Breaking Barriers: Richie Serna of Finix on Democratizing Access to Payment Technology

Episode Overview

Our Guest: Richie Serna – Redefining the Payments Industry with Finix Payment Technology.

Richie Serna is the CEO and co-founder of Finix, a company that he launched with Sean Donovan in 2015 to revolutionize the economics of payments. His journey into fintech began with a strong foundation in political science from Harvard University, where he graduated with honors. Initially, Richie’s career path took him through the world of management consulting at Booz & Company’s Financial Services group in New York, where he developed a deep understanding of financial systems and business strategies. His subsequent role as a software engineer at Balanced, the first payments API for marketplaces, was pivotal. There, he identified significant gaps in the market for companies needing to monetize their payments but lacking the resources to do so, which inspired the creation of Finix​​​​.

Richie’s early life was marked by the challenges and opportunities of growing up in Santa Ana, California, a community with a high Mexican American population. His parents, who immigrated from Mexico in the 60s and 70s, instilled in him the values of hard work and education. This background not only shaped his worldview but also fueled his commitment to social impact. Before entering the fintech world, Richie worked in the LA mayor’s office on gang prevention and youth development programs, an experience that highlighted the importance of community support and the need for systemic solutions to social issues. This diverse background has informed his approach to leadership and innovation at Finix Payment Technology. where he emphasizes democratizing access to payment technology and supporting diverse founders​​​​.

Under Richie’s leadership, Finix has rapidly gained momentum, raising substantial venture capital and attracting top talent from the payments and fintech industries. The company’s mission is to enable businesses to own, manage, and monetize their entire payment experience without the traditional expenses associated with building an in-house system from scratch. Finix’s innovative platform allows software companies to embed payments seamlessly, creating new revenue streams and enhancing customer experiences. Richie is particularly proud of the company’s commitment to diversity, ensuring that Finix Payment Technology not only fills its ranks with talented individuals but also fosters an inclusive and supportive work environment. His vision is for Finix to be a cornerstone in the fintech industry, supporting the growth of numerous Stripe-sized startups in the coming years​​​.

Episode Transcript

Richie Serna: La is one of the only cities in the country that has a division that’s specifically dedicated to addressing the youth gang problem, but not from a criminalization perspective, but instead from a programming perspective.

Kevin Rosenquist: Hey, welcome to PayPod, where we bring you conversations with the trailblazers shaping the future of payments and fintech. My name is Kevin Rosenquist. Thanks for listening. Richie Serna is an incredibly driven entrepreneur. He grew up in a rough part of Southern California and, with his parent’s help, avoided the pitfalls that so many young people fell into. He went to Harvard, spent time in Los Angeles working on gang prevention and youth development in the mayor’s office, and eventually founded Finix, a payment technology company that helps companies become payment facilitators, giving them the tools to build their payment systems rather than relying on third-party processors. Finix strives to democratize access to payment technology, and they even use some of their funding to help founders of color get their startups off the ground. He has a big heart and a lot of knowledge of the payment space. You’ll enjoy this interview. Please welcome Richie Serna. Your career trajectory is fascinating to me. You’re a fintech CEO and co-founder now, but you graduated from Harvard, where you focused on government and started your career in Los Angeles, working on gang prevention and youth development.

Richie Serna: Oh, man, you went deep.

Kevin Rosenquist: What? Yes, I totally. I found that fascinating. What what drew you to want to help young people avoid that path?

Richie Serna: Yes. So I’ll go a little bit back into kind of my early origins and where I came from. But my parents immigrated from Mexico back in the 60s and 70s. They both met in Southern California in a city called Santa Ana. So it’s down in Orange County 80, 90% Mexican American population. I have probably 30, or 40 first cousins down there. My dad was one of 11 and a close-knit family. At the same time, it was still a neighborhood that was marked by drug addiction and youth gangs. So growing up, that was something that was very a real part of my upbringing. In fact, it was one of those places where you couldn’t wear specific colors. I wasn’t allowed to cut my hair short enough. My mom was very anti-tattoos. I couldn’t play with toy guns. Because I was such a prevalent part of my upbringing. Family members were a part of that sort of lifestyle. Honestly, up until I was 18, I had this random fear that I was going to go to prison for something because it was such a common aspect of the day-to-day of that neighborhood. So once I was lucky enough to go to Harvard, I had a close family member who went to jail for being a part of gang activity which made me think about the criminal justice system more broadly. So when I was younger, I thought about being a lawyer, mostly because I had read this article that 50% of Fortune 500 CEOs are either lawyers or engineers.

Richie Serna: So I thought, hey, why not go into law? So that’s why I studied political science and saw this incredible opportunity to intern at the mayor’s office in LA. LA is one of the only cities in the country that has a division that’s specifically dedicated to addressing the youth gang problem, but not from a criminalization perspective, but instead from a programming perspective. So one of the periods during the year that ends up having the highest amount of gang activity is in the summer, because that’s oftentimes in low-income communities when school is out, there are not enough jobs for the youth. There are no summer programs to keep kids busy. So inevitably, when people are out and about, they get into trouble. So we did this program called Summer Night Lights where we put on an entire summer’s worth of programs in the most highly gang-active neighborhoods. We had zero homicides that occurred in those neighborhoods during that period, and they ended up expanding it. It became a pretty great case study for a number of cities. But Yes, that was something that that was always something I focused on. It was at the end of that summer when I realized there wasn’t enough capital going into addressing this problem. The whole city of LA, which I think is 8 million people had a $1 million budget for this division.

Kevin Rosenquist: Jesus. It seems low.

Richie Serna: If you think about it you can get a deck in San Francisco, a few slides, and raise $1 million. Pre-product, pre-revenue. They threw these checks left and right and realized that especially for the types of problems and issues that were important to me there needed to be more folks with capital to address these types of problems. So I ended up making that shift and deciding that I needed to go not necessarily into the legal space, but into the corporate world. In hopes of being able to sort of have enough influence from a capital perspective to address these types of problems. So I started off my career. Then in management consulting. I tried to invest in banking, didn’t love it, and went into investment to management consulting out in New York. That was my first job out of college. So kind of had a few different areas of interest from there, but happy to go deeper into any of those topics that you think are interesting.

Kevin Rosenquist: I find it very interesting. That’s an interesting path. So, after the internship and all that, where did you head after that? Did you have an internship, first, it was in Los Angeles and then what was the other internship?

Richie Serna: So first it was the LA mayor’s office, and after that, it was JP Morgan and their investment group. Then after I graduated, I went to Booz & Company, one of the big consulting firms out in New York. I ended up having this conversation when I was working at the mayor’s office with some sort of elder statesmen who were very active in the Latino politics space. They said something to the effect of what we need is not necessarily more Latino politicians. We need more Latino billionaires. Which I found because there aren’t very many, if any, that I can think of. Off the top of my head. You shared that when he thought about the Congressional caucus, there are a lot of demographic-specific groups, and the Latino community has raised the least amount of capital in even less when you think about the per capita population that we have. So there’s a lot less capital that goes to a lot of the issues that impact our communities. That was sort of one of these light bulb moments for me, that sure, you can have an impact and there’s a lot of folks who are doing a lot of great work, boots on the ground. But I had a unique opportunity to get into another space. Whether it’s increasing opportunities for founders of color, or investors of color, it’s still something that I am actively involved with to this day.

Kevin Rosenquist: How did you end up becoming a founder? A co-founder? Was entrepreneurship only for you or is that something that you kind of had an interest in early on?

Richie Serna: Yes, I did. When I got to college, we didn’t have a business school, so there’s Harvard Business School, which is for the postgraduates. However, the undergrad did not have a program for economics. It’s a liberal arts school, so you can pretty much study anything and go off after that. So I did my two years of management consulting. I thought about getting into hedge funds and private equity and had interviewed at a lot of the top firms, kept getting the final round of interviews but ultimately wasn’t able to get an offer. So the late-stage private equity folks were maybe you should go to the growth stage, which is usually earlier on in the sort of capital cycle. Then the growth folks said, maybe you should go to venture capital. After I started reading all these articles on TechCrunch and these tech blogs kind of got hooked on the idea of the startup bug. So I think one thing that that stuck out was that in 2012 Facebook had gone public, I think, in maybe 2011, Pinterest was starting to grow and become a big thing. It was hard to not see that this was a very unique time in human history where a 30-year-old kid with a laptop could build a multi-billion dollar company.

Richie Serna: The barriers to entry were getting lowered and lowered every single day. I kind of thought about my time in college as well because I didn’t know how to code. So before I went to that, I had tried to start a bunch of ideas and I maybe worked on 3 or 4, and for each one, I kept getting stuck at the actual prototyping phase. Inevitably, when you’re not technical, you ask every engineer that hey, help me build this idea. Every single engineer probably gets 30, or 40 people asking them all the time, but half of the company builds this thing for me. So they, of course, passed on that. So I spoke to my buddy who was an investor, about my ideas, and he said don’t quit your day job. He said, you can’t code. Your parents aren’t rich and you’ve never worked at a rocket ship startup. Nobody’s going to back you. So I couldn’t change my upbringing and I couldn’t necessarily find the next rocket ship startup. But I could think about learning how to code. So when I thought back on our time in college of your four years, only two years of it are dedicated to your specific degree.

Richie Serna: Sure, the rest of usually these other extracurriculars, general eds. So I was 24 at the time and thought, hey, I have the rest of my career. Why not spend an extra two years and learn how to code? So I ended up reading this article, funny enough, a week or two later about people moving to San Francisco to learn software engineering, people who were quitting their jobs and starting a completely new, different career. So I made the jump in 2013 and moved to San Francisco. That was how I broke into the industry. So there was a little tiny office in Chinatown in San Francisco. There were maybe 30, or 40 people who were all learning software engineering and kind of caught the bug there. The very first company that I interviewed with, I begged them for a job, nonstop inbound email them until they took my interview and said, hey, I will code for food. I brought some of the investment banking mentality. I was I’ll be the first one in the last one out. I did that. So they gave me a job. I think I got paid 15 bucks an hour. So.

Kevin Rosenquist: Did that cover food? I can’t imagine.

Richie Serna: I had saved up a lot of my money on good days in San Francisco. That’s it. I did a bunch of my money for this sort of career pivot. After a year, they gave me a full-time job, and that’s where I learned payments engineering and building a company and sort of caught the startup bug and have never looked back since then.

Kevin Rosenquist: Wow. So now you’re CEO of Finix. Did I say that right? Finix?

Richie Serna: Yes. That’s right.

Kevin Rosenquist: I want to read part of the mission statement. Giving money is a fundamental human activity and critical to the health of our global economy. However, innovation from established financial service providers has failed to keep pace with the needs of innovative SaaS platforms and their users. What do you mean by that?

Richie Serna: So let’s focus on the US. If you look at the US today, 91% of all the payment processing volume goes through these five legacy providers that were built in the 80s and the 90s. So if you take a step back and you think about, hey, well, when was the internet broadly commercialized? In 1996. These systems were built before the introduction of the Internet. They weren’t built for the use cases of today’s marketplaces, vertical SaaS companies, crowdfunders, or P2P. All these things were built after that. They weren’t even built. They’re still entirely on-premise. If you think about cloud-based infrastructure companies AWS, they came about in 2006. So you’ve had a tremendous amount of shift in terms of what consumer experiences look what the expectations are, new feature functionalities, alternative payment methods, the speed of money, and movement. If you look at Visa, Mastercard, Amex, and Discover, they continue to roll out new innovative products, but the market doesn’t get access to them because of how slow and antiquated these five players are today. So the way that we’ve kind of discussed it internally, it’s kind of as if 5G internet existed, but your phone is only capable of 3G. So in turn, who ends up becoming more innovative? The Ubers, the Airbnbs of the world, who can hire armies of engineers to build these payment capabilities, it’s been transformational for them from the perspective of the product experience and for their profitability.

Richie Serna: So our goal is to continue to create more access and make it easy for companies of all sizes, from startups to publicly traded companies, to get access to the latest and greatest payment technology, and our belief is that if these platforms and Software providers have access to that, they can, in turn, provide better experiences to their consumers that are better, faster, cheaper. So a very simple example. You probably get paid direct deposit once every two weeks via ACH. Ach is an incredibly antiquated system. It takes 2 to 3 business days for funds to be disbursed. visa and Mastercard have released all these products that can push funds directly to your debit card, 365 within seconds. So that’s having a huge transformational impact on the way that some merchants, and gig economy providers get paid. So today, over 70% of Uber and Lyft drivers get paid out from real-time disbursement. So as soon as they complete their shift, they don’t have to wait two weeks to get their funds. They can get funds instantly in their bank account and go and use them. So these are the types of things that bringing more innovative technology to payments can have a real-world impact on.

Kevin Rosenquist: How do these providers fall so far behind? Why has there been no motivation to catch up with technology?

Richie Serna: So these providers are not tech companies. They never have been. If you peel back and you look at these five top companies and it goes even beyond them, they’re conglomerates. So one, the way that we kind of think about it is there’s kind of three issues, the first of which is that pre-internet based technology, they were built so long ago that they’re old and antiquated and never got to take advantage of a lot of the leading technology and best practices that exist today. Secondly, their strategy for growth has never been about R&D. It’s been about M&A So mergers and acquisitions. So if you peel back Worldpay’s first data, 11 thesis Chase Paymentech these companies, but most people probably never heard of but are multi-billion dollar entities. They’re 15 companies that have been sort of cobbled together. So from an investment banking perspective, they say, hey, if we take these two companies, one plus one is equal to three because they can cut costs and they can realize these sort of cost synergies, but you don’t realize technical synergies. Instead, what they end up having is they have two platforms with two different databases, two different back-end languages, two different reporting, services, and two different APIs.

Richie Serna: Uh, two different support engineers, two different sales teams. They have two different companies., what you end up having now is a pretty massive technical debt issue where you have to be able to manage and service both of these platforms. So now if you want to roll out a new feature, you have to roll it out twice. So when Visa and Mastercard end up rolling out these new products, it’s twice as complicated for them to roll them out. Then what ends up happening is for the end user. The merchant who’s integrating into these platforms, that one plus one is one plus one in terms of is equal to 100 in terms of the complexity because now they have feature disparities across both of these platforms. Maybe one platform works in store for the card-present devices. The other devices work online for e-commerce. Maybe one has Google Pay, and the other one doesn’t, so it created this massive mess. It’s difficult for them to be able to pay down that technical debt issue.

Kevin Rosenquist: Okay. So it comes down to a cost issue. Because they could do it if they wanted to spend the money on it.

Richie Serna: No, I don’t think they can. Look at JP Morgan. I think it was last year that Jamie Dimon said that they are going to spend $6 billion on technical debt. I promise you that $6 billion is not going to be able to solve the problems they have. There have been so if you for the folks here, this is a payment podcast. So you guys are all familiar with Stripe? but Stripe came about in 2009 with very simple developer-friendly APIs. Their APIs are all publicly available. You could see Stripe’s APIs and say, hey, I’m going to copy that. These companies were worth $40 billion-plus could say, hey, well, I’m going to start over from scratch and try and produce that on my own. They have they’ve tried investing 50, 100, and $150 million into building a new standalone company or technology platform. They’ve all failed. They don’t have the technical chops to be able to achieve that. Yes. So it’s that technology is indeed developer-friendly. API development. It’s not part of their DNA. If you think about it, there’s people talk about the API sort of economy and there’s an API for everything. Most APIs suck. There are a lot of bad APIs and a lot of folks. People build internal APIs for their internal consumption of services, but externalize those so that other developers can integrate in. That’s very hard. Most companies, when they develop APIs, maybe the first ten, 20 people were involved with that API development, that API development phase. Most of the other 1000 people who work at a company never got that type of exposure.

Kevin Rosenquist: Do you see any changes coming? Does AI change the motivation for any companies or ability to increase their tech, increase their technology at perhaps with less money, with fewer resources? Does it allow the large incumbents?

Kevin Rosenquist: Yes. The larger companies that are behind are they able do you think this will push them to do stuff on their own, or do you think they’re more likely to go with outside third-party vendors?

Richie Serna: I think they’re going to continue to do what they they know, which is continue to try to buy companies.

Kevin Rosenquist: I think this is going to change it.

Richie Serna: I’ve spoken to a number of executives at these companies and they’ll tell you behind closed doors, they don’t think that their technical teams are capable of solving these problems. So you think about technical debt. It’s taking out a loan. You’re saying, hey, I’m not going to fix this thing. I’m going to take out a loan or accrue this liability against this technology that I should be solving. But I’ll pay it down later. 20, 30 years of accrued, accumulated technical debt that is almost insurmountable. Now imagine you have 15 different technology platforms that are accepting payments. If you say, hey merchants, I need you to stop using technology platforms nine through or two through 15 and only migrate over to this new one. All of those companies are going to reevaluate entirely new payment processors because they’re saying, well, you’re forcing me to have to do a new integration. I might as well check out what else is out there.

Kevin Rosenquist: Well, I may as well shop around.

Richie Serna: That’s a good point. Kind of a catch-22 for them.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yes, that’s a really good point. You also talk about removing technical compliance regulatory and global barriers. So businesses have access to payment technology. What are the barriers you’re referring to and what businesses are most affected by them? Is it this technology issue or is there more to that?

Richie Serna: So when you think about payments, in particular, it’s a very complicated problem space. It’s both very broad and deep in terms of the different domain expertise that you have to have. So when people think about payments, they think about, hey, I’m taking this 16-digit credit card number, I’m sending it to a payment processor. That’s all they see. Hell, even as consumers, we interact with this product so many times per day, but you never think about the complexity that goes behind the scenes. That’s super easy. Everything that happens before the transaction and after the transaction, that’s what can be very difficult to be able to do. So if you think about everything that happens before the transaction, that’s where the compliance and regulatory burdens come into play. So as every new merchant gets onboarded, say you have a coffee shop and you want to start accepting payments, you’ll fill out this application. That tells you what is the business. What do you do? What do you sell? And behind the scenes, what the payment company is doing is they’re assessing and underwriting your reputational risk, your financial risk, and your compliance risk as well. So there are certain compliance and regulatory bodies that stipulate that you have to make sure that you’re performing certain, duties and obligations. So if you guys remember 9/11 happened, we ended up having the two planes fly into the Twin Towers. They realized that a lot of money was being laundered at that point in time to terrorist organizations. So these organizations, FinCEN and OFAC ended up being created. So any time you do business with a merchant and other types of financial products, you have to check this database to make sure that whoever you’re doing business with is not on those terrorist watch lists.

Richie Serna: So those are prohibited parties. You also have to make sure that they’re not doing business in prohibited industries, such as cannabis and other sort of illicit businesses. You also have to make sure that they are not financially unstable. So you guys all probably remember Fyre Festival, the music festival, that Job Rule put on a few years ago, they sold $30 million worth of tickets to a concert that never occurred. They went bankrupt. It fell on their payment processor. So there’s all of these things that are being taken into account. When you submit that information. Then you have to store credit cards, and you have to do it in a compliant way to make sure that bad actors don’t see those credit cards and put them out on the dark web. You have to figure out how to pay out all of the money movements. So as you can imagine, now you start to see all of these things have to be done. Or you can start accepting payments. This is why companies Airbnb and Uber had to hire hundreds of engineers to build these internal solutions. So we are lowering the barriers by productizing those compliance obligations into our product offering. You have to pay us, pass us the information, and then we will do all those complex checks and underwriting pieces behind the scenes for our customers. We can do those in seconds.

Kevin Rosenquist: Wow. Okay, I see what you’re saying. So that’s pretty good barriers you knocked down there. I like that.

Richie Serna: Yes. Sometimes back in the day. If you’re a merchant, you submit this application, you would literally have a mechanical Turk. So Mechanical Turk is something that looks its technology, but it’s a human, that’s running around in the background doing all this work. So you would submit your merch application and this person would get all of your data, your bank statements, and your driver’s license, and then go into 20 different providers and manually key them in. I’ve seen this happen. You can imagine that it’s highly error-prone and wildly inefficient.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yes, totally.

Richie Serna: Oh, it still happens today. It’s wild to kind of see this stuff. But there’s obviously a better way to be able to do that in a more effective, impactful way that reduces the risk for this type of business.

Kevin Rosenquist: The fintech space has changed dramatically since you founded Finix, almost nine years ago, I think, I saw.

Richie Serna: Eight years? Eight years or nine years? I don’t know, it’s a blur.

Kevin Rosenquist: I looked it up. It’s almost nine years.

Richie Serna: Oh, good to know.

Kevin Rosenquist: I am assuming what I read is true, but it’s obviously changed a lot.

Richie Serna: I’ve been in payments for over a decade.

Kevin Rosenquist: Over a decade. Okay, okay.

Richie Serna: The last payments startup, it’s wild.

Kevin Rosenquist: With the pandemic and the rise of AI, how has your focus changed for Finix, because of those factors?

Richie Serna: It hasn’t largely changed when it comes to AI. I think the pandemic grew a lot of different types of businesses, particularly on the e-commerce side. I think the biggest change that you’ve seen in the last decade is the sort of distribution models of payments. So when I say that, it comes down to who is the merchant, the coffee shop, the local restaurant going to for their payment services. So if you go back to the early 60s, when the payment networks were first formed, you’d have to go to your bank and apply for a merchant application and then you would get an account. Then the processors, which are different than the banks, the processors are the ones who provide the technology, and start reselling payments directly to merchants. Then in the 80s, you had these things called ISOs, independent sales organizations, and sales teams who would resell payments in return for a residual in 2010. That’s when I first around that time is where I got into payments. This is when you started to see sort of developer-friendly payments. So that’s when Stripe, Braintree, balanced, the company that I worked at was formed. We’re making it easier for developers to integrate into payments. In the last five years, what you’ve seen and this is I think the biggest shift is you’re seeing vertical SaaS companies, companies like Toast, Mindbody, Clubessential, one of our customers who provides software for golf courses, and country clubs, and fitness studios to embed payments into their software as a part of their overall product.

Richie Serna: So what they’re doing is they’re transforming themselves into the square for a particular industry, and they build all the vertically specific tools and solutions to be able to service that industry. So that I think is the biggest change that we’ve seen. Our sort of core thesis here is that in the not-too-distant future, most merchants sellers, and retailers are going to stop going to the big banks, and they’re going to go to their vertical SaaS provider to get all their products and financial services, payments are one of them. You’ve seen that with companies like Toast. Toast started off by providing software for restaurants. They layered in payments. They even gave away the software for free and they only monetized on their payments. Then they started adding in other financial services lending, adding in issuing payroll, and other products to capture the entire sort of banking stack that a restaurant typically would get.

Kevin Rosenquist: And they become kind of the industry standard for at least the smaller ones. I know there are larger companies for big chains and stuff like that. But Yes, Toast is sort of the that’s what everybody seems to have now.

Richie Serna: It’s a great product.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yes. Obviously. One of the solutions you offer that I find interesting is the white label solution, where you help them create a completely branded payment processing system. Yes. That feels unique that you can do a completely branded where you have no one has any idea they’re going to Finix. They think that Kevin’s sports bar is what they’re going to. They have no idea they’re going anywhere else. Was that a super important thing to you guys right off the bat when you were building Finix?

Richie Serna: Oh, absolutely. If you think about that Toast example, there’s still a payment processor underneath Toast. So we’re making it easier for other folks to create the toasts of their particular industry. So if you read the terms of services of these platforms, you will see that Finix is there. But we’re making it so easy for these types of vertical SaaS companies, and marketplaces to be able to embed payments as a part of their product experience. So when they’re collecting data, they’re sending it to Finix, and we’re underwriting that merchant, provisioning a merchant account, and then allowing them to begin accepting payments. So our original product was always built on the or sort offering was developed to be as white labeled as possible. We wanted our customers and their brand to be front and center because they’re the ones providing the front-end experiences and the customer support. For us where that sort of core infrastructure sits behind. We’re perfectly happy with that. It’s something that, takes a different type of design and product approach in strategy to be able to make it so seamless for our customers.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yes, and I think that it helps with trust because I feel a lot of times when you feel you’re being taken somewhere else, even if it’s a reputable company Finix is, you are still like, wait, where am I now? Am I putting my credit card in the place? There’s a trust aspect, I think, that goes along with full-on branding.

Richie Serna: Oh, Yes. It’s funny because if you go back to some of the earliest versions of software being embedded in payments, you think about PayPal and eBay.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s the first time I ever did that kind of stuff. That was eBay.

Richie Serna: Yes. You had eBay as the listing website, but you couldn’t accept payments. Then you had to go to PayPal, set up an account, and then you kind of bought those things together today. Now, PayPal is such a big entity that it has that innate trust built in, and trust is key to every part of the payment experience. But the new startups are popping up and you never heard of them. That’s a trust barrier. So, that you’re doing business with this particular website, this frictionless experience is very key for both the consumer and the merchant.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yes. It makes it easier. It makes it quicker everything like that. I think that’s a good, important thing for me. I like the branded options because it makes me feel better about who I’m giving my information to.

Richie Serna: Yes, absolutely.

Kevin Rosenquist: There are a lot of payment methods these days. I recently started using Google Pay and I don’t know what took me so long. It’s awesome. I love it. It’s so fast. It’s convenient. It’s great. How important is it for merchants to be able to accept a variety of payment methods today?

Richie Serna: It’s critical meeting the consumers where they’re at and providing them with whatever seamless experience they’re looking for is supercritical. A lot of folks probably don’t realize that alternative payment methods come in very different forms and form factors. So there’s Google Pay and Apple Pay on the web, which is completely different from Google Pay and Apple Pay on your phone, and then pay in Apple Pay on the hardware that you tap. So when you’re looking for a payment processor, understand that not everybody has all of those and you have to look at that type of experience as well. We see a tremendous amount of growth in those types of payment experiences. I think people are becoming more and more used to using their phones and these other alternative payment methods to store their wallets and their credit card details. It’s something that we think is going to continue to grow as time continues.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yes, I was going to ask that, do you think there are going to be more and more payment methods becoming available in the near future, or do you think there might be some sort of a correction and some will get left behind and we’ll end up with larger players?

Richie Serna: If you think about Google Play and Apple Pay, they’re still storing your credit card. It’s just where it’s being stored, which makes it easier for you to accept. So in other countries, you have WeChat pay and other types of alternative payment methods. There’s kind of a distinction between Google Pay and Apple Pay and the other ones that store value on them. The stored value ones have been a little bit slower to adopt. But I do think that with cash pay and Venmo, those things could in the long term, play a bigger role as well. When you think about these sorts of P2P apps, PayPal, it took a long time for them to develop enough adoption for them to be so ubiquitous that people wanted to use it as a stored value sort of payment method. For Venmo, it took a long time as well. Then once it becomes ubiquitous, merchants are willing to accept it as well. I think the same thing is sort of happening with square cash for cash is not this sort of overnight success they’ve been working on this product for years, as long as I can remember, and a number of times it almost got killed as a product. I think a lot of folks are happy that they didn’t do that because it is now gaining so much traction out in the market as well.

Kevin Rosenquist: How has your early career in social work influenced the way you develop products, particularly, considering your goal to democratize access to payment tech?

Richie Serna: I don’t know if it’s necessarily my early work in politics and things like that. I think that when it comes to formulating a company and thinking about how you want to build it and who are the people that you want at the table, it’s influenced that. we have an incredibly diverse company from the individual contributors and team members to the senior leadership team to even our board. We think about that not in terms of, ethnic diversity, but gender diversity and a number of different forms that we consider, I think 60% of our senior leadership team is women. On our product team, I think we have 3 or 4 Latinos who are very technical. So Yes, I think it’s not necessarily you do have to be intentional about that team building. But you have to also think about every part of your organization as well. So I think we come when we came to Silicon Valley, it was probably the most homogenous industry I’ve ever been in. It’s way more homogenous than investment banking. It’s way more homogenous than management consulting. So we always kind of wanted to do things differently.

Richie Serna: And I think that comes from my upbringing and background and giving folks the opportunity here at Finix is something that we take a lot of pride in. So I think you can see that and even some of the programs that we put in place. So we’ve done this thing called the Cap Table Coalition at Finix. So we’ve dedicated 10% of each of our fundraising rounds to angel investors of color. So black and Latino investors to help them build a stronger track record in Silicon Valley investing so that they can invest in other companies as well progress their careers in venture capital and maybe even start their funds. So that was a part of I think my early upbringing, the folks who helped me break into this industry and wanting to pay that back. We’ve now it’s sort of spun off into its organization. A number of different startups across Silicon Valley and across the country have now participated in that as well. So I think that’s something that’s very unique to us. I don’t think that would have been possible if it wasn’t for where I grew up. In some of those formative life experiences that I had early on.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s cool. That’s cool that you guys are doing that. Are you still involved at all with the gang side of things, the youth development side of things or do you plan on getting back involved if you’re not?

Richie Serna: Not these days as much. I still have a few friends who still work in that group. But I think finding where you can have that impact is key. Hopefully, down the line, that’s something that can continue to get involved with. For me, in the area where I now live, the impact that I can have is helping founders with similar backgrounds and kind of coaching and mentoring and giving them advice to help them through their journey as well.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s probably what they need more than almost more than anything probably.

Richie Serna: Yes.

Kevin Rosenquist: Well, that’s awesome. Richie, I appreciate you being on here. kudos to you for all the good work you guys are doing, and I enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for being part of this show.

Richie Serna: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.