is displaying the characteristics of someone who would churn, and then we're using that and rolling it into a loyalty program where they can go back to that customer and say, hey, if you spend this amount of money in the next 60 days, 90 days, you'll get a rebate or some other variation on a theme there around loyalty. And all of this is now just happening in real time because of the machine learning model that we've built. And if you think about how that extends out going forward, we're pretty excited about helping our customers figure out where the white space is within their client base.
Speaker 3:Obviously, churn is an easier one to get at because if somebody was buying at a certain level, their buying is declining or they're spending less, and you can identify that relatively easily. But what we're particularly excited about is a new model that we're in the process of building, where you can compare buyers to one another that have similar characteristics and say this buyer is buying a basket of these 15 things on a regular basis, but this buyer is only buying 10 of them. Why are they not buying the other five? What is causing them to not buy the other five? And that might be pricing strategy, it might be marketing, they might not know, and so there's a whole really useful set of information you can provide back to say there's white space here. These are existing clients, but there's white space within these existing customers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's fascinating, Brandon. A couple of final questions before we wrap up. If you could kind of look back to your younger self, maybe just starting your career, what kind of career advice would you give yourself?
Speaker 3:It's so interesting because my career was kind of serendipitous and I don't know how yours unfolded, greg, but I felt like I got lucky at times, like I was in the right place at the right time, and I think the best advice I could give myself is just be comfortable with the journey. It's not always the destination. There are going to be things that you do and decisions that you make throughout your career that you have no idea what the long-term impact of that is going to be, and so just enjoy the ride. Enjoy the journey, because you will learn something from it, and then that will prepare you for whatever comes next. And so be patient and let it come at you rather than worrying about what the destination might be.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's great advice. So if you could have our listeners think about one thing related to payments as kind of a takeaway from this conversation, what would that be?
Speaker 3:So for us, we have definitely developed the view that the way you allow your customers to pay and, more importantly, the way you produce the invoices, the content for them to pay, can be a real driver of loyalty. Let me explain what I mean by that. If your invoices are always wrong or don't have the right data on them, or don't allow your customers to easily approve it for payment, then ultimately they will spend less money with you because, at the end of the day, we believe that experience loyalty is actually becoming more important than brand loyalty. Customers want a good experience, and so the easier you are to do business with, the larger your share of wallet you'll have with your clients, and payments, believe it or not, is a big part of that. Allow them to pay the way they want, allow them to easily improve and approve your invoices and get the invoices right, and then you'll get a larger share of their spend.
Speaker 2:Well, brandon, I think that's a great way to wrap up the show, so thank you so much for being on today. It was great to catch up with you again, so thanks for being here.
Speaker 3:It was a real pleasure.
Speaker 2:It's always fun sharing with you. Greg, thanks for allowing me on the show Absolutely, 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.