Welcome to Breaking Banks, the number one global fintech radio show and podcast. I’m Brett King. And I’m Jason Henricks.

Every week since 2013, we explore the personalities, startups, innovators, and industry players driving disruption in financial services. From incumbents to unicorns, and from cutting edge technology to the people using it to help create a more innovative, inclusive, and healthy financial future. I’m J.P. Nichols, and this is Breaking Banks.

Today, I have a conversation with James Anderson, Managing Director of Pays, a new digital bank wallet coming out early next year from Early Warning, the fintech company owned by some of the largest banks in the U.S., and the company that brought Zelle to market. We talk about what the company learned from the rollout of Zelle and what’s different. It’s a completely separate venture, focused on e-commerce payments.

The market for digital wallets, and all the apps that want the top slot, is crowded, and consumer habits are hard to break. Will the trust and ubiquity that comes from banks and credit unions be able to overcome the inertia of Apple Wallet, PayPal, Google Pay, and others? The empire strikes back. Again.

We’ll get to all that in a few minutes, but all of this has caused me to think more broadly about fintech and financial services, the never-ending battle between incumbents and insurgents, and how much change is coming in the next few years. Here we are, literally and figuratively, in the waning minutes of the fourth quarter, and I’m trying to avoid the trite and often exclusionary sports analogies, but sometimes they can be useful. Starting the season strong, with an effective playbook, and not falling behind early is just as important in business as it is on the field.

Unlike sports teams, though, we don’t have an off-season. There’s no time for hiring new coaches or rebuilding the roster before the next season begins. The playbook needs updated, but the next season has already started.

And so has the next era of banking. We’re already in this new era, and I don’t think most people realize it yet. For all but the most innovative incumbent financial institutions, the last era was all about ZERP, Zero Interest Rate Policy, and incremental improvements of existing products and processes.

As I’ve quoted Warren Buffett many times, only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked. ZERP and the inherent structural advantages of funding operations through low-cost and no-cost deposits mask catastrophic cracks in the system. In far too many cases, it took a global pandemic to force rethinking many customer experiences, and far too often the outcome was essentially putting digital lipstick on an analog pig.

For fintech insurgents, venture capital was relatively easy to come by, and a lot of people who understood later-stage investing, and some that didn’t even do that very well, jumped in. Unable to resist the VC siren song, they traded in their suitcoats and wingtips for fleece vests and allbirds. They threw money at pre-revenue, pre-product, and even pre-team deals.

Ideas like burn rate and runway were forgotten, or never learned, because there was more money where the last pile came from. Every good party has to end sometime, and if it’s a real rager, it might not end until someone calls the cops. The worst of the crypto bros crashed the party, and they brought trouble in ways both predictable and unpredictable, or at least in ways largely unpredicted.

Before you knew it, even some of the kids who never got in trouble were calling to be bailed out of the pokey. One of my other favorite quotes is from Bill Gates, Success is a poor teacher. Whether you’re an incumbent defending a venerable franchise, or an insurgent seeking to disrupt the status quo, much of what got us here won’t help us in this new era.

I’m stealing some of Jason’s thunder here, and he’ll have a lot more to say about this in future episodes, but now is the time to update those playbooks. Now is the time to reimagine financial services from a truly customer-centric approach and now is the time to re-architect your organization to get the right people, the right processes, and the right culture in place to survive and to thrive in this new era. The next season has already started.

Now, my conversation with James Anderson. All right. Well, welcome.

James, you want to introduce yourself? Sure. Nice to meet you, JP. James Anderson.

I’m Managing Director of Pays at Early Warning Services. So tell us about Pays. Yeah.

So Pays is a new initiative. Well, it’s not as new as it used to be. We’ve been going for a little while now, about a year and a half, but it’s really an answer to the question of why does e-commerce still confound consumers, merchants, and to some extent, issuers? Why is it so hard 25 years in to buy something online? And so it’s a problem.

It’s also a great opportunity. And what we’re building with Pays is, I think the easiest state of term of art is to call it a digital wallet, because that’s really what people associate to this use case of this scenario. But it’s a lot more than that.

It’s got different dimensions. And by virtue of coming from Early Warning, a part of our strategy and part of our go-to-market is on the consumer side, Pays will be something that’s brought to you by your participating financial institution. And we think that’s, from all our research, is a very important differentiator.

We’ve got other differentiators, things for merchants as well. But I think on the consumer side, something that comes to you directly from your financial institution, our research shows is very meaningful to consumers. It’s something that consumers pay attention to and something that we think we can use to introduce Pays to an audience maybe that hasn’t adopted a wallet until now, or maybe has adopted and drifted away.

So our research shows there’s quite a few consumers who are still using guest checkout systematically. There’s other users that drift in and out of individual wallets and guest checkout and don’t have established patterns. But we think with Pays that we can create something different, create something that delivers both on a convenience and a security value proposition, resulting in better outcomes for consumers, merchants, and by extension, issuing banks.

Now, I’d like to come back and talk about that research a little bit, but let’s talk about the way the landscape has developed. I mean, today, it’s largely the tech providers and the hardware manufacturers who are kind of owning that digital wallet space. And as you mentioned, you’re really trying to carve it out from the bank side as a bank wallet space.

Talk a little bit about, you know, maybe broadly how the landscape has evolved. As you said, this is, you know, 15 years into e-commerce. It’s still painful for a lot of people.

Probably the best traction so far has been, you know, the Apple wallets, the Google Pays, you know, Tencent and China and so on. So talk a little bit about how that evolved and what gaps that you’re seeing that you can fill by approaching this from the bank side. Yeah, for sure.

And so you mentioned, you know, China. I’ll just for clarification, Pays is a U.S. initiative. It’s early warning is owned by seven of the larger U.S. banks.

And our focus is the U.S. market, U.S. consumers and U.S. merchants. So there’s been a lot of wallet activity around the world, some of which is informative, but it’s not really directly addressed or relevant to us. But to your broader point, in terms of the landscape, you make a great point, which is that if you think about the kind of players, if you define the problem as helping consumers check out online, you kind of see the immediate sort of market splits in two, which is obviously merchants have a lot of interest in that as well.

You know, so they have deployed and successfully convinced certain segments of consumers who shop frequently at that specific merchant to leave a card behind, right? So although most people don’t think about as a wallet, it certainly addresses the problem of how do I check out easier online because I don’t have to do that typing. I don’t have to do all that data entry. And obviously from a merchant point of view, they have an ongoing relationship with you.

Then there are multi-merchant wallets. And so obviously maybe the granddaddy of the category would be PayPal. And then, as you mentioned more recently, there’s been a number of tech companies have leveraged their assets and their customer relationships to build solutions, including Apple, including Google.

So, you know, all of these solutions help consumers. And I think it’s noticeable and notable that, you know, the people who actually fund the transaction in the sense that they either hold the funds for the consumer and make it available through a debit type product or they’re extending credit to fund the transaction, which is the financial institutions, they are noticeably absent. Now they are participating.

They have their products inside those other experiences. So they’re not completely absent. Obviously they are present, but they are definitely not owning the experience.

They’re not driving the consumer value proposition. They’re kind of riding on it, which is a different type of relationship. And Pays, the objective, one of the objectives of Pays is to, you know, make the banks a first class citizen in that, you know, in that competitive environment.

And we think that they’ve got some real capabilities that they are, you know, haven’t been using that will, you know, make the experiences better, both convenience, more convenient for consumers and also, you know, more secure. So I think the, if you think about kind of the consumer dynamics, there’s an array of ways people have solved this problem. You know, some people are very religious about card on file and that’s their preferred method.

So they leave their cards with all kinds of merchants. That’s actually great until it’s not great. And particularly when a card changes and then you’ve got your card all over the place.

It’s also a challenge because you have usernames and passwords with everybody in your card scattered around the internet. So some people take the opposite attack vector and say, I’m not leaving my card anywhere. And then some of those then fork off and say, well, I’m gonna use a digital wallet or I’m gonna use guest checkout consistently.

So I think, you know, what we haven’t seen is any one, you know, model be dominant across consumers. And I think that’s part of the opportunity with Pays. And part of our position at JP in the market and part of what we bring is because the fact that we are owned by financial institutions and we participate and they participate in the transaction as, you know, the card, they participate economically and they participate experientially.

Some of the things we’re able to do in Pays are quite different from, you know, what other digital wallets would and wouldn’t do. I’ll give you one example and it could be really because it connects these two ideas of card on file and a wallet. So one of the use cases that we’re talking to a number of merchants about is the ability for them to initiate a transaction with a new customer using Pays to get the customer information, to get the card details and to be able to affect the first transaction.

So that’s kind of a classic guest checkout scenario. But if the consumer then wants to create an account with that merchant, we’re very supportive. And if as long as the consumer gives the authorization, the merchant can retain that data and can actually take the network token that we’ve given them and trade it in for a network token that comes from, it’s actually against their token requester ID.

So other wallets would say, well, that’s not a great, that’s not a good idea because I’m never gonna see that customer again for that merchant. And given our situation, the market is a little different. We’re perfectly happy with that outcome.

That’s a happy customer because they’ve been able to do a first transaction. It was convenient, it was secure. It’s a happy merchant because they made that first sale.

But then even better than that, that merchant now has the opportunity to convert them into a recurring customer and create a username and password in their domain and then get that network token for themselves in their own world. And so that’s something that Pays is doing that other wallets might look at and say, that doesn’t make sense, but because of who we are, and we’re willing to do that and happy to do that because it results in a better outcome for a merchant and for a consumer. Well, on the bank side in that situation, do they have the opportunity to add offers or insights because they are the financial institution that may understand that cardholder better than a merchant would? Yeah, so I think that’s in the bucket of things we could work on.

I think right now our objective, our first objective is to create a ubiquitous layer of better e-commerce experience using the existing cards that have been issued, integrating into merchants at scale. Our objective, I mentioned the word ubiquitous, we actually talk about that in two ways. One is our objective is to be ubiquitous on the consumer side, meaning that any consumer that has a card issued by a US financial institution should be able to use it through Pays and also ubiquitous on the merchant side, meaning any merchant that accepts cards in the US should be able to accept them through Pays.

So we have a very broad strategy by design. So I think our first task is to create that very broad infrastructure layer to deliver more convenient, more secure outcomes. With success a lot against that first mandate and that first goal, there’s lots of things we could do.

I mean, obviously, the financial institutions are, again, they either hold the consumer’s funds or they lend the consumer’s funds. There’s lots of things that they can do with this kind of direct connection. And I think that’s kind of the missing piece that hasn’t been there, which is Pays is kind of this piece in the middle that connects tens of thousands of financial institutions with millions and millions of merchants.

Then we are in the middle and we can do all kinds of things that are exciting, but that would be getting ahead of ourselves. First, we’ve got to establish a position in the middle and that’s what we’re working on right now. And not that that’s so simple, right? Ubiquity is part of what makes it so complex, as you well know, so many sub-networks in this space.

Yeah, yeah, but actually I was going to go there, but one of the things that’s exciting is that when your vision is ubiquity, it creates the opportunity to work with everybody and therefore the opportunity to create a chance to create business opportunities for everybody. So we’re working already with some merchants direct, we’re working with acquirers, we’re working with payment facilitators and so we’re already on the merchant side figuring out how we get that ubiquity, which is exciting because it’s a big complex world out there, we’re learning things every day, but when you have a vision of we’ve got to figure out how to solve it, so if everybody kind of forces you to get creative about technical solutions, about experiential solutions, so that’s exciting. And then similarly on the consumer side, we are going to, obviously we’re owned by seven large financial institutions, but when we launch, we’re going to launch with more than a thousand financial institutions because of a partnership we’ve created and then we’re going to go well beyond that.

Our genuine objective is ubiquity of every financial institution wants to, can participate in pays. So yeah, the world of US payments is complicated, but that complexity, you know, we’re trying to make that our friend and trying to use it to our advantage to get to ubiquity. Well, it’s kind of ironic that it’ll end up, if you can reach that ubiquity, it’s kind of a backdoor non-legislative way of getting to open banking, isn’t it? Ah, that was a bit of a, that’s a bit of a segue there, JP.

So, I mean, we’re in the payments business, open banking is a, that’s a different use case and there’s lots of people working on that. Lots of talented colleagues and former colleagues working on that. So I’ll leave that one for some of those other people to work on.

I’m just a poor payments guy, JP. Well, fair enough. Well, but you have significant experience with Zelle.

So how does Zelle fit into not only the future and the game plan of Pays, but what have you learned from the Zelle experience so far that you’re taking into Pays? Yeah, so for those who don’t know, Zelle, it comes from Early Warning as well, launched I think six years ago and has been tremendously successful. Pays and Zelle are completely separate initiatives, different management structures, different management teams and different use cases to solve. I would say the learning really has been that, you know, this is a very important learning, which is that people really listen to what their financial institutions tell them.

If your bank says there’s a better way to transfer money through Zelle, people pay attention and people do it. And of course it has to be a better way and it is indeed a better way. But people really do listen to what their financial institutions say and they respond.

And I think that’s one of the things around Pays, which is we’re really working very hard with our owners. And then, you know, beyond that with people who are joining us who are not owners, but also, you know, have consumers, we are working hard with them to figure out and define, you know, the go-to-market strategy and the launch strategy and how they communicate around Pays. And there’s really some great lessons that we’re able to leverage from the Zelle experience about embedding it in the consumer experience that you deliver to your bank.

You know, one of the things that, you know, we think is really important is that there’d be some commonality because, you know, again, with Pays, you may have a card from one financial institution and a second financial institution, and they’re all going to show up in your Pays wallet. But when you hear about something new from bank A versus bank B, bank A talks in a different way to bank B. They have their voice, right? They have a marketing voice. They have the way they talk about products and services.

And so we want there to be commonality, but we don’t want to over-constrain that. We want it also to come through as this is coming to you from your financial institution. It’s coming to you in a voice that you recognize.

That’s also extremely powerful. So I think there’s some real interesting lessons in terms of how to introduce something new like Zelle have a common element to it. You know, Zelle has its own brand.

Zelle has its own marketing programs, but also make it part of the offering that comes to you from your financial institution. And that’s a very powerful kind of, I don’t know if it’s a T-shaped thing where you’ve got the kind of commonality and the specificity. But I think that’s one of the things we’re definitely taking some lessons from the Zelle experience, which are all positive lessons, because, you know, Zelle’s been a tremendous success and delivering, you know, very large transaction volumes, still growing very strongly, still got, you know, many, many hundreds of institutions joining and really is now an expectation for a bank account.

You know, a bank account should have Zelle associated to it. And we feel very similar about Pays. We feel like your card should have Pays associated to it.

We think that’s just, it’s a feature. It should be a feature of Pays, of your card is Pays, because online has become so important to consumers in terms of where they use their cards, that it needs a better experience. And that better experience needs to come from your financial institution.

Well, and with all the complexity that was entailed with Zelle, now you’re really having fun because you’re going to add all of the merchant ecosystems to this. And the merchants have tried on more than one occasion to band together from their side. There’s a little bit of, you know, let’s call it creative tension between the merchants and the issuers.

What have you learned so far from working on the merchant side in putting together Pays? Yeah, so I think, you know, what we’ve seen is that, you know, merchants who are successful selling online in 2023, they know a lot about how to sell online. Otherwise they wouldn’t still be doing it and they wouldn’t be making money doing it. And so part of what we took very seriously is we didn’t, we were, we did not come in and be very prescriptive about, hey, your checkout experience should work this way.

We came in and said, hey, we have a very large customer base that we’re going to enroll into Pays. You know, the more than 150 million e-commerce active cards, credit and debit will be enrolled. And we want to find ways that that asset can help you get more out of your online experience.

And we really framed it that way. And for some merchants, particularly smaller merchants, the iconic experience they need is they need to help, they need to avoid cart abandonment, right? So if you’re a small merchant, you’re selling belts in Albuquerque or something and you’re probably promoting yourself primarily in social media, people click through, they like the product, they go to checkout and then they’re presented with 17 white boxes. And that’s a big buzzkill.

You know, you’re not going to, you won’t have registered at that site before, you’ve never been there before. And a bunch of people are just going to click away because it’s just too much work. So Pays can help there.

But when you go up market, when you go to the top of the pyramid and you could talk to the larger merchants, they’ve been A-B testing their experience. They’re pretty good. We can help them because we’ve got this customer data, we’ve got this customer base, but that’s not a first order problem for them.

They’re interested in other problems. So the example I gave you before, which is, you know, they want to go create an account. They want to have an account.

They want to have a persistent relationship with a consumer. They want to be at a market to that consumer. So the idea of using Pays as the first transaction and then the ability to create an account, that’s very appealing for larger merchants.

Other large merchants have other problems. So for example, if you’ve got 100 million consumers already being billed every month or so, every month, for example, a whole bunch of them are going to go bad every month. And there’s tools to try and help them get back on.

The schemes have the, you know, the networks have products, but still they have a problem, which is people fall off and they don’t have a good card. And so part of, one of the things we’re talking some of those merchants about is what we call the back to good flow, which is if they know your email address, which is our kind of key, is our lookup key, they can ping the directory in the background, find out that there’s a Pays wallet and then offer that consumer a bespoke flow to load a card from their Pays wallet into the experience. So they’re not just driving you to a regular page, asking you to do all this data entry, which you may say, yeah, you know what? I don’t need that service so bad after all.

They can offer you this kind of bespoke flow through Pays. And most importantly, they can offer it to you only if it’s relevant to you. So they’re not asking you to, you know, one of the big things we also talked when we found out when we talked to merchants is they’re not really keen on helping wallets grow.

They want to build their business. And so the idea of taking consumers through an enrollment experience off the merchant website and off the merchant checkout experience is extremely negative to the merchant community. It doesn’t solve any problems for them.

No, it just creates problems, which is people are off in this wilderness of creating a wallet and then they forget why they were even here. And then the phone rings and the dog barks and off they go, right? So part of our positioning, you know, which we discovered was very powerful was there is no way to enroll into a Pays wallet other than through a participating financial institution. We didn’t design that experience for that reason, but for merchants, it’s very appealing that we will never be competing with them for the sale.

We’ll never be competing. We’ll never be trying to enroll people off their website. The only way to get a Pays wallet is through a participating financial institution.

The consumer is pre-enrolled into it and then activates typically from a bank experience. And so, again, it’s another kind of positioning or a very important part of our positioning, which is we’re here to help the merchant and the consumer have a good transaction experience. And we wanna help when we can help, but if we can’t help, we’re not gonna get in the way.

We’re not gonna take people down a blind alley. So, you know, one of the ways we bring that to life is through a feature we call dynamic button where the button only shows up if there’s a wallet. If a consumer knows, sorry, if a merchant knows a consumer’s email address, then they can do this background ping and then they can show the button dynamically.

But if there is no wallet, then they don’t show the button. So all these features really speak to, I think your broader question is what the merchants want. I mean, it’s complex, but it’s simple.

You know, they wanna sell stuff. You know, they’re in the business of selling things, either goods or services to consumers and they’re looking for tools that can help them. But they’re also looking to avoid people who are gonna get in the way.

And so we’ve been very kind of clear that we’re there to help. We’ve designed our experiences so that we can be invoked when we can help. But if we can’t help, we’re not getting in the way.

Yeah, nobody wants a payment experience, right? Not the merchant, not the consumer. No, people love buying stuff. People love buying stuff.

And if they didn’t have to pay for it, they wouldn’t. So how are you thinking about- Not lifting trends in the US. Well, that’s another whole topic.

And we will come back to fraud, but how are you thinking about the brick and mortar, face-to-face, whether card president or NFC or whatever? Is that a piece of the puzzle for you? Great question. I mean, our mandate and our 100% focus is online payments, remote payments. And the reason is that we still see that as the environment where there’s pain and problems to be solved.

With all the work that the schemes have done in terms of EMV and in terms of contact lists, we don’t see a big residual problem at POS. I mean, the approval rates are very high. Tap has become predominant and is extremely convenient.

And we’re not in the business of… We are in the business of helping deliver better outcomes for consumers and merchants. And if there’s already a great outcome, we’re not gonna try and build another one just for the sake of it. So our focus 100% is online.

And that’s where we think we can help. That’s where we see the challenges. And that’s our total focus.

You mentioned fraud a couple of times, and it is, in many ways, the evil shadow of customer experience, right? The less friction we have, the easier it is to commit fraud. What’s unique about the way you’re thinking about fraud? Yeah, it’s easy for the true customer. It also becomes easier for the fraudster, right? So a couple of things, one of which is that our whole experience is tokenized.

So we’re only using network tokens for our whole Pays experience. So there’s no real card numbers. And then every payload also has a cryptogram associated to it.

So it’s truly unique. And so if you think about some of the advances at POS have really been driven by EMV, implementation of chip card. We think we’re as close as you can get to an EMV transaction online as is possible, which we think is great for security.

I mean, the reason if what you’re proposing or what you’ve got in the market is of no value because it can’t be reused, nobody’s going to try and steal it. So if it’s a tokenized and it has a dynamic cryptogram in, the payload has no value and therefore nobody’s going to try and steal it. So that’s a great starting point.

So we’ve got incredibly solid foundations in terms of our fundamental approach to executing a transaction is to make every transaction unique and also to distance it from the underlying card but through tokenization so that in the event something is compromised, there’s no impact on the consumer. The underlying card that is in their physical wallet doesn’t have to change. Now we’re not unique in using tokens.

We made a fundamental strategic decision that it was going to be the only way we were going to transact through Pays was going to be using network tokens as our kind of foundational element. I think on top of that, we are doing an authentication of the consumer every time they want to use the Pays wallet but we’re doing it a little differently. So we’re not using a username and a password that puts cognitive load on the consumer to remember.

We are using their email addresses, their lookup key and then we’re doing an SMS OTP to their phone. And again, that email is a piece of information that comes to us from a financial institution. That phone number is a number that comes to us from a financial institution.

So all that data has been validated by the financial institutions. It’s good data. And so we are doing a login against an email address and then using an SMS OTP.

We think that’s the right amount of friction. For this type of an experience, we think consumers, our research shows consumers are pretty comfortable with SMS OTP. We have a number of services behind SMS OTP to make sure that we’re sending a message to the right phone.

The phone number hasn’t been ported or anything like that. So we’re doing all the checks that are available to us to make sure it is still the right phone number to be reaching that consumer app. So we think that in terms of the fundamental transaction security of using network tokens and cryptograms, SMS OTP on every transaction, we think we’re very secure from a consumer perspective.

And then in terms of the other dimension of it, which is in the event something bad does happen, it’s a card transaction. So we’re doing a card transaction. And so all the rights that are associated with a card transaction, all the protections that accrue to a consumer accrue to a card transaction performed through pays.

So the consumer doesn’t lose anything in terms of protection, but they gain all these things that they may not understand, they may not care about, but actually do really make it more secure. I mean, the root of true security in my mind has always been totally dynamic data such that it can’t be replayed. And I think the reason, I think if you look at, so I did spend a lot of time, number of years working for one of the large schemes.

And I think it’s fair to say that the schemes were pretty secure until they came up with the idea of e-commerce and started having consumers type numbers into little white boxes and then put them on, push them on the internet. As soon as that started happening, the 16 digit number started becoming valuable because somebody could intercept that number and replay it somewhere else. And so I think if you look at the last 10 years, the combination of network tokenization and cryptograms on e-commerce transactions essentially puts that toothpaste back in the tube.

It’s very hard to do, both in the real world and figuratively. And actually does get you back to a point where that transaction can be intrinsically secure. And that’s really what we’ve embedded right in the heart of PACE.

So update us on the timeline. You’re deep in testing and building right now, planning to roll out still first quarter 2024? Yeah, so still scheduled, still is as previously discussed in the industry. So we are building, we’ve rolled out one state in kind of a technical pilot.

We’re looking to roll out early Q1, another state in a single US state in a more market facing pilot. And then we start building the wallets at scale early next year. So yeah, so we’re sort of, I’d say we’re at the end of building and just beginning to run.

So we’re at that transition phase, which is exciting. Right. And rolling out merchants and implementing merchants and getting everybody connected in.

All the easy stuff. So how can people find out more? All the easy stuff. Yeah, so we have a website, pace.com is our website.

I think really P-A-Z-E. Yes, P-A-Z-E. I think in consumers are really gonna hear about it first from their financial institutions.

So consumers will hear about it there first. Those who are in the industry, which I assume is a lot of your listeners, pace.com is out there. We have availability for merchants to participate, to connect to us.

Also people in the industry. So we have, in terms of kind of like the merchant community and those people who serve the merchant community, we have really two ways of working with those people. So those companies.

So we have what we call a distributor and a distributor is somebody who is actually making merchant processing available to a merchant. And then we also have technical integrators. So the world of e-commerce, as you said, JP has got complicated and there’s lots of people who are involved in transactions, involved in websites, involved in platforms, but don’t actually offer merchant processing.

So they can sign up with us as a technical integrator. They can make P-A-Z-E part of their story to their merchant community. If there’s a company out there and there’s many thousands of them, including payment facilitators and gateways and acquirers, those people who actually offer merchant processing, they sign up as distributors and that’s because there’s certain conditions that have to kind of flow down to the individual merchant through the distributor.

But we have a very, you know, we’re very keen to hear from people who work on the merchant side of the ecosystem. We think we’ve got something unique and different. We want, it’s a very broad church.

We want everybody inside our tent to mix metaphors. Well, it could be a church tent. So James Anderson from P-A-Z-E, thanks for joining us.

Appreciate you being here. Appreciate it, JP. This show is brought to you by Alloy Labs.

As much as we love talking on the show, we believe that action is more valuable than talk. Alloy Labs is the industry leader in helping fearless bankers drive exponential growth through collaboration, exclusive partnerships, and powerful network effects that give them an unfair advantage. Learn more at AlloyLabs.com. Alloy Labs.

Banking Unbound. That’s it for another week of the world’s number one fintech podcast and radio show, Breaking Banks. This episode was produced by our US-based production team, including producer Elizabeth Severance, audio engineer Kevin Hirsham, with social media support from Carlo Navarro and Sylvie Johnson.

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