Money2020_2016_special

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startup spotlight “WE BELIEVE IT’S A NOBLE GOAL TO HELP CHANGE HAPPEN” Jeremy Almond, Co-founder & CEO, Paystand Many different financial services have made big gains over the last years. Oftentimes those are mainly focused on business-to-consumer transactions. However, there is also another immense market for payments in the business-to-business (B2B) world. To this day, B2B payments are known to be inefficient and expensive. Paying invoices or moving funds across borders can be very costly for businesses and is full of uncertainties. We speak with Jeremy Almond, cofounder and CEO of Paystand, a next generation payment & eCommerce checkout system enabling businesses to handle their payments in a more efficient manner and at lower costs. Where did your idea for Paystand originate? At a very high level Paystand uses modern Internet technology to transform B2B payments. Today in the U.S. about half of all payments are still done via paper cheque. In my particular background I have spent a long time working with business technology companies. And I’ve seen them try ‘crazy things’ to get away from paper cheques. They would sometimes build some complicated business processes on top of ACH or move over to credit cards, which can get really expensive. For example, when sending a big invoice of $50.000 you might be charged 3% just to get paid. On the consumer side there is a lot of great innovation going on with payments but there really isn’t something yet that looks like the modern Internet on the business side. Something that is basically nearly instant, very low cost, cross border and also completely open. All the principles you know the Internet to be. That’s where the idea for Paystand came from. We started building the software in 2013, therefore, we are still a pretty young company. But, we feel really blessed since we’ve been growing very fast and serving different companies from small businesses to very large enterprises. We just hope we can grow the business for us as well as our customers. Our goal is to make business payments adapt to the Internet and modernize the process. How would you define your company culture? For us as a tech company, our culture is very much focused on innovation, openness and fairness. All of those things are partly what the Internet stands for. Bringing these values both to our team and our customers is a very important task. We are very customer centric and for that reason we also made our business model very transparent. Since we think the industry needs transparency all of our team members live and breath that attitude as well. When thinking about innovation and openness, our team members are very passionate about what they do. We think that improving financial services, which are at the heart of our economic system, is a meaningful purpose. Our team members with years of experience coming from either tech companies or financial services backgrounds came to this start-up because we think we can actually improve the system. What differentiates Paystand from other payment gateways in the B2B payments arena? Basically our product is centered around a model we call payment-as-a-service platform. This concept adds value for the business on top of seeing payments only as a utility. To be more specific, we mainly do three things that separate us from other payment gateways.
startup Spotlight First, we have a fairly flexible platform that enables a business with their own existing business process to layer us into their website, their invoice or their enterprise mobile application while still maintaining full control of their customer experience. When looking at companies such as PayPal or Square, these consumer facing companies seem to move their business into one specific flow. We can go behind the scenes because we don’t think it’s our customer but the business’ customer. Thus, we treat this relationship very honorably. Secondly, we have this very broad technology platform that uses different payment rails. When working with us, businesses have the option to use an electronic cash or an electronic cheque system that are both very unique and proprietary to Paystand. Additionally, we also allow choice. Customers who want to use a card for certain customers can do so. They can use Paystand to have a single point of reporting and a single point of settlement. In case businesses want to use a traditional card system for some other customers for convenience purposes they can do that as well. Furthermore, if businesses want to work with more innovative things around digital cheques, bank to bank transfers or electronic cash, Paystand offers that option for their customers too. Paystand provides the platform, which offers many different pipes and the business can choose which specifi c ones they want to use. In the end we provide them with all the tools which they can use to their advantage. The third and perhaps most interesting thing Paystand is known for is that its entire business model is different from common players in payment industry. We don’t make our profit from transaction fees. Instead we are a software company providing software licenses and businesses can use Paystand as much as they want. Basically we give you 0 per cent network fees that you can benefit from. If you use our eCheque or eCash network, there is no transaction percentage fees. This is much more efficient for businesses when they need to move large amounts of money. Even if businesses want to use the old system the costs are still going to be dramatically lower since we give people wholesale rates. What are the key hurdles to grow your business? We believe to our core that payments will go completely digital on the business side. It’s going to take quite some time though. We started Paystand as a longterm company, one that can make an impact by methodically serving our customers. Looking at hurdles, today we are currently only operating in the U.S.. We want to serve these customers well and make sure Paystand has delivered the best customer experience and solution possible. From a broader perspective to grow, Paystand obviously wants to operate on a global scale. For that we must work with the regulators in various different countries with different sets of rules related to moving money in a safe, compliant and secure manner. We take the customer’s trust very carefully and see that as a privilege and honor to serve them in the best way. What opportunities do you see in the payments industry? Looking at the opportunity in the industry, we’ve been very early proponents of blockchain. If you look a year or two ago that was very much the bleeding edge. Now we are starting to see other financial services whether they are banks, exchanges or remittance focused companies starting to realize that blockchain is transformative technology. If considered thoughtfully, we think the technology of blockchain ledger is world changing. It does solve real fi nancial problems but it will take time to bleed out into the different part of the system. When it does though it will make the system more efficient. We are really excited about that. To name a few, for example settlement is very slow today on the traditional rails and in the U.S. ACH is very slow as well. Another example is cross border transactions today are very hard to execute and they are expensive. With the blockchain A snapshot of the Paystand team located in the Silicon Valley office.
Page 1 and 2: Special Money 20/20 Issue | 2016 PC
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Page 5 and 6: Thought Leaders Corner The ERPB has
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Page 17: Spotlight You think you have what i
Page 21 and 22: SPECIAL FEATURE Pour App Origins: A
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