Fintech in the Metaverse and Other Payment Innovations, with Justin Passalaque of Worldline
How do payment companies take advantage of the growing number of meta verse payments. And what payment innovations are coming in the next few years. Justin Passalaqua Country Director at Worldline tells us about the key strategies Worldline uses to innovate and to stay ahead of shifting customer needs, and where he believes payments are headed. Listen in for some exciting insights for the future of payments technology.
Payments & Fintech Insights In This Episode
- The diversity of Worldline services
- How Fintech has a major role in the future of metaverse
- Pros and cons of going fully contactless
- Card-present and no-card-present transactions
- Worldline Metaverse Mall
- And much more!
Today’s Guest
Justin Passalaqua : Worldline
Worldline is shaping a new world of payments and trusted transactions. With their advanced payments technology, local payments expertise and solutions customised for hundreds of markets and industries, they are helping millions of businesses of all sizes to realise their ambitions – faster, simpler and more securely. Worldline’s purpose is to design and operate leading digital payment and transactional solutions that enable sustainable economic growth and reinforce trust and security in our societies. Their solutions are environmentally friendly, widely accessible, and support social transformation.
Featured on the Show
About PayPod
PayPod is the leading voice in the payments and fintech industry, covering payments, risk management and new technology. Host Jacob Hollabaugh interviews leaders who are shaping the payments and fintech world, as they discuss the latest developments in the payments and fintech industry.
Episode Transcript
Jacob: Welcome to PayPod The Payments Industry Podcast. Each week, we’ll bring you in-depth conversations with leaders who are shaping the payments and fintech world from payment processing to risk management and from new technology to entirely new payment types. If you want to know what’s happening in the world of fintech and payments, you’re in the right place. Hello, everyone. Welcome to PayPod. I’m your host, Jacob Hollabaugh. And today on the show, we are taking a look not just at where the payments industry stands today, but also going to spend some time talking about the future of payments and some topics like the metaverse or autonomous payments that, depending who you ask, might be closer to reality than you think. Joining me for this discussion is Justin Passalaque, chief market officer of North America for Worldline, one of the leading payments services providers globally. Justin, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here.
Justin: Thank you, Jacob. I really appreciate your time.
Jacob: Yeah, absolutely. Let’s start here. We will start a little kind of broad, all encompassing of world line before jumping into your North American market. And some of those more not so futuristic anymore topics that I referenced there. But Worldline offers a wide range of solutions for both merchants, financial institutions covering nearly every aspect of the payments ecosystem. How does a company manage such a diverse portfolio of services, and what are kind of the key strategies you employ to ensure consistent innovation and growth across so many different segments?
Justin: Yeah, very good question. I would say maybe on the fringe of a cliche here, but voice of the customer, I do think it’s very important being a large payments company. There’s a lot of us out there, a lot of payments companies, and with a lot of different technologies, you kind of add on throughout the years. I think it’s important to really listen to the customer and figure out what the needs are. Pay attention to your go to market strategy, too. So if you’re an indirect model and you’re going through banks and ISOs and resellers of the world really listen to what their needs are and what the market trends are, and then try to fit what your all the different solution sets are to really pinpoint what those needs of your customer and then what their, you know, the end user are. So I think it really comes down to not just asking questions and surveying and and checking all the boxes, but it’s really important to actually listen and pay attention and then figure out if you’re starting to see some of these trends develop, either a solution that you don’t have yet or mix all the pieces together to really drive a genuine payment experience for your customer.
Jacob: Absolutely. And I like to say there’s most cliches exist for a reason. There are some are that are truly just cliches and maybe don’t mean much when said, but others exist for a reason. And I think that one is certainly among those. Similarly, with the size and scope of Worldline’s portfolio, you’re managing an incredible amount of partnerships and integrations to be able to offer these solutions to your end users and clients. How does the company approach building and maintaining strong relationships with all of these partners, and what strategies do you employ to ensure that seamless integration of your services and technologies at such a large scale?
Justin: Humanizing payments I think it’s kind of a lost aspect in payments quite often. I think with technology we’ve kind of replaced the human aspect, which is good and bad. I mean, there’s good things about it as well, where it’s seamless. You can download and consume an API quickly and have payments in your software. So easy and fast it’s kind of nice. However, when it gets complex and you have all these moving pieces, you often you need to speak with somebody, right? And I think that’s very important and that’s where I think that we’re aligned does really well and that we continue to drive that home is the human piece of it. And you had mentioned specifically integrating. So it’s not just the customer care aspect of it, which is also very, very important when you have a human to speak with, when your merchants need to speak with someone or customers. But it’s also at the very beginning of the experience. So if you’re a software company or a bank or an ISO and you want to incorporate payments and there’s some integration work that needs to be done there, I think it’s really important to have that human element where you can work with an integration specialist. So if you need to add or ACH or all these different moving pieces, you’re not just trying to source through a bunch of documentation, you can actually just have an email or a conversation with with a human that can walk you through that and really make sure you’re going down the right payment path. There’s a lot of partnerships to manage and there’s a lot of moving pieces, but I think as long as we can continue to have these conversations and make sure that we’re a trusted partner and not just a piece of technology out there that you can’t find help, I think that’s important.
Jacob: Yeah, and I love bringing the human element into it, especially This will be come up more in down the line here in this interview with some of the topics we’re going to talk about. But when thinking of removing that friction, making things more seamless, that there is a human element to doing that. It isn’t just making the better APIs, the better integrations and everything. It’s that that documentation might not be the more seamless way to do it. It might be much better of like you’re going to get on a. Call with someone who tells you where to click and how quickly you can get through it. So love that. Let’s before we get to some of those big, crazier topics, let’s talk specifically about your domain, North American Business of Worldline, which has grown its North American business among many ways by succeeding in very niche software provider verticals, things, you know, like order head sports, membership, childcare, etcetera, and have done so by providing those niche specific solutions to those niche verticals. A couple of questions related to this approach. Are you developing these niche specific solutions in house? Are you using acquisition to find the solutions for these niche verticals, maybe integrating with third party developers? What’s the development process like for these solutions?
Justin: It’s mainly all done in house. I would say it’s more of taking an existing payments stack, right? So we take our stack and then we add features that certain vertical markets may need, right? So again, maybe back to the original question. The voice of the customer. Let’s say we think that gym memberships is a good vertical market for us because we have recurring billing, good subscription model and we’re checking some boxes. But then we go to a trade show and we speak with some customers and maybe we partner with one software company that does gym software. Then we listen to that company. We learn that, Oh, actually we need a card updater, we need this, this and that. And so then we start to develop that solution so that it’s not a fast thing. I would say it takes a little bit of time to become an expert within that vertical market and be a trusted payments consultant there. But I think we mainly all do it in house. And I think the key there is to our go to market strategy for North America’s almost 90% through the ISVs. So the independent software vendor. So we make sure that our partnerships are very in tuned and we’re developing solutions and listening to the software companies because the software companies are the ones that are really building the solution, right? I mean, we’re empowering the payments piece and we need to make that as easy as possible and give that software company all the different tools because the software company is really solving the the problem, right? They’ve created a very niche software specific to gyms or childcare where they’ve found problems that they’re trying to solve. And so for us, it’s really just trying to figure out what those areas are and within our realm, can we help them through payments or reporting? Could be. Maybe it’s on onboarding or security fraud tools. Each vertical have a very specific need that’ll be different than the next one, and we just need to pay attention to that. And whether we build it in-house or we tweak something that we already have to modify to, to meet their needs.
Jacob: Absolutely, That makes total sense. And a couple of follow ups on that. Then what’s the selection process like for choosing one of these verticals to focus on? Is it existing merchants or software companies coming to you with, we need to fill this need? Or are you identifying a vertical yourself before diving in and finding out is what are the needs here? Is there a software provider already trying to that we could partner with to try to provide this? What’s that selection process like to identify these verticals?
Justin: All of the above. Yeah. Think it’s a good mix. Yeah. Think it’s important to as a good example because we’re in North America we’re all in direct go to market strategy. So our outside sales is very small. We have a very large account management team that helps all of our software partners grow and maintain payments. But think as far as like acquisition, it’s pretty small. And the fact that we’re really going to market through the ISV, but through that, we have a lot of organic growth, we have a lot of merchants. Let’s go back to gyms is a good example. So let’s say we look at our portfolio and go, Hey, weird, we have a thousand gyms. Why do we have so many gyms? And then we take a deep dive with our product teams and sales and sales enablement teams and we go, okay, where are they using us the most? And then we take that and we go, okay, can we replicate that? What’s a similar niche vertical market? It turns out child care has some similar needs. Let’s let’s take a deep dive there.
Justin: It could be as simple as showing up to a trade show. We have a sales person. He or she says, Hey, you know what, I’ve got an idea. My cousin runs a child care and they have this trade show and I think there could be a fit. Can I go to the trade show? And we send a person to a trade show and they come back and say, you know, there’s 40 software companies that just service this market and think this is a good one for us. And then we as a company, we kind of make sure the product needs are there and do we have all the regulatory things and security checks and all of that. So it’s a good combination. I would also say market trends to even having some of these conversations out of this. If we get into something in more detail, then say. I’ve had a cool idea there. I’m going to go back and run with it in the team and see. Maybe it’s non-for-profits as good for us. So yeah, I think it’s a good blend.
Jacob: Yeah. And that kind of answered my other follow up already then of where the data gathering happens on all those channels and where the sales channels kind of are. Very cool. Switching gears a slight bit here, successful underwriting of new accounts comes down mostly to balancing speed and accuracy and both tremendously important in e-commerce, which with the North America division, you guys are not a traditional retail point of sale based business model, as you said, focused on e-commerce industry specific software intensive verticals like we’ve discussed. An acquirer can be blindsided in this industry with millions in fraud, and at the same time customers are expecting that same day approval minimal, if any, reserves. How do you guys at Worldline navigate that balance of speed and accuracy?
Justin: Carefully. So yeah, I think that’s a very good point that I think it’s often maybe forgotten about or it’s not as seen as much, right, because it happens on the back end. But I would say maybe a shout out to our teams, our fraud and monitoring and underwriting teams that maybe don’t get the limelight as much as sales and marketing and others. We have a full team that that’s all they do and they monitor that and we have a lot of tools too. So we implement a lot of technology and tools to help monitor and flag things. But as you may know, in e-commerce, world karting is really huge because the opportunity for fraudsters to create tools, basically they have their own tools that crawl the internet and try to ping our systems and try to find a way to hack into. So we have full teams of very specialized people that that’s all they do is monitor and use these tools and really pay attention to that. We also play well with all of the other entities within the payment scheme because it’s a big ecosystem. So there’s banks and processors and so we work really well with all all the regulatory systems and make sure that we’re always up to date. We always want to make sure it’s not just after the fact, but where, as you mentioned in the beginning of this question is the underwriting aspect, right? Making sure that we want to follow all the guidelines. But there is a balance, as you said, where we want to be able to still service a lot of industries that maybe have been deemed harder to underwrite or not. Everybody feels like it’s a safe industry or vertical. So we do balance that and we make sure that we want to make payments available to as many people as we can while making sure that everybody’s following the right rules and that we’re all being safe and and monitoring, making sure that in the end, we just we don’t want anyone to have their card compromised. I mean, that’s the gist of it. We want to make sure it’s a safe way for people to enjoy commerce.
Jacob: Absolutely. And we’ve gotten into the world of security. So let me ask you this. Could you walk me through the security differences between card present and then card, not present transactions specifically maybe speaking to 3DS and how that evolved now into 3DS too? Sure.
Justin: Yeah, it’s fairly similar. So if you think about it, I mean, kind of just what I just mentioned is that the gist of it is to secure a credit card transaction. I mean that’s the simplicity of it, whether it’s online or it’s in in hand, whether that it’s a device or it’s a shopping cart, right. Or a screen, it’s the same concept. Basically, you just want to be able to accept a payment and make sure that transaction runs through its path without it being touched. So it’s secure, it’s tokenized. You want to make sure that there’s no criminals or fraudsters or have the capability to to touch that data, right? That’s the gist of it. So it’s the same in card present card, not present. I would say some of the main differences is through the checkout process. So the difference with online with as you mentioned like 3DS, is that you actually have a screen and that screen comes in and you want to make sure that that screen is fully secure, right? So that there’s no ways anybody can drop some code in there and take that away. So there’s a balance there between having that security, but also not interrupting the flow of a commerce checkout. Right, because that’s huge. So it’s almost the same as like a retail store.
Justin: If you walk into a retail store, you want that experience. If you’re a retail owner, you want someone to come in and feel like they can be okay and they’re safe and they want to buy everything in your store. Same concept. So if you go online, you want to have a flow going. So with 3DS and 3DS2 now is basically allowing for a secure transaction to happen without interrupting the flow. So it’s mobile optimization, it’s not a full redirect. So when the customer goes on, they’re checking out, but they’re not leaving that experience to where they get frazzled and say, Maybe I don’t want this and they don’t leave the cart all together. In the end you want them to buy. So, I mean, that’s the biggest difference. I would say. There’s also things kind of happening on the back end, too, with tokenization. That’s a little different. So every time you go to check out so you’re not having to authorize your card every time. Most players like Worldline will have a tokenization vault that keeps your secure data safe. And then that way, every time you go to add another cart or check out again or go to a different location, you’re not having to reauthorize that credit card information.
Jacob: Of course. And want to shift gears now to talk about a topic that hasn’t been mentioned often on this podcast, but I think will start to be much more in the future. And that is the metaverse a topic that for a period in 2021 and 2022 was kind of like the next big thing, everyone’s favorite topic and the broader tech world and just culture at large and since has receded a bit from the public discourse. But while there may be more naysayers now than maybe a year or two ago, I count myself still among those who believe long term, the metaverse is going to be a major industry, an ecosystem that could potentially be a part of our everyday lives. And a world line as a company seems to think similar to myself and has recently gotten heavily involved with linking the financial and fintech world with the metaverse. And so I’ve just been fascinated by the topic and saw the connection between the company in this new burgeoning industry. So I’ve got a few things I’d love to ask you about this, starting with what sorts of financial services and tools do you see as necessary to bring into the metaverse first? What’s that initial structure that needs to be put in place to allow both the growth of the metaverse itself, but then also the growth of the rest of the industry and the rest of the kind of integration to happen. What’s that initial tools and structure you see as necessary?
Justin: That’s a very important question, I would say, because there’s a lot we can pull in. I think maybe as a good bridge to the last question you asked is security. I think you need to make sure that everything is is because it’s new. Right. It’s it’s almost like when the Internet came out, it wasn’t very secure. We had to figure out how to make it secure. And so I think it’s first off is to make sure that however we’re connecting through the metaverse, that it’s very secure and that we’re we’re establishing, whether it’s tokenization vault or as we already mentioned, a few of those tools, I think that’s the most important get the groundwork, which is security, making sure that all the regulatory that we know of, because it’s still pretty new.
Jacob: Is hitting that on the fly.
Justin: Yeah, you’re right We could obviously just be creating but using what we’ve learned so far through e-commerce and mobile and other things along the way to help build those building blocks. I think that’s important. Instead of jumping in too early and throwing in creating wallets right out of the bat or creating certain things that I think will be necessary. But I think the ground base is security. Yeah.
Jacob: And certainly at some point, payments are a big part of what’s going to happen there. Obviously, it’s you know, it’s a new commerce platform essentially. So a lot of payments going to be happening. How do you envision the payment flow occurring in the metaverse? Do you see it being like you referenced a wallet eventually some sort of metaverse wallet that’s linked to your existing accounts? Do you anticipate funds it being easier to leave funds in the metaverse versus having exchanges in and out? What kind of payment flow do you think maybe makes the most sense, at least in its nascent stages right now?
Justin: Yeah, it’s kind of exciting. I think that it’s going to need to be a combination. I think there’s going to be especially to start, I do think there’s the capability to eventually have it left in the metaverse and have like basically like a virtual wallet or a virtual bank. Guess, right. It’s sitting in a new.
Jacob: Virtual wallet outside of the current virtual wallet. It’s a new in the virtual virtual wall.
Justin: Yeah, you got it. Yeah. I think there’s opportunity for that once we kind of figure things out a little bit more. And again, back to making sure it’s it’s safe and secure. And but I do believe there’s going to have to be some sort of combination of that mixed with the transactions having to leave and then and kind of follow this the similar path as it is today. Right. So it’ll have to hit Visa, MasterCard issuing banks to the processors and your actual gateways and players like Worldline who kind of do a lot of that all of it so where it’ll have to leave, check all the boxes and then maybe come back in. But I’m curious on what companies and what kind of maybe it’s ISVs or fintech companies can figure out that connection. That’s where I get kind of nerdy and excited about. I’m like, Who’s gonna make that connection? Where is it a world line to an ISV that has now tied into it that’s kind of formed like a metaverse middleware? It’s going to be interesting.
Jacob: Do you anticipate thinking that companies that exist right now and like traditional players in the payments world and fintech world will be the ones to adopt and bring what they’re currently offering in? Or do you think it’s more likely that we might see new people crop up if the adoption rate is slow? By these companies to say maybe we don’t believe that it’s actually a viable market or whatever, and for the growth of it to be new companies coming in and saying we can provide those services that they’re slow to adopt into this new ecosystem, we can do that instead. And there’s new players, or do you think it’ll be adopted or are you seeing other companies in the space adopt quick enough or be open to the idea of it that they’ll be able to slowly become those kind of middlemen or create that integration with companies that exist versus new ones cropping up to fill that gap?
Justin: It’ll probably be both. I think, you know, it’s an easy way to get out of that question. No, there’s.
Jacob: It’s also I would also agree with you, it’s probably correct. Yes. I knew, as I was saying, that I was like, this is another one where it’s probably both. I would I would think. But the mix might be. Yeah.
Justin: You know, the Reason I say both is because there are large players like Worldline who are already adopting it and are already developing. So we have an innovation center in France where we’re headquartered, where we’re always trying to find new innovative ways payments can make a new play. And metaverse obviously is a hot topic. So we’ve already started down that path. So that’s a good example where we already have nine stores and we already have some customers using them or getting getting feedback. And so it’s pretty interesting where we’re this large and old company, right? Established, Yeah, established where we say we often could be stuck in our ways. You know, it’s kind of nice to see that larger companies are actually taking a look at this. Now that being said, is it moving fast enough? Maybe not. There could be smaller, more nimble startup companies that have certain connectors. We’ve seen this throughout payments, too. Whether that’s e-commerce was actually just thinking about the bridge here, too, is going to the National Restaurant Association show. I’ve gone to that show probably 15 times, 15 years. And every year it kind of evolves. I’m always there looking at technology and the last time I went, it was like dominated by all of the Uber eats, skip the dishes and now there’s software companies that just enable that piece of it and they’re everywhere. And it’s been this explosion of technology where there’s been a shift probably during COVID, where everybody went online. And then how do you fulfill that into the restaurant and how do you basically navigate all these vendors? And so there’s probably a hundred software companies that just do that. So I think there’s probably going to be a mix where you’re going to have these startup companies that will try to attach maybe some of these large world line entities while Worldline’s doing their own. They’re still going to be a need for, for lack of better term, like middleware companies are just a quick switch that will allow you to tie in all these little pieces. Yeah, yeah.
Jacob: Adapt it to that new ecosystem for you. Finally, then on topic, you alluded to it, but Worldline, I asked all this and knew this was a topic I wanted to talk to you about because specifically I’d seen earlier this month Worldline opened a metaverse mall or earlier in March. By the time folks are listening to this, it might be just into the new month. Can you explain a little what this metaverse mall was and what the goals were for its initial rollout? And now, if you can, you know, almost a month into it about what the kind of results or maybe anything you’ve learned already from it.
Justin: Yeah, and can speak a little bit to it. It’s still pretty new. So a lot of our findings are still being, you know, a month.
Jacob: Or 2 or 3 weeks in here.
Justin: So yeah, it’s pretty new and it’s also pretty heavy in Europe. So I oversee North America, so I haven’t got to play with it personally yet, but I’m excited to but from but so basically it’s yeah, so as I mentioned, there’s nine stores in this in this mall that we’ve tried out. The goal is to really kind of test it, test the market, gain some customer feedback across different usages too. So not just retail but different types of merchant Guess, Yeah.
Jacob: Can I ask what’s the makeup of those nine stores? What, what are the offerings there? What type of merchants are they?
Justin: It’s mainly retail. I believe there’s a non-for-profit in there. Yeah, I think that’s all.
Jacob: Makes sense from my limited experience with that world too, of what would be the first adopters in there.
Justin: Yeah. And because Worldline plays really heavy in retail, especially in Europe too. I mean that’s the sweet spot. But yeah, the goal is to really just test our own systems, test the market a little bit, but we’ve got a really good feedback so far. So we have a few experts that are just running with it now or they’re like, okay, this could really be a thing. So the initial market indicators I would say is very positive in the fact that we’ve actually have one person that that’s his job that tells something, that there’s enough interest and there’s enough green lights on our end from our own systems and being able to like make it worth our while. So more to come on that. Don’t have any other concrete things I could tell you as far as like what other rollouts. I think we’re going to start with that as a kind of like our our initial base and gain some more feedback over the next few months and go from there.
Jacob: Yeah. Well, if talking about the metaverse wasn’t futuristic enough for folks listening, I’ve got one thing even more far out I’d like to ask you about. I was reading The Worldline’s 2021 Navigating Digital Payments document that you published and it led with depicting a pretty wild scenario of it’s 2030 and autonomous payments are in full swing. And kind of describe that between the Internet of Things data analytics, predictive modeling, using machine AI learning tools that all the pieces were starting to come into place to depict this place in 2030 where goods and services would just be ordered for you before you even know it. I think the example in the little depiction was the person in the hypothetical was out of toilet paper and needed groceries and they just showed up on Sunday. He didn’t even know or anything. They just came to his door. Is that type of future something you yourself can envision just outside of the world of payments or whatever? Just like seeing that world come to fruition as quickly as, you know, 20, 30 or sooner and assuming that it is in our future. How soon do you think payments companies and the payments industry need to be considering and incorporating autonomous solutions?
Justin: I do envision that whether you like it or not, maybe it’s a little too much to handle me being kind of like, again, a payments nerd. I’m kind of excited for it. I do think it’s closer than we think. I mean, even if you just as simple as like Instagram, you have a conversation with your partner about patio furniture and then you open Instagram and there’s patio furniture. They’re looking at you. You’re like, whoa, You know, like, so what’s the next steps? To me, it’s fairly easy if that’s tied to payments and whatever the algorithms are that learn know your behavior that you are ready to buy patio furniture and it you’ve already basically have it selected and there’s ways to like have that distributed. I don’t see why you know, your next Chase Lounge just isn’t waiting for you in your backyard the next morning. I think that’s closer than we think. So yeah, I think it is important for payments companies to think about it, get ahead of it, maybe monetize it. Maybe there’s ways to figure out how can we get ahead of that instead of playing catch up to it. It’s pretty interesting. I think there’s a fine balance, though, too, because if we get too far ahead, then it either gets not secure again back to that point or it kind of gets too far fetched and we lose the focus of it. But yeah, I think there’s also good examples of even just buying behavior that we saw some big stores like Target tried to do. When you go down the aisle at Target, almost like Minority Report, the movie, like if you walk through the aisle and it sees you and then it it knows and it spits out an ad specific to you and it’s trying to change your course of behavior. You’re buying your consumer behavior, the.
Jacob: Shampoos right down here. This is your favorite one. You’re actually almost out at your home and you’re already here in the aisle. So there you go. Yeah. And we have.
Justin: Smart fridges, too. I mean, the pieces are I mean, we’re already almost there. I mean, you can make payments through your fridge now, too. It’s pretty dang close, to be honest. 20, 30, maybe even long tooth. And we’re already starting to see it by then. I think it’s we’re already going to have most of that happening.
Jacob: You mentioned security. The other part I’d my kind of first notion of what the big hurdles with that will be. And there’s a variety of things that could fall under autonomous solutions that would be a little short of the pure. Like I just wake up one morning and Amazon has delivered a new suite of things so I don’t have to run errands or even think that I need to do them. But with anything that would be autonomous and taking it even more seamless, where at some point you’ve given some sort of clearance as the consumer, that this is allowed to happen at these times in the background, and that that would possibly lead to my big thing being like chargebacks or refunds or people saying, I did say yes to that, but then it popped up or something showed up that the order had been placed and I didn’t actually get to click. That final like wasn’t even a part of the purchase process. And now I’m saying, no, I actually don’t need that. And that becomes a huge hurdle. So would you agree that like maybe that would be one of the biggest hurdles with anything? Autonomous payments wise, or is it the security? I think across the board just kind of always is that one. But would there be any other hurdles you would see?
Justin: Yeah, that’s a great point. I think that’s going to spike and maybe also even outside of payments, you go get your law degree because there’s probably going to be some lawsuits. Yeah. But yeah, all jokes aside, I think that overarching security. Yeah, but you’re right. Is it down to the terms and conditions? Is it down to do we just have to have more robust chargeback and guess solutions and or like risk thresholds? Right. Are we going to have to, like, adjust everything we’re doing at like a world line on the back end? Do we have to get more flexible and quicker, too, because there’s going to be more, right? There’s going to be more transactions, probably more chargebacks, definitely more transactions, I would assume, because if every time, you know, your laundry soap runs out and it orders automatically, is that going into one group of transactions from a basket in your Amazon or is it that every time because if it’s every time us as a payments industry there’s a lot of stuff a lot of transactions that are going to happen right.
Jacob: Yeah. And that’s the ultimate goal behind all of it of an Amazon of the world wanting to incorporate this is simply to basically turn us into our own organizations as like my inventory of my hosts always stocked, never being empty and yes, increasing transactions which increases payments for folks on your end. Well, this has all been fascinating. Justin, before we go, the final thing I’d like to ask you about is two part question related to finding success in the payment industry. You’ve been in this world for going on two decades now, I believe, and have found a lot of success, both individually and on behalf of the companies you’ve worked with and for from both company perspective and an individual perspective, what stands out to you as key characteristics or skills that are necessary to be successful in the payments world? What makes a company great in this industry and what can make an individual great or succeed in this industry?
Justin: I think it’s individual and company probably both is shut up and listen. As simple as it sounds, I really do think you really need to listen instead of thinking that your payment scheme is the best and you know everything. I personally really try to listen and just everyday life in all my relationships, but also to the customers and my employees. I think it’s important not just to ask questions and send out surveys and do all of that, but really listen to the feedback you get. If you really listen and you ask a lot of questions and you pay attention to your end user and your customer, that’s where you’re going to learn and that’s where you’re going to be successful because you’re going to be able to then take that and scale it. You can figure out what the really needs are and the basis of it. And so whether that be I’ve been lucky in my career to specific working with ISVs and vertical markets, that’s kind of been my MO. But it just it didn’t happen magically. It was basically I would listen and I’d pay attention and I’d say, okay, well, there’s a need in the parking space for payments. I should listen and figure out what that real need is and talk to people and go over all the trade shows for ten years. It takes a lot of ground effort. But think in the end, it really comes down to to paying attention and really genuinely listening to your customer and your employees as well, because you’ll get some great ideas that don’t necessarily always surface unless you’re listening, because you never know where it’s going to come from. The next Great idea.
Jacob: Yeah, sound advice indeed. And definitely really highlights. Well, one thing I love of that difference between hearing and listening of the listening is when you’re actually actively engaging with it and allowing it to influence the actions you take versus just I can give you the survey. I can say we’re letting you say your piece, but if I’m not actually engaging with it, then I’m just kind of hearing it. I’m not truly listening and acting on it. So love that this has been an absolute blast. Justin For those listening who might be interested in learning more about Worldline, its product offerings or who may want to follow you and keep up with anything you’ve got going on, where would be the best place for them to do that?
Justin: Go to worldline.com. We’re also pretty active in social media, so LinkedIn, we’re always posting. You can kind of follow us, see what trade shows, see what’s happening next in the metaverse, maybe. So I encourage you to check us out there, but thank you so much for having me. Jacob This has been really fun. Appreciate it.
Jacob: Yeah, absolutely. And I can definitely say we’ll link to all of that in the show notes, but definitely the blog and the LinkedIn profiles on social media. Definitely. Obviously was reading quite a bit of it coming into this to get some questions and topics to talk about, but you’ll also maybe come across like I did, the somewhat terrifying report about the future of autonomous payments and all kinds of different things. So lots of good info being put out. This has been absolutely great. Justin, thanks so much for the time and knowledge and I look forward to speaking again in the future.
Justin: Thanks again.
Jacob: If you enjoyed this episode and want to hear more, head on over to SoarPay.com/podcast to subscribe on your podcast listening platform of choice. That’s s o a r p a y DOT com slash podcast.