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Leaders In Payments
Leaders In Payments
Special Series: Focus. Build. Win. with James Derby, EVP, Merchant Facing Product at Payroc | Episode 441
In the second episode in our three part series titled: Focus. Build. Win, I sit down with James Derby, EVP of Merchant Facing Product at Payroc, to unpack how a core product strategy transformed scattered tools into a focused growth engine for partners and merchants. Instead of mastering dozens of third‑party options, the team picked a few products to go deep on, built vertical features that matter, and tightened the feedback loop from sales floor to roadmap.
James walks through Roc Terminal+ for broad processing needs, Roc Giving for nonprofits, and Roc Services for field service teams, including a new scheduling component aimed at competing upmarket. The thread tying it all together is software-led sales: lead with the operational win and let payments follow. That shift brings faster deployments, better support, and real economics for ISOs and agents, with an 8–11% margin lift on new core placements and lower attrition as support improves. Owning the gateway and settlement stack gives Payroc the control to integrate acquisitions, standardize security, and ship features at speed without vendor drag.
We also get into the commercialization playbook: building a business case with sales input, targeting underserved MCCs, choosing build vs. white label, and running disciplined pilots before GA. Post‑launch, James emphasizes data, not vibes - tracking adoption, revenue, support quality, and direct merchant feedback to keep product-market fit tight. Looking forward, tap to pay continues to rise, standalone terminals slowly recede, and consolidation among large processors creates room for agile teams that ship vertical SaaS with integrated payments.
If you care about turning product focus into partner success, this conversation delivers practical detail you can use.
Welcome to Focus Build Win, a special three-part series that dives into how PayRock turned a focused core product strategy into a growth engine. Across three conversations, we'll explore how the company is leveraging acquisitions, building products that scale, and aligning sales, recruiting, and partner teams to win.
SPEAKER_02:Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Leaders in Payments Podcast. I'm your host, Greg Myers. This is the second episode in our three-part series titled Focused and is being brought to you by Payrock. In the first episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Jim Oberman, the CEO of Payrock, about how focusing on a core product strategy really became Payrock's growth engine. Today I'm honored to have as my special guest, James Derby, the EVP of Merchant Facing Product at Payrock. James and I will be discussing Payrock's product strategy, commercialization, and why this core product strategy is so impactful for sales partners and for merchants. So, James, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the show. Thanks, Greg. Appreciate you having me on. So before we dive into the topic, let's talk a little bit about you and Payrock. So if you don't mind, tell our audience a little bit about yourself, your professional journey, and your role at Payrock.
SPEAKER_01:I will just stick to the current role here at Payrock and a little history. I spent about 23 years on the POS side for hybrid retail and restaurant, got into the payment side of it mainly as a POS provider and payments as obviously necessity of the POS space. Got to great relationship built with Payrock over the years. And in 2018, I was actually an acquisition of Payrock. So that's how I came on board. And since then, as you probably have ascertained, we've we've had some growth spurts, and I've gotten the pleasure of working in in multiple departments, multiple job descriptions as we've grown. So I've done everything from the Agent ISO channel as one of the executives there all the way through now today, running commercialization and merchant facing product.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. So for those that may not be familiar, can you give us a quick overview of what PayRock does and sort of their role that they play in the payments ecosystem?
SPEAKER_01:Sure. Best I can put it is I think PayRock is uniquely positioned in the upper uh mid-market arena to be have size and scale, not be a super tanker. So we're still a little bit more agile, I would say, than some of our larger competitors. And I would say that, you know, we grew up as a retail ISO. So the agent ISO community and that partnership is kind of in our DNA and our blood. And, you know, this before we had a lot of our own proprietary technology, you know, we outsourced a lot of that to third parties to provide the food that those folks need to eat over the agent ISO community. But now we've diversified quite a bit, gotten into a lot of the ISV side. So we do offer a lot of really great technology for ISV prospects and partners today to kind of help balance out our portfolio. So I would say whether you're an agent, agency partner in ISO office or you're sophisticated ISV and you're looking for a payments platform, I think Payrock is uniquely positioned to handle a lot of different needs and provide a lot of great cover and a lot of great support.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. Well, let's dive into the meat of the conversation. So tell us about how your product strategy has evolved over the past, say, 12 to 18 months.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So I know you spoke to our coach, Jim O'Ruyman, right? I call him coach benevolently. So he uh himself and some of our other leadership, Matt Austin, our COO, and and my boss, Casey Connolly, is our chief product officer. We developed a strategy. This goes back to about 18 months ago. So you said 12 to 18 months that fits right in line. Where I mentioned Agent ISO, that's how we grew up, is that retail ISO or retail ISO processor. So we had a lot of different third parties that provided a lot of different products. And what we started to find as we started scale was that we were becoming inefficient in being able to deploy and support a plethora of different merchant-facing products, right? So the idea of kind of a core product shift really came about as a necessity, not only for Payrock to derive more efficiencies, but also for our partners ultimately to be, we want to be the best we possibly can and support the merchant-facing products that we want to deploy and we want to kind of funnel that traffic to. And I think that's been the major shift that we've had over the last year, year and a half has been boiling it down to still providing a lot of options and a lot of different verticalized products, but also being able to, again, consolidate down to either white label or proprietary merchant-facing product that we can better control our own destiny and more efficiently and better support. Okay. Well, what core products has Payrock launched over the last year? In the last year to 18 months, we've launched three, one of which is uh Rock Terminal Plus. Notice the ROC there, a little play on Payrock. Uh Rock Terminal Plus, that ecosystem, which is everything from your standalone devices all the way through a mobile app, a really nice user's portal. It's kind of a a little bit more of a generalized product from processing, right? It's not really geared for any one specific MCC that can be used across the board. And then we get to some very, very focused and verticalized products in our Rock Giving, which is our charity vertical uh go-to-market merchant facing product, as well as Rock Services, which is our first foray into field services. That was completely that whole roadmap was developed by Payrock. And I've been very excited. In fact, we're about to release our scheduling component to that to allow us to go upmarket a little bit, compete with some of the likes of like the jobbers of the world and our service titans, some of the big guys out there. So we're super pumped about what we've done. And we're going to continue to verticalize. I know that you spoke to our CEO, Jim Overman, about that. We're going to continue to verticalize and hone in so we kind of make a smaller aperture for some sales partners that want to come on and from a recruitment standpoint and also kind of being able to not change the DNA, but be able to add those folks that want to go after those underserved or emerging verticals that today we don't have a lot of answers for.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. So those vertical solutions, are they primarily just on the payment side or like you mentioned scheduling? So are you kind of expanding that beyond payments like other software or other financial services?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So let me try to answer that this way. So obviously we're a payments platform, right? Payments is always first and foremost in our mind. But as the technology has evolved over the last decade to 15 years, technology has gotten cheaper, it's gotten better, and it really entices businesses to bring in something that's going to allow them to run their business. So when we talk about verticalized sales, we go from instead of a payments processing sale first, it's really a sales cycle built upon the software. So it's a software sell first and a payment sell second, in my mind, right? And that does take some training and really, you know, having partners really understand how to sell the product, who the target audience is, right? Because you're selling that software solution. So to your point when you asked about what are we doing with the scheduling, the scheduling piece is allowing that field service software to become more holistic so that that operator can run their business 360 and schedule their field service technicians, for example, for that specific job, that specific estimate, that specific invoice, and be able to track that work through the system and then have all the reporting in one place. The idea is those operators don't need to leave the software to effectively run their business.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So what does a product roll out from maybe ideation to launch? What does that look like at Payrock? What's sort of the standard playbook?
SPEAKER_01:Well, it always starts with a business case, right? It also starts with our friends over at sales. There's a lot of feedback loops that we get. We periodically will request from sales, hey, what's the feedback you're getting? What are we missing in the market? What verticals do they want to go after? We also look at a lot of the Visa MasterCard emerging and underserved market reports, right? Like what MCCs are are out there that are being underserved today. And, you know, you look at your TAM and your SNAM and your PSOM and you work with sales and they ultimately sign off on, yeah, let's get this out there. Either we engage a third party as a white label or we our own proprietary technology, we want to build something out. And then you go into the skunk works, right? And you from the ideation side, you get the playbook and you have your business case first and foremost. And then you start looking at a swag on how long it's going to take to get out to market, right? And do we feel like the market conditions are going to be consistent enough that at the time that we're ready to release that, we're still on a good foothold or good position for that specific product launch. If those all those answers are yes and we get agreement from across the org, which sometimes is fun to do, right? Then, you know, ultimately we run that all the way through a commercialization. And through that process, we go from a beta and pilot, we collect feedback loops from both merchants and partners alike to make sure that we're, you know, whatever little tweaks we have to make along the way. And by the way, that doesn't stop on GA, general availability, right? That's something that continues throughout the life cycle of any merchant-facing product at Payrock, and I imagine at most processors.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. Well, in the first episode of the series, as you mentioned with Jim, he talked a lot about acquiring companies that help drive scale. But I assume there were some along the way that had strong products or core functionality that came along with that company. So can you speak to how you integrated them? What was sort of that process?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So the process is when we acquire a technology through a company. By the way, I think there's been something like 18 acquisitions in the last few years. So it's been uh quite a maelstrom. But first thing you do is you take a look at what they've got, right? And you have to answer some questions. Do we already have a redundant product that's in place if it's a merchant-facing product? If so, you got to look at the PLs of both, also the market viability, the age, the infrastructure, the code base, infosec pen testing, right, to make sure it's solid. And if all those things check out, we adopt that. Now, PayRock is in a unique position because we do own our own front door, being our the payrock gateway, and then all the way through our settlement side. So we kind of own our sovereignty, so to speak. So whatever product we choose to adopt has to go through all the rigor of being connected to the payrock gateway and making sure it flows all the way through our billing and residuals and settlement systems. So it's there's a lot to unpack there. And I'll tell you that it has been a challenge. It's been a fun challenge, but nonetheless, it does, like I said, with the growth that Payrock's had, one of the biggest challenges in my mind is exactly your point. It's the integration of the product sets and not just the products, but also the people, the culture, all the things that goes with it. But ultimately at the end of the day, I think Payrock's done a very good job of evaluating all the different toys in the toy box that we've been given through acquisition and done a pretty good job positioning those for our product portfolio.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. And what you just said, you made it sound like it's relatively easy, but there are plenty of payments companies in in this space and other you know industries as well, that when they make an acquisition, that integration, whether it is culture, products, whatever, they don't do a very good job or it's a challenge, or it takes three times as long as they say it's going to. So I know that's that's got to be challenging. So it sounds like, you know, maybe after 18 times you guys have gotten just kind of maybe good at it.
SPEAKER_01:Well, we're good, maybe and maybe lucky. I'll take both. So yeah. It's fun though. It really is. It's a blessing to be able to have all these opportunities and be able to look at all these different products and and make some of those strategic decisions.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. And you know, Jim and I talked about this, like the solutions today are so much different than they were 15, 20 years ago, right? Where you had the salesperson with a terminal, and back then there were three terminal manufacturers, drove up to the you know, strip center that has the dry cleaner and you know, the same old kind of retail places, and they just go door-to-door selling the same solution. That world's gone. We don't live there anymore. And, you know, it sounds like the adaption or what you guys have done to meet the needs of modern day merchants is really, you know, what had to be done. And it's been through acquisition and kind of this product strategy.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And I think again, owning your own sovereignty and not being dependent upon third-party vendors, you know, for your product or your gateway, you know, or settlement or building residuals, all of it. So kind of owning that sovereignty makes does make put us in advantage and makes it a little bit easier because we know what the end goal is going to be at all times. But yeah, to your point, backup used to be a knucklebuster, you know, carbon copy. You leave somebody, you know, now things are much different.
SPEAKER_02:Right. So in this series, we've really been focused on that transition from what we've been talking about relying on vendors to building your own products. So let's look at that from the sales partner's perspective. So, what changed most for the agents and the ISOs once you standardized kind of on this core product strategy?
SPEAKER_01:Oh boy. Well, I would say what changed, let's start with maybe the negative outcomes, right? You do have many, many different types of DNA in the sales channels. And some folks really like some of the disparate third-party vendors and products that we had. And they were maybe not so happy about that. So the first challenge was with the partners is getting them on board, right? It's communication, communication, communication, not ripping anything out from under their feet, giving them plenty of time to digest it, really putting our teams to work to get them to train and hey, we will be sunsetting X, but we're going to be promoting Y. And here's why you should take a look at this and get them involved early on trainings, QA sessions. Make sure they understand that you know how it's market parity to what they were selling before, or maybe even market leading compared to what they're selling before. That to me was the most, let's just say, challenging and crucial part of the process is getting that buy-in from those sales partners. And then I would say on the positive side of the things, what they're experiencing is, again, better efficiencies, right? Better support. They have now when they when they call in or they work with their advocates or their product sales lead team and they need those SMEs to come in and explain or help them close a deal or do some further training. It's we're honed in because we're not dealing with, you know, we were kind of a master of none. We've got some great people, but when you've got 60 different merchant-facing product options out there with devices and software, everything else that's out there, it becomes really tough as an organization to be really damn good, excuse my language, at supporting and deploying some of that. So I think that was the most positive effect for our partners, our sales partners, is being able to have better support and more efficiencies within payroll.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. Well, I think you answered this next question a little bit, but I want to double-click on it. So how did you keep the ISOs and the agents informed about sort of the new strategy and the rollout of the products?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So we're always striving to be better, but it's always communication, communication, communication. When you think you've communicated enough, you need to probably make sure you do it again on repeat. So it started months and months early, right? We start sometimes up to six months away. We'll we'll message, we'll say, you know, this is coming, stay tuned. And that can be a multitude of different ways. It's sometimes it's it's in the leadership sales calls, right? With those partners. It's emails, it's newsletters, it's every way we can possibly get to people, we're gonna get to those people, right? So again, anytime in this business you think you're overcommunicating, you're not, right? It's because not everybody reads their emails or they show up to a phone call. But also we have a really, really talented product sales team. Those folks are dedicated to be the firewall for that agent or partner to come in to be able to sit down virtually at their desk and walk through what that product is, why we might be sunsetting, what we're releasing to replace that, all those great things, and then provide all that training for them almost on demand, as well as all the recordings. And I'll also say that we've done a very good job over the last 12 to 18 months of taking a good look at what we have been doing for sales training and doubling and tripling down on that. And now we're completing full-blown sales training modules that are all virtual. We use a lot of great technology here at Payrock, which really, if you were to be a brand new partner that came in from Mars and never ever been in the business before, you could understand what the product is, who the target audience is, what pricing methodologies are employed by it, what the costs are, and how to really get out there in the market. So hopefully it answers your question.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, absolutely. So what was the economic upside for both the sales partner and for payrock with executing the strategy?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, the bottom line to margins is anywhere between 8 and 11% on every new merchant, new mid that you put on payrock proprietary or white label. So if it's if it's I if it's a core product, generally speaking, everybody involved stands to make just a little bit more money. But again, I think monetary is always a good conversation to have. But I think really supporting and really helping out over your vintage, you know, protecting attrition. If you look at vintage two, vintage three, you go out right after that first year that someone signs up the longevity of the account because we're supporting that product better and we're again we're more efficient. All those things kind of come together. So yes, the monetary piece is nice. Eight, eight to eleven percent is always great to have on the bottom line. But I think the efficiencies and the support is what probably number one and number two reasons why we did what we did.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. So we've looked at it, the product strategy from the sales partner's perspective, the ISO's the agents. So let's look at it from the merchant perspective. And I know that's sort of your customers' customers a lot of times, but what is the real value for the merchants? What do they really see in from a value perspective out of this strategy?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean, I hate to be short on that answer, but it's it's the same kind of benefits that our partners get, right? It's when they get on the phone and they've got they need to troubleshoot something or they they need to know something about the software they're employing or the device they're employing, whatever to run their business. Our teams are just better at it because we have less to focus and say graceover. We have we're very concentrated on what our core product set is. And again, we now become a master of those products instead of a master of none when you have 30, 40, 50, right? So it's I think that same benefit applies. And again, just by the organic ripple effect of having people that are just better SMEs at what they're supporting with these products, you're gonna get a better merchant outcome. You're gonna outcomes, you're gonna get short call resolution times, one call resolution times, you're going to increase the longevity of the account. And because we're also hyper focused on continuing to enhance these products, we're gonna constantly give them new, better features to keep up with the times and the technology that those small businesses, medium-sized businesses, and enterprise businesses demand. So I think it's all of those things.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. So at that merchant level, how do you know the strategy is being successfully executed?
SPEAKER_01:Well, data, data, data, right? Again, any after GA is just the first part. After that, it's constantly monitoring how are we selling this? Are we being successful? What do our revenues and margins look like? And also, I think the most important piece that we have is my teams actually go out and work with the sales partners to many of them will willingly give us a feedback loop on their experiences, maybe deals they won, the deals they lost, the feedback they gave the merchants. And in many cases, if they give us permission to do so, we're engaging with those merchants directly. So we're taking that input, that feedback right back to us digitally, or sometimes it could even be a phone call, right? A live phone call and say, Hey, would you talk to us for a little bit? What, you know, what's that feedback? So constantly pumping that feedback all the way through from sales and deployment, all the way back through product. I think that we've got a pretty good mousetrap and a pretty good handle on how our partners and how our merchants ultimately are feeling about any given version-facing product set.
SPEAKER_02:All right. Well, I'm gonna go off script a little bit here because I really want to maybe talk about the future. Like where do you see from your lens, where do you see the industry headed from a product perspective? I know you know we talk about stable coins and we talk about AI and those kind of things, but you're in the day-to-day sort of what do you see as the future of kind of the industry and where it's headed and how is Payrock thinking about that from a product perspective?
SPEAKER_01:Well, you know, we've been saying for a long time that at some point the uh standalone payment devices for card present transactions will likely start to decline. While that hasn't been significant, it is starting to happen with the advent of the tap to glass on bring your own device, right? Whether it's an Android phone, an iOS phone, which Payrock has. And that that's that that's part of it. The the greater piece that I see is just the distillation of technology, right? So in the payment space, we also have a lot of consolidation that's happening. The big guys keep getting bigger. And so that allows a lot of opportunity for agile companies like PayRock that have scale but also have agility to be able to employ said technology into that payments ecosystem. But at the end of the day, I think we're gonna be more and more becoming software-led sales and not processing. I think the days of just collecting a statement, you know, and doing the statement analysis and getting a pricing methodology that makes sense for that merchant and for the partner. And that's great. We're gonna do that forever, but I really feel like that's really enabled by the software. And I think that's the biggest change that I'm seeing is that standalone processing is definitely on the decline. Today, everything's in some kind of a software SaaS model, whether you it doesn't matter what MCC you're talking about, right? Let me look at restaurants, for example. That's the most oversaturated MCC in all of the country. And it is blanketed by software. When was the last time you're at a restaurant and they had no point of sale? A long time ago, right? But I know I'm not giving my age away here. When I was young, it used to happen all the time, right? So we talked about the knuckle busters earlier, right? So that's what I see. I see payments becoming a lot more consolidated with technology.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. Well, James, this has been an amazing conversation. I just wanted to close out the show by seeing if there's anything that we might have missed or any closing thoughts you had.
SPEAKER_01:No, uh again, just blessed to be in the in the ecosystem and having a great time doing it. And uh yeah, at Payrock, we love our core products and we're continuing to serve our agents and partners and our sales distribution channels uh as best we possibly can.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. Well, I think that's a great way to wrap up the show. So thank you so much for being here. I know your time is very valuable, so I really appreciate you being on the show today. Thank you, Greg. And finally, to all you listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well. And until the next story.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks for tuning in to Focus Build Win, a special series exploring how Payrock's focus on core products drives alignment, growth, and lasting partner success. To explore more resources and insights, visit www.payrock.comslash agent opportunity.