Optimizing Subscription Payments with Revolv3’s Robert Podlesni

Episode Overview

​Robert Podlesni is a seasoned professional with over 15 years of experience in the payments industry, currently serving as the Chief Product Officer (CPO) at Revolv3, a company specializing in payment optimization and subscription billing solutions. Since joining Revolv3 in June 2022, Robert has been instrumental in leveraging adaptive technology to enhance credit card acceptance rates, thereby facilitating significant revenue growth and improved customer retention for merchants. His strategic vision and leadership have been pivotal in positioning Revolv3 as a transformative force in the payments ecosystem.

Prior to his tenure at Revolv3, Robert amassed a wealth of experience at Experian Consumer Services, where he held several key positions over an eight-year period. Beginning as a Payment Consultant in February 2014, he advanced to Senior Billing Architect, Director of Operations, and ultimately, Senior Director of Operations by April 2022. In these roles, Robert led initiatives that optimized billing processes and payment systems, significantly enhancing operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. His career also includes leadership roles such as Director of Business Development at Aston Marketing Group and President at Magnate Merchant Services, further underscoring his extensive expertise in business development and payment processing.

Beyond his corporate achievements, Robert has an impressive background in motorsports. He began his racing career in the mid-2000s and quickly made a name for himself in the Pacific Formula F2000 series, securing the championship title in 2006 and 2009, and finishing as runner-up in 2008. His racing prowess earned him the prestigious Team USA Scholarship, providing him the opportunity to compete internationally. Robert’s passion for racing continues as he contributes to the motorsports community by coaching aspiring drivers, sharing his expertise and fostering new talent in the field

Episode Transcript

  Robert Podlesni : I believe strongly in blockchain technology. I believe in the crypto side. One of the things you have to consider in terms of the timeline of migration here is, you know, they’re saying it takes money to buy a whiskey, right? The crypto is great. And having that wall it’s great. And being able to pay with it’s great. But if you have consumers who are already in credit card debt, who already have loans, who already can’t make rent or are struggling to pay for gas, the last thing they’re doing is going out and spending more money to buy bitcoin, right?

Kevin Rosenquist: Hey there. Welcome to PayPal. Where we bring you conversations with the trailblazers shaping the future of payments in fintech. My name is Kevin Rosenquist and thanks for listening. In today’s digital economy, subscription based models have become the norm, making efficient and reliable payment processing more critical than ever. Yet many businesses grapple with declining transactions and revenue revenue loss due to suboptimal payment systems. My guest today is Robert Podlesni , Chief Product Officer of Revolv3, a company dedicated to transforming subscription billing through advanced payment optimization and orchestration. In this episode, we’ll explore how revolve is enhancing payment approvals, delve into the complexities of subscription billing, and discuss the future of payment technologies. And we talk a little racing too. Joining me now from Laguna Beach, California, Robert Podlesni . All right. So this is a payments and fintech podcast. But I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you about your specific formula. F 2000 career. How did you get into auto racing?

Robert Podlesni : I. My dad got me a go kart class when I was seven. He was into cars and thought it would be a good weekend activity. And then at 12, he was sending me all over on airplanes by myself and then got into Open-wheel racing and then endurance racing. And now I coach drivers in the USF Pro 2000.

Kevin Rosenquist: I saw that you want to at least one, 1 or 2 championships in that FF2 thousand, right?

Robert Podlesni : Yeah, yeah. Got two championships there. Did a bunch of stuff with Champ Car Atlantic at the time, you know, the IMSA racing stuff. So just a motorsport guy. Actually sponsored by banks and processors. When I was in racing, which is how I got into payments.

Kevin Rosenquist: No kidding.

Robert Podlesni : That’s awesome. If it’s not, if it’s not motorsports or payments on the wrong guy. All right.

Kevin Rosenquist: Nice. I grew up on racing myself. My dad was heavily involved in it for work, so I went to a ton of races as a kid. I raced karts for a few years in my younger years as well. I did, uh, it was back then it was I’m dating myself here, but it was like, uh, Briggs five horse, slower stuff, chassis like I. My problem always was that I’m a tall guy, so, like, my dad kept having to, like, lean my seat back so that I could get my giant melon out of the wind. And it was tough.

Robert Podlesni : Yeah. Gotta go. Formula wired Jake back, 2006 karting or whatever.

Kevin Rosenquist: Wow, man. That’s awesome. That’s really cool. You know, there’s a certain mindset drivers have. Do you feel like your racing experience has kind of helped you advance your career, especially in sort of a fast paced kind of world that moves, moves quickly, like fintech?

Robert Podlesni : I mean, it’s definitely helped with the startup stuff. I mean, before this I was at Experian, you know, and it helps navigate, I guess, a lot of the pressure, as you know, going in as effectively a kid into a big business and trying to prove yourself. And then, you know, the startup life is just totally different. It’s all, you know, individual pressure. You got to lead a team. You deal with fundraising, you deal with all these things that are I deal with all these things. I don’t really have a core competency. And thank God for my co-founder and great ops and great finance people. But, you know, I get brought in as the payment subject matter expert but have to learn this. And so it’s been a crazy experience and I’m grateful for all the lessons racing has taught me.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, yeah for sure.

Robert Podlesni : Actually, I’ll be in Saint Petersburg for the first IndyCar race.

Kevin Rosenquist: Oh you will. Nice, nice. When is it? Is that March?

Robert Podlesni : Yeah, it’s March 1st. Basically March.

Kevin Rosenquist: 1st. Awesome. Very cool, very, very cool. All right, well, I can talk racing with you all day, but I’d have to do a different podcast for that. So, you know, there’s a lot of subscription based businesses facing challenges, with payment declines leading to involuntary churn. Can you shed some light on the common causes of the declines and their impact on businesses?

Robert Podlesni : Yeah. And I refer to payments as the telephone game. So if you haven’t played as a kid, you sit in a circle, you whisper in one person’s ear and it goes around the circle, and eventually that message changes. And that’s really what’s happened in payments, is you have a system that was designed with retail and e-commerce as effectively two separate things, and now those lines are being blurred. You have things like Starbucks apps where it’s an e-commerce transaction, but you’re in the parking lot ordering your drink or whatever. And so it changes the risk profile. It changes how things operate. And not all the issuers, all the banks, all the networks really support that. And so what you have is more and more intermediaries mapping this data. And so the issuer is in an awkward spot saying is this real. Did I get the data I wanted to see. Do I trust this transaction? Is this person really traveling here really doing this? And you get scenarios where customers either get frequent calls from their bank when they’re traveling, or they get these approvals and they have to charge back transactions, or they have to call the merchant and ask what it was, or their cards get stolen a lot. And so there’s a lot of things going on to solve this. But really the crux of the issue is does the issuer get the data they need to make the decisions on this transaction or not?

Kevin Rosenquist: Okay. Yeah. And so when it revolves claim to fame is having some of the highest acceptance rates in the industry. What technologies or maybe strategies does the platform employ to accomplish this.

Robert Podlesni : We started building revolve backwards, where we went to the banks and the processors and the issuers and said, what do you guys not getting? What do you want to see? Why is it if I send a transaction through this gateway on this rail, it approves and the same one on this transaction through this rail and it declines? We compiled a lot of that data. We cut out every intermediary. So every integration revolve does is direct to that core processing platform network, whatever it may be. And then we use our technology to not only route the transactions to the best possible source or best possible approval path, but also provide recommendations back to the merchants. You know, things like order funnel optimizations, great. Less fields, less friction is awesome. But if you’re not accepting some data, banks may not like that, right? If you don’t accept address, some banks are going to decline that for fraud because they see address and all the other transactions with that card. And so we try to have a symbiotic relationship with the merchant to say, we’re going to do our best to route this and to use our rules and our AI to make the best decision. But we also want to get the best inputs so we have more options to route.

Kevin Rosenquist: Okay. And your pricing model is unique. It only charges for successful transactions, which is very different from the traditional models. What inspired this approach and how has it been received?

Robert Podlesni : When I was at Experian, I got sold by a lot of companies who said they did this, none of which did, and they all charged me for attempts. And I, you know, had pushed really hard to get the budget to build an internal billing platform, which is what my whole career has been in payments. And thankfully they were a fantastic company and put it together and it was a very successful project. But as in trying these third parties, I realized that not only do is there a lack of knowledge in payments, but the billing model is all backwards, right? And so the industry has created this issue of hammering retries tied to cards to get approvals. When the banks are saying, hey, this looks riskier and riskier and riskier. Please stop. And so, you know, what I’ve spent building for internal billing platforms really just took to market. And so we think standing behind what we say we do, we get approvals. Why am I going to charge you on a decline? I think it’s just the right way to treat people.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s awesome. Like I said, it’s not typical. So that’s a that’s a cool unique. We get that a lot.

Robert Podlesni : Yeah. You can also cancel any time. You know we stand behind our product. You know it’s hard to be in contracts for five years up front where you don’t know if it’s going to work. So our technology is pretty adaptable and so is our pricing model.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah that’s cool because I think a lot of, you know, so many subscription models are going away from the long term contracts in just all aspects of life. So I think people are starting to appreciate that or even maybe expect that more often.

Robert Podlesni : Yeah. And you’re stuck with RFP ING, you know, providers every 3 or 5 years. It kind of wears on you.

Kevin Rosenquist: Absolutely. Absolutely. So speaking of subscription models, they’ve definitely exploded across various industries. From your perspective, how have those models evolved and what do you see trending in the future for the future.

Robert Podlesni : We’ve seen a lot more companies taking their logic in-house. So I’d say historically we’ve seen this kind of mass migration, if you will, to creating these subscription offers on every product or service based. And they’ve started out as relatively simple models, and now there’s more personalization and configuration in a lot of these, whether that be, you know, stacked products to create some kind of bundle or whether that be, you know, creative installments in sort of the finance space or even healthcare spaces. We’re seeing a lot of buy now, pay later has been really popular, but merchants kind of creating their own versions of this to keep people in their ecosystem. And so this migration to how does the merchant retain control of their destiny, but use someone like us to, to optimize that journey is a really it’s been an interesting path and we continue to see it, you know, iterate constantly.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah. You’re you’re it’s interesting about the buy now, pay later thing that is definitely become way more common. And I’ve talked to other guests about that. And to your point, you just said it helps keep them in their ecosystem. It helps keep them part of their whole process. Do you see that continuing to expand over the years? The buy now, pay later?

Robert Podlesni : I think there’ll be a greater evolution in terms of meeting concerns where they are financially. There’s a huge amount. It was like $1.2 trillion in concerned, you know, debt right now from the card perspective in the US, uh, a.

Kevin Rosenquist: Lot of that’s me.

Robert Podlesni : Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And you know, the I track macroeconomics pretty closely because you look at the cost of living versus incomes and people are tight. It’s tight out there, right? And so I think that businesses are getting better at understanding that, hey, you had an emergency, for instance, they’re going to work with you either in terms of the price or the payment plans, or if you can’t make a payment or skipping a payment or things like that. That meeting the customer where they are has been much more popular. And a lot of the reason why, you know, companies are coming to platforms like us to be able to make adjustments on the fly.

Kevin Rosenquist: One of the things that comes up on the show a lot is security for for good reason. And, you know, without creating friction, without compromising the user experience, how can companies ensure robust payment security without, you know, crushing that user experience?

Robert Podlesni : You know.

Kevin Rosenquist: It’s a.

Robert Podlesni : Great point, and the answer differs by implementation. And I’m a big proponent of the journey. Right. So our optimization within that path is one component of it. But understand what that checkout flow is, and use your experiences all the way to that response. And how you’re dealing with a dunning or retry cycle is really important. And so reducing the number of touch points between the consumer and that issuer is important. Obviously, the more data you map, the less info you have even on the fraud side. And then getting that data in a spot where the merchants able to diagnose their platform is incredibly important. So whether you’re using a single token through a platform like revolve, if you’re using a processor token, if you’re storing pan, your PCI level one, all these things are different, right? So when we go to an enterprise that says, you know, like a telco is a great example, they’re never going to decouple their actual subscription product or their billing. , they, they may or may not use a token, but they’ll probably store the pan and they want to route through somebody like us. That implementation and getting their AOC is a lot different than a growing, you know, service based company that doesn’t want to touch pan. They don’t want to be PCI level one. They’re not at that size yet. And so having security as a part of your roadmap and growth is important because what we see is as companies grow, they do want to maintain more of that source of truth internally, but that also means taking on more of the risk. And so those providers change. So working with a good partner who can help you map that out and then enable those on the fly is, you know, helps long term because otherwise that becomes your roadblock of, you know, do we trust this concern or not.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah for sure, for sure. And do you see more payment options continuing to be involved in payments in the future? I mean, you look at other countries and they have lots of different ways to pay. And, you know, we’re still in this country, still pretty card based. I feel like compared to other countries. Do you see the shift coming where we’re kind of more in those alternate payment methods? Yeah.

Robert Podlesni : I mean, the US is interchange dependent because who doesn’t want to take a vacation on credit card points that you already? It’s true. Right?

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s what I do exactly.

Robert Podlesni : You know, it’s interesting. There’s I don’t know what it is. 600 plus app alternative payment methods globally right now. Having all those on the checkout page would be insane, right? So would be the hyper localization of, you know, if you’re taking something like Pix in Brazil or, you know, even the direct debit and real time payments has evolved in Europe and things like that. So the localization of understanding what your customers are using for your kind of product in that region is important. Service based companies in Asia-pac are going to have a different, you know, primary payment method than product based companies in the US, for instance, right? , that’s something we look a lot into. But I think we’ll start to see a contraction there a bit as winners emerge, because we’re in this explosion of everybody’s a payment company. And I think at some point to your previous question, either the risk or just the availability or the usage of those payment methods will start to see true winners emerge. And then you’re going to see companies start to back out of saying, hey, look, we don’t want to be a payment company anymore, right? Just we’ll accept these payment methods.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, yeah yeah, Real time payments is another thing that I think is interesting because again, not really prominent here, but other countries are seeing more use cases or usage of real time payments. Is is the obviously the credit cards like you know, they’re they’re part of the reason why. But is there any other reasons why you think we’ve been slower to adopt real time payments? I mean.

Robert Podlesni : The infrastructure in the US is much harder than everywhere else, right? The UK is, I’d say, one of the leaders in terms of adopting new payment methods quickly and iterating on this. Typically you see the UK, they have, you know, penetration with that stuff earlier. But if you look at the US, I mean, you know, UK is, you know, less than effectively the size of California when you go global or if you go nationally in the US, you’ve got, you know, think about how many terminals, point of sale devices, omnichannel merchants are out there. And that not only does that infrastructure have to update, but a lot of the physical equipment does too. And I think that’s why you saw EMV was so slow to be adopted in the US as well. If the stripe on the back still works great, but now there is no more stripe, right? It’s gone. And even EMV is is disappearing in retail. Because you have wallets like Apple and Google Pay obfuscating that credit card data for security. But at the end of the day, it’s still a credit card, right?

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah. That’s that’s I mean, pretty much everybody I know, including my family, we love to pay with our credit card and just pay it off and get the points. Like you said, use it for vacations and things like that. Obviously, you don’t get that with alternative payment methods that you know, that we’ve been talking about. Do you see like, you know, it’s kind of a broad question. I don’t want to get too deep in the weeds, but as far as crypto goes and stuff like, do you do you see, I mean, I’ve talked to people who are building platforms to only accept crypto, like physical machines that accept crypto. I mean, do you do you see that continuing to evolve, or do you think it’s more of a passing fad?

Robert Podlesni : , I think that will continue to evolve. I was I used to consult for a company that did bitcoin mining. And so quick story, I lost like 660 some odd bitcoin in one of the exchanges that went down. Right. So someone in the Bahamas is living, is living large on effectively my payments from this consulting and so.

Kevin Rosenquist: Oh no, that’s a lot of money. Yeah.

Robert Podlesni : Exactly. And I still and that was quite a while ago. So it’s worth a ton now. And so I believe strongly in the blockchain technology I believe in the crypto side. One of the things you have to consider in terms of the timeline of migration here is, you know, they’re just saying it takes money to buy a whiskey, right? The crypto is great. And having that wall it’s great. And being able to pay with it’s great. But if you have consers who are already in credit card debt, who already have loans, who already can’t make rent or are struggling to pay for gas, the last thing they’re doing is going out and spending more money to buy bitcoin, right? And maybe they are. And they’re taking the hit on the interest or whatever else. But effectively you have to move that over to living on cash, basically, whether it’s cash or crypto or whatever else, in order to make that full migration. And so I think we’ll see a continued expansion in that space in terms of acceptance. I’m a believer in the technology, even if a couple exchanges burned me. But you know, I still have some. So, you know, keep rolling.

Kevin Rosenquist: God, that’s that’s gut wrenching to hear, Robert, that you lost that much. Well, I mean.

Robert Podlesni : I’m not the only person. It’s like you look at Mount Gox, mint Powell. There’s been tons of them that have gone down. And fortunately and I mean, even if you look at ft, it’s like, you know, that happened, but then there was no crypto behind there and kind of everybody paid it and shoved it under the rug. But there’s still an issue of unless it’s in cold storage on a hard drive, you don’t actually know if you have your crypto or not. Right?

Kevin Rosenquist: Are there any exciting developments or initiatives on the horizon for revolve that you can share?

Robert Podlesni : Yeah, I mean, we’ll be getting into some of the on ramp space here this year from the crypto side. But really to support existing merchants in our space, we have a lot coming out in terms of plugins and apps and things like that. So you’ll see a number of releases there, and then we’ll have more of the, you know, I’ll call it pay fat connect instant onboarding available. So a lot of our market right now is the either platforms who are looking for a processor or gateway alternative and using revolve, or you have merchants that either don’t want to run in-house billing platform or want the options we provide. You’ll see more and more. I’ll call it SMB and down market solutions. For those growing businesses that want to leverage the technology the enterprises are using.

Kevin Rosenquist: Very cool. In the larger sense, how do you envision the payment processing landscape evolving? You know, I want to say next decade, but jeesh, maybe like 1 to 3 years. Like, I mean, things move so fast. What do you think is there a next big thing on the horizon that you think is coming?

Robert Podlesni : You know, it’s interesting the there’s a lot of processors making big investments into new platforms. So even the companies you think of as, you know, new kids on the block are now sort of looking at reinvesting and re rebuilding their platform again. There’s some really cool stuff coming out in that space. So I think that’s nice. The localization is getting more and more interesting as a lot of acquisitions happening, gobbling up things everywhere from local acquiring to banks. I think you’ll see candidly, I think there’s going to be a lot more regulation in the fact space because we see quite a bit of misuse of what pay facts really are for. And so I think that will be something Visa and Mastercard focus on. And then really, you know, to your point, it’s how do you create a more secure end to end transaction? Because credit cards are built effectively on rails that are decades old, right. So if we can improve that. One of my core objectives is as part of this company, can we make it so that there’s no data loss or degradation in that journey so that the issuer or issuing processor, whether it be a card or a digital wallet or an alternative payment method, has all the data they need to make that decision, and you’re meeting the customer where they are. I think those are the two biggest things you’ll see in terms of both the cost reduction standpoint and a security improvement.

Kevin Rosenquist: One more question about real time payments. You know, I feel like a lot of people in this country don’t really know that those are are happening in other countries. Do you? Do you think if more people knew about it, there would be some demand that would kind of push that more in this country?

Robert Podlesni : I don’t know, to be honest. And the companies who are most interested are either SMEs or B2B businesses, because those are kind of the you’re either dealing with a lot of money right away, or you’re dealing with somebody who’s like, I just started my brand new restaurant or my brand new, whatever it is, and I’m kind of hand to mouth, and they’re looking for that immediate deposit. And historically, that’s basically a lack of getting into technical details, basically just fronting the money that’s coming back to the bank. Right. Is effectively what they’ve been doing. And so I believe in real time payments. I think there’s a lot of good use cases for it. Again, it comes down to even the bank connect stuff is great, but you have to have money in the bank account in order to make that payment. And you’re seeing not to have what looks like more and more regulation around the use of, you know, in their case, like ACH or bank account transactions. And there’s a lot of cool technology there, but how much of the pie can they take? Is is difficult to say. So we don’t get a lot of requests saying, hey, I’m not getting my money fast enough right now. So it hasn’t been a priority from our side. Yeah, from a security standpoint and from a monitoring standpoint, it’s better. It’s a lot less complicated from the reject side and things like that. But again, it hasn’t been a priority for at least the merchants we have. Yeah everyone, everyone’s watching it. But it’s kind of with them more in hope than expectation.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, yeah. Or at least if there is going to happen, it’s it’s still a ways away.

Robert Podlesni : Yeah. And it’s not massive change to do it right. , so it’s not completely outside the norms of traditional payment rails where you’re enabling some kind of truly APM that’s out there processes is generally familiar to everyone, right?

Kevin Rosenquist: So are you racing competitively at all now or just teaching?

Robert Podlesni : You know, what’s funny is I guess there’s this new rule at IMSA that if you’re over 35, you’re like a guaranteed bronze. So my phone rang for a couple teams to try and do some endurance stuff, but mostly just coaching. I mean, I have a startup, I’ve got a two month old and a four and a half year old. And so getting back and training and and losing my my dad bod is, is hasn’t been my top priority. But you know, look I love coaching I love motorsports. You know it definitely runs in my veins. And so you should you should watch I think the new announcers and Fox on IndyCar are fantastic. I’m a huge fan of Hinchcliffe and Will Buxton. And then USF Pro Championships is the feeder series there. And they do. They have a tremendous job. If you get to watch them on YouTube. It’s a real pleasure.

Kevin Rosenquist: Awesome. Robert Podlesni  from revolve. So glad to have you here. Thanks so much for your time. Yeah.
Robert Podlesni : Cheers. Have a great day.