Innovating Payment Solutions with Afshin Yazdian, CEO of Electronic Merchant Systems

Episode Overview

​Afshin Yazdian is a distinguished leader in the fintech industry, currently serving as the Chief Executive Officer and Executive Chairman of Electronic Merchant Systems (EMS) since October 2023.With over two decades of experience, he has consistently demonstrated a capacity for driving growth and innovation across various organizations. Prior to joining EMS, Yazdian held significant leadership roles in several prominent payment processing companies. Notably, he was the President of Priority Payment Systems (PPS), a Georgia-based payments technology firm that served over 174,000 merchants across the United States. His tenure at PPS was marked by substantial expansion and technological advancement, solidifying the company’s position in a competitive market. Before his role at PPS, Yazdian served as President and CEO of Cynergy Data, a New York-based payment processing company. Under his leadership, Cynergy Data experienced significant growth and eventually merged with Priority Payment Systems in 2014, creating a more robust and comprehensive service offering for clients.

Earlier in his career, Yazdian was a co-founder and Executive Vice President and General Counsel of iPayment, Inc., where he played a pivotal role in the company’s formation and growth into one of the top payment processors in the U.S., leading to its listing on the NASDAQ exchange in 2003. His extensive legal and executive experience provided a strong foundation for his subsequent leadership roles in the payments industry.

Yazdian’s academic credentials include a Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) degree from Emory University’s Goizueta Business School in Atlanta and a Jurius Doctor (JD) law degree from the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida.

His comprehensive understanding of both business and legal aspects has been instrumental in his strategic decision-making and leadership approach. Throughout his career, Yazdian has been recognized for his transformative leadership style, focusing on leveraging technology and fostering exceptional customer experiences to drive growth. At EMS, he is committed to investing in people and technology to ensure a superior experience for all stakeholders, aiming to propel the company to new heights in the fintech industry

Episode Transcript

Afshin Yazdian: I go back through my 20 plus year career where it used to take you forever and you have to wait for reporting to come in, and there’s like site visits and all these kinds of things that people used to do versus now within literally a minute, you can have all that same information and a decision helping be been made.

Kevin Rosenquist: Hey, welcome to Pay Pod, where we bring you conversations with the trailblazers shaping the future of payments and fintech. My name is Kevin Rosenquist. Thanks for listening. Afshin Yazdian has 20 years of experience in the payments industry and a law degree to go with it. Now he’s CEO of Electronic Merchant Systems, a payment processing company that has been providing innovative payment solutions to businesses of all sizes for over 30 years. He has great insights on how new technologies are modernizing the industry, and on what it takes to compete with the larger players. So please welcome Afshin Yazdian. You went to law school at Miami and practiced practice law at the start of your career. What prompted the pivot to the payment space?

Afshin Yazdian: I actually when I got to the law firm, there was a client that was in the payment space. I worked at a law firm that pretty much did real estate and healthcare, and this was sort of an anomaly. This is like mid to late 90s. Um, it was a company that would eventually become what is today Elavon. And I somehow gravitated towards that. I understood the business. I grew up in a, you know, my dad had a retail business, and I remember credit cards coming in and doing the swiping, and I knew enough interchange, just knew what it was, that kind of thing. And so like, oh, he’s an expert. Put him on these deals. And, um, the company was basically rolling up a lot of fintech companies mostly, but today we would call sort of ISO agents, uh, got to know the owners really well. I was traveling around with them all of a sudden doing deals with them. And when they would eventually sell, I realized I was probably not a great attorney. You know, law school was three years. I years. I practiced for 18 months so didn’t fully amortize or depreciate. I spent. Yeah. And then I left thinking that, you know, I probably would be happier on the business side of things rather than the legal side of things. Um, and so we, you know, took off. I started a venture fund, which was a complete disaster. Uh, best mistake I ever made in my life. I learned a lot from that, uh, because, you know, at the age of 27, 26, you think you know everything. And, of course, you don’t. You don’t know anything. Yeah. And, um, and then basically got back into the payment business was one of the old clients with the old client group. And we started a company called payment back in 2001.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s really cool. That’s really cool. So,do you feel though, like now because you’re a CEO now, you’re obviously in a high, high, high profile business situation. So do you feel like you are getting anything out of your law degree. Like just in that respect? Do you feel like it helped you in some ways? Are you like looking back, going, well, that was a waste.

Afshin Yazdian: Uh, no, I think it absolutely did. So early on, especially at I payment. Um, we did a lot of mergers and acquisitions. And as you can appreciate, for every one deal that closes, there’s probably 10 to 15 deals that you’ve looked at that you maybe even got to meet the team and did some diligence and did a site visit and all those kind of things that, you know, you you weren’t able to either win the deal or you passed on the deal or so forth. So because I was so heavily involved on the M&A side and because, you know, there was only three of us at the time we started the company. So I was involved in everything. Um, because of that legal background, I was able to not only understand, you know, the legal ramifications, for example, and the deal structure. And, you know, no two M&A deals are ever structured the same. So you get to be creative in that regard, but really got a deep dive into everything from the sales channels, the operational channels and so forth of the business, sort of like the bottom up approach that I like to say. and I think it helped tremendously not only build relationships, with a lot of people within the industry because, you know, you’re going to see them and looking at potentially buying their companies, but also knowing almost ahead of time what the issues were going to be, so that when, you know, if we got lucky enough to move forward with a with a transaction, thinking ahead about how do we address some of these concerns in the contract? And even though I wasn’t doing the legal work, my ability to sort of identify those things and bring them up at an earlier stage, um, I think was very helpful for, for us closing a lot of deals, because instead of waiting to find these problems and having to negotiate them towards the end, we would always bring them up at the beginning. And it made us a much more, uh, easier company to work with. Honestly, from an M&A perspective.

Kevin Rosenquist: I’ve talked to, you know, CEOs of tech companies that, you know, used to be coders and they’re not anymore, but they but they really value that because of the fact that they can talk the talk and they can see things that maybe a CEO who has doesn’t have that background wouldn’t see. So that makes perfect sense. Why would, that help you. Yeah.

Afshin Yazdian: And it created it was also an interesting dynamic because, again, I don’t know how much you’ve been involved in an M&A transaction, but as soon as the deal is done. Yeah. So, you know, everybody’s got their focus on trying to get this deal done. And, you know, not literally but almost literally the deal signed. Everything’s closed and the operations, everyone else goes off to the next deal and they start doing everything else. Well, I had also built a pretty solid, strong relationship with those entrepreneurs because I’m the one negotiating the deal with them. I’m the one going back and forth with them, you know, asking the questions, putting some of the modeling together. And so post deal, I was their main point of contact. So they were calling me. They were getting me on calls with like, you know, their salespeople and their ISOs and agents and their vendors and whoever it was. And so it really helped me again, post deal, like being heavily involved in these transactions. And then the second part of my career was, you know, this is back in I payment. We’d gone through this whole process of buying all these companies. We’d gone public and then private, where, you know, I probably spent a third of my time, you know, still utilizing that M&A background, that legal background. And now that that part of the business was over, I was really now the guy integrating all these transactions. So all these promises we had made to each other in our board like, hey, we should buy this company because look at how it fits well with the other companies that we’ve acquired and our base. I was now the guy that was going in because I had those relationships and integrating these businesses finally. Right. Like after all that work. So, um, it just again, it was a great perspective. I think you could be successful no matter where you come from. But I think that for me was a unique approach to really understanding the business.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, that’s you’re right. You can be successful no matter where you come from. But there are certainly advantages to having certain skill sets and certain educations. Yeah yeah, yeah. So it’s obviously we talked about this a little bit before we hit record. It’s an exciting time for payments in fintech. You know we talk about AI and blockchain. Blockchain technology on the show a lot. Um everything moves very fast. It’s opening a lot of doors for new players. Of course, that also comes with more competition. So in an increasingly competitive payments industry, how do you ensure that EMS is able to sort of differentiate from the rest?

Afshin Yazdian: It’s a great question. Um, you know, we have one advantage, which is also at times, um, kind of a detriment to us is our size, right? So EMS and you know, what attracted me to EMS is it’s an entire platform. So we basically handle every aspect of the merchant, you know, onboarding. We do our risk and underwriting and the entire everything. The only thing we don’t do is our actual process in which we outsource to a third party. So that gives us a huge advantage. Um, and then our size, we’re able to be a little bit more nimble. Right. So this is a company that’s been around. I’ve sort of been, you know, we raise some private equity money. I’m coming in as sort of a change agent. And the word I like to use is there’s a transformation that’s going on utilizing what our strengths are, building on a lot of technology that we have. And then how do we get it to the next level? Almost. I hate to use this word, but how do we modernize the business is the word that I like to use. And so a lot of what we’re doing is focused on scalability, efficiency. You know, when you take over what I would characterize as a lifestyle business where the mode of operation was like, let’s just keep the company going and, you know, you’ve got 1 or 2 owners that are just comfortable where they are.

Afshin Yazdian: Now I’ve got, you know, my own drive to grow a business, using it as a platform. And then of course we have private equity money come in. You know, they’re not here to just, you know, hold your hand and skip along. They’re looking for growth. So almost every decision that I make right now is tied to this modernization approach. And I and what we call machine learning and all those kinds of things are a huge, huge component of that. Um, and so, you know, again, from a size perspective, we’re lucky because we’re so small that, you know, small changes here have huge impacts. But at the same time, because of our size, I have to also be very mindful of we can’t take on 50 projects at once, right? We have to be very, very focused, which are the ones that are really going to make the biggest impact. You know, there may be 100 things we need to do, but I can only do so many of them at any given point. And so really, the strategy around, um, you know, how do we incorporate what time, you know, there’s got to be a better roadmap because I just can’t go hire, you know, 250 people to come, come in and do everything. We would , we would fall on ourselves. It wouldn’t. Yeah. So yeah, that.

Kevin Rosenquist: Would be a disaster. But that’s good though. I mean, you know, I feel like a lot of, especially when technology advances in something that’s is as game changing as AI people are just rushing to like implement, implement, implement, you know, is there is I think it’s interesting what you just said is that you’re like, we’re not going to do everything at once. We’re going to do it in pieces, you know, and make sure that we’re doing it right and doing it well. Do you think, do you think that there’s a lot of, I don’t know, fear of FOMO, of getting left behind. You know, fear of getting left behind. I don’t know what that would be, but not FOMO. But is that something that you see in other businesses?

Afshin Yazdian: Well, I do 100%. I’ll take a I’ll go back to like the internet bubble as the perfect example. So I mentioned to you earlier that, you know, we I left practicing law, started a venture fund right in the heart of the internet bubble. Right. And, you know, we created a fund and our idea was we’re going to go work with small entrepreneurs who have ideas. And, you know, we had a guy that came to us and I wish I was making this up, owned the URL forks for.com and wanted like $8 million for it. There was no business there. He just thought, this is a great idea. We could do so much with it. I’m like, but what are you going to do with it? You know what? What exactly is your plan? And he had no clue, right?

Kevin Rosenquist: Do you manufacture forks? I mean.

Afshin Yazdian: Put it on that you could have sold silverware. Was it food? You know. But the point being, like you had this mad rush, right? Everybody was like, you know, you had a.com and your market cap went up, if you remember, by like 20, 30%, You know, there’s it’s a big deal. I was one of the great examples. I used to sell records, you know, mail order records. They decided to add a.com and their value of their business quadrupled overnight. You know, things like that. Yeah. So I think there is a little bit of, um, and I think that’s, by the way, spurred by the FOMO that you mentioned. Right. Hey, if we’re not in this, we’re not in this. We don’t know who the winners are going to be. We’re still not exactly sure how, um, you know, we’re going to utilize AI and some of the machine learning for every aspect of the business. I will say this, and I’ll probably get in trouble for it. I think the payments business has been using a lot of the machine learning AI elements for many, many years. You think about what we do in terms of like just the basics of authorizing a credit card. There’s so much that goes into that to understanding, like, is that really Kevin, you know, buying those pair of shoes or is it somebody else, you know, there the visa, Mastercard American Express discover they’ve been using AI. You know, we just haven’t called it that. It hasn’t been the sexy sexified version of it. Yeah.

Kevin Rosenquist: Sexified.

Afshin Yazdian: So what I think is happening now is everyone is trying to figure out exactly what they need to do for their own particular business, how they want to incorporate it. And I think in payments in particular, the idea of scalability, the efficiencies that I talked about, you know, how do you how do you utilize it from that perspective? Um, one of the things that we’re going to bet on, and I am betting on, is that whatever we think is the right answer today will be very different, very, very soon. Right. And this goes back to sort of the advantage that we have from our size. We’re able to be as aggressive as we can be. But also, you know, I’m smart enough to not go try to build all this myself. We’re going to utilize a lot. We’re going to work with a lot of third parties. We’re going to sort of like take the best of what’s out there, because we’re not at a size that we need to go build everything. It’s not going to impact us. And so our approach is we definitely are doing something. We’re spending a lot of time and effort on this. Again, we’re prioritizing where the area or areas are that we want to spend the time in, but because we’re not sort of, you know, manufacturing the AI, we’re not building it ourselves. We’re utilizing third parties. As that shift occurs, we’re able to shift with it. So if we need to make a pivot, we need to make a change. It’s easy for us to do that because I haven’t invested that much into building our own technology. I think for some of the bigger players, though, they are going to have to make an investment. They are going to have to like put their foot down. They’re going to have to make a decision and they’re gonna have to pick a lane and go with it. And I think everyone will be fine. Everyone will be successful. But that gives me, I think, a little bit of an advantage that I can shift around as necessary with our size. Yeah.

Kevin Rosenquist: I feel like it’s interesting a lot of people that I talk to that, that, that more and more people are taking that approach, that third party approach. And, and it’s it’s obviously opening the doors for a lot of different startups and new companies and stuff to try to to try to, you know, build products that they can outsource to people or that they can they can sell to people.but even bigger players, I feel like are kind of maybe considering that route to just from a staffing perspective and a management and a risk and all that kind of stuff. And, you know, do you see that trend continuing? Do you think that more and more people are going to use third party apps?

Afshin Yazdian: I think it just changes so fast, right? Technology changes so fast. And again, I go back to the term focus. I think businesses now run much more efficiently than they ever had. CEOs understand that when you’re in a rapidly changing environment, you know, focus on what you’re good at, you know, whether it’s 1 or 2 things like, you know, for our company, for example, we know that, you know, right now our strength is distribution. So all of my investment in AI and whatever technology that we build is how do we make that process easier, smoother. We talk about the merchant experience, the customer experience. Like that’s what we’re focused on, but I agree with you. I think large businesses are small are sort of on the same approach here of what’s actually going to help me differentiate what’s, you know, what do I where do I need to invest. And a lot of times going out and kind of becoming, you know, investing within your own organization in areas where you’re not an expert and you don’t really understand well enough. It’s better to outsource. And I, ironically, is helping them make a lot of these decisions. Right. They’re utilizing it in a way that says, you know, you should not be building your own AI and machine learning systems. You should use third party, that’s what they do for a living. This is what they wake up every day doing. You’re in payments. Focus on payments, but figure out how to utilize our systems within your ecosystem.

Kevin Rosenquist: Mhm. Yeah for sure. Is there anything like as far as you know the the excitement of technology and fintech and where things are heading. Is there anything that has you specifically kind of jazzed up like you’re like oh this is going to be cool.

Afshin Yazdian: Yeah, I mean it’s part of it’s both jazzed up but also worried, I guess, at the same time. Yeah, it.

Kevin Rosenquist: Seems to be it seems to be a lot, a lot of people who feel that.

Afshin Yazdian: Way. Yeah. So, so I’ll, I’ll pick one, you know, just from a call that I had this morning. Um, we’ve hired an unbelievable underwriting team. You know, we’re going through this whole process of data and analytics in terms of like making decisioning the idea that we would like to, you know, with our line of business, we deal with mostly small and medium businesses. So it’s critical that we’re able to get a decision back to somebody that you’re approved for an account and so forth and so on. So how do you do that? You talk about the experience, but how do you use AI? How do we use information to quickly gather all the information? You know, we built our own ecosystem now where you can have a scoring system that we know is a good merchant. We can get back to them as soon as we can. That’s exciting. Right. So things that would take, um, a lot of people many years ago or a lot of time, even a few years ago that we can now not quite instantly, but pretty close to instantly decision on because of the utilization of artificial intelligence. It’s phenomenal. Um, and there’s the dark side of that, the fraud. So the level of fraud has absolutely increased significantly because it’s so easy. So the ability for people to fabricate, you know, fake IDs, steal information, create fake identities, you know, just literally from scratch that, you know, through AI they can build an entire identity within minutes, right? You know, all those kinds of things.

Afshin Yazdian: And how do you make sure that, yes, we want to move fast. We want to be as quickly, as quick as possible. We want to rely on these systems. But there is now more fraud coming through the system, more people applying for fake, uh, you know, merchant accounts and so forth and so on than ever. So there’s a good and bad. Right? So I feel like every time we take a couple of steps forward, they’re getting closer to the crowd. So it feels like it’s a never ending thing. But it does excite me. I think once, um, as long as we can stay ahead of the game and as long as we, we sort of continue to invest and look at the right approach to this will be great. But those are things that, you know, I go back through my 20 plus year career where it used to take you forever and you have to wait for reporting to come in, and there’s like site visits and all these kind of things that people used to do versus now within literally a minute, you can have all that same information and a decision helping be been made for you is is quite exciting and I think it’ll help continue to drive the business forward.

Kevin Rosenquist: Do you feel like the good guys are ahead still or is it more even?

Afshin Yazdian: You know, I would like to say yes. And I and I think so.but man, the you know, there’s definitely a lot of effort by the bad guys. Yeah. To, to just figure it out. And I think, look, in any new technology, you always see that, right? You always see, you know, when the internet started, you saw a lot of fraud. I mean, you know, whatever it is, you see, you know, even, like, think about music piracy and all that kind of stuff, like, totally. So there’s always going to be some elements of that.you know, we’re lucky as an industry. We have a great ecosystem.and while I do think there’s a lot of change that’s happened, and there’s still going to be a significant amount of change, things that you and I can’t even imagine at this point that will occur over, like, say, the next ten, 15, 20 years.because it’s a somewhat mature industry. We’re so critical to, to commerce, period. Right. You know, in terms of what we do in terms of people buying and selling and so forth, that there’s enough, you know, within our ecosystem to stay ahead. But it is harder every day, honestly. Like it’s, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a lot of work.

Kevin Rosenquist: So yeah. Yeah you’re right and you’re right. Every, every technological advancement has, has that. I even remember when Myspace came out and like all the fake accounts and people asking weird questions and you were just like, what do you need that information? And there was just there was all all that stuff started way back then, you know, before Facebook and Instagram and TikTok were even on the radar. So it’s interesting, interesting how that works. You know, my,I was going to bring up we were talking before about staying, you know, competitive. I’m helping a buddy of mine open his bar, and he’s using toast for his POS, obviously industry standard platform. People know it. You guys work with restaurants and bars as well. How do you compete with companies that have such name recognition, especially when they’re within certain specific industries.

Afshin Yazdian: Yeah. Um, by the way, your buddy will get a call from me. We’re going to sign him up,but that’s a great question. I mean, look, the good news again, you go back to the size and depth of this industry. It’s huge. Right? There’s plenty. I remember seeing stats, you know, not too long ago that in any given year, there’s between a million and a half to 2 million new business startups. And that could be a guy mowing your lawn. But it could be like a real business. Like your buddy starting Bart as an example of that. So what we were really sort of focused on at a company the size of EMS is this concept of optionality, right? And so where, you know, I’m not going to pick on toast specifically, but toast has a great POS system that’s expensive and it works for certain sized businesses. There’s plenty of other businesses that don’t want to make that don’t have the capability to make that kind of investment. Um, a lot of times when businesses have to change, you think about like, you know, from an e-commerce perspective, you know, our ability to have optionality with a variety of different gateways. You don’t have to go through the integration. Again, we have optionality in terms of price.

Afshin Yazdian: We have optionality in terms of like level of service. We provide, you know, whatever it is. So we’re kind of looking at this, we’re not quite a bespoke because that’s not scalable, but our ability to sort of have a menu approach that says, you know, what is it that this particular merchant is looking for? How do we sort of go in and our differentiation is the optionality, whereas, you know, in Toast’s example, there’s not a lot of negotiating on the price. There’s a lot of like, you know, fees and so forth and so on. And again, for a lot of small businesses, it seems easy, but it’s not. So we’re able to come in. We’ve got a lot of the same equipment. We’ve got great POS systems. We have all these things that we use and utilize to differentiate ourselves. And we’ll continue. And this goes back to the other comment that that I made earlier, our ability right now to sort of focus on our core business and then partner with third parties, you know, we can have a suite of products that choose from, not just, you know, we have A or B, and that’s it. And this is the pricing is a you know we provide that optionality in the differentiator that comes with it.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s yeah that’s a good point. I mean I want to pick on toast either. But you know I was part of that process. And you’re right. It was it was expensive. And it’s not it’s somewhat customizable but it’s all packages, you know like you have to do certain things. So I totally understood what you mean. If you’re a small business, you want to have a little more control. Okay. I don’t really need this piece that’s in this package, but I want that piece that’s in this package and it’s not always available in some of the bigger players. You got to kind of pick what they want you to pick.

Afshin Yazdian: And the rates are not negotiable. Right. So we’re not I tried. Yeah. We’re still at the point, you know, we’re able to be, we’re able to be a little bit more, um, you know, uh, amenable I guess, is the word I would use in that regard as well, especially for a very small business. Um, that’s just kind of getting out of the gate. Right. And especially if that somebody that, you know, is switching to a different, you know, they’re not unhappy with whoever they’re processing with or they’ve done a revamp of the business, and they’re now looking for something so that that has been a strong selling point for us.

Kevin Rosenquist: Mhm. I want to talk a little bit about payment options. I, my wife and I pay for everything with our credit card so we can get points. Not uncommon obviously a lot of people do that but over the past five years or so I’ve noticed a lot more merchants charging the customer for using cards. And I know that for a while that was, you know, it was not legal in certain states. And like, that’s kind of kind of come out and I get it. I mean, I have my own business and paying those fees is a real drag. It totally is. But, you know, do you see any data that shows that people might start using credit cards less because of this?

Afshin Yazdian: I’ve not seen that. Yeah, I think I think, you know, look, we we call that here the dual pricing option. Right. For cash discount. You’ve heard surcharging whatever you want to call it. But the idea that and I’m old enough to remember when gas stations used to have the two prices, you know, you had your, you know, per gallon cash versus credit card.

Kevin Rosenquist: I remember that, absolutely. So yeah.

Afshin Yazdian: That’s what’s been going on. Um, I don’t think so. Look, I do I’m going to speak now as more as a consumer first and then like I do sometimes get there’s a, there’s a moment of like, huh. You know, like they’re charging me a, you know, they’re giving me a discount if I pay cash versus whatever and so forth and so on. And I would say 99.9% of the time I will go ahead and just use my credit card because of the convenience and everything that comes along with it.

Kevin Rosenquist: Me too. Yeah.

Afshin Yazdian: Um, I think there’s certain sectors where I don’t believe that’s going to turn away consumers, you know, places you’re not going to go to on a day to day basis. You know, you go to buy tires, you go to the mechanic, you know, places you’re only going to go to, you know, once in a while. They’re not places you go to regularly. Versus I think if you start, you know, grocery stores where people go to constantly or even some restaurants and small, especially small medium businesses, things like that. I could see that having an impact a little bit, of one of two things. Either, you know, people actually starting to pay with cash a little bit more because it’s it’s why not? Type of scenario. And you’re getting that many points for it and it’s not maybe not worth it.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah. You’re right. That’s a good point. Yeah.

Afshin Yazdian: Do you know, if there’s two coffee shops next to each other and one has that and the other doesn’t, you know, do you gravitate towards the other one? So I think how.

Kevin Rosenquist: Loyal are you to the coffee. Yeah.

Afshin Yazdian: I think merchants have to be a little bit aware of how that plays out. and how that’s sort of presented and so forth and so on. But nothing we’ve seen I mean, we’re seeing volumes continue to increase. Um, you know, and so nothing in our numbers shows that it’s there. I will tell you from a sales perspective, we do we talk about that. We offer that to merchants. And on the retail side especially obviously, and a lot of, you know, retailers will think about it and then they’ll go against it. They just don’t feel like it’s what they want to do. They’ll figure out a way to sort of make up that, you know, that cost, if you will, to them through other, other scenarios or other avenues, whatever. But I don’t think it’s going to go away. Um, I think it’ll continue to grow, but I don’t think it impacts credit card usage the way people.

Kevin Rosenquist: Okay. That’s interesting. Yeah. I mean, I, you know, honestly, like if you’re paying it or not, you’re paying for it, right? I mean, businesses aren’t stupid. They’re going to raise their prices to a level to make sure they can make up for that, for that loss. So to some degree it’s like, well, you know, I’m going to be paying that at another place, just in a different way.

Afshin Yazdian: I was at a restaurant a couple weeks ago that the receipt was incredibly long. This is a really fancy restaurant. So they had the cash price and then they had the credit price, and then they had tip for your waiter and then a tip for the kitchen staff. And it took me like 20 minutes to figure it out. I’m like, how am I going to do all this? And so again, people have to be smart about that. Like tipping has become another, you know, area of like, annoyance, I guess maybe.

Kevin Rosenquist: Sure.

Afshin Yazdian: To the point that there’s now commercials making fun of like, you know, you know, making fun of the fact that you have to tip for everything. You know, for everything. Yep. Yeah, I was at the airport through one of those, like, Amazon Go type scenarios. Literally got a bottle of water and didn’t talk to a human. And as I was walking out and, you know, paying that had a tip option on it. It’s like, who am I even tipping? You know.

Kevin Rosenquist: Like, is there anybody here? Like there’s anyone there is.

Afshin Yazdian: No one here, you know? But, um, so I think I throw that in the same bucket. I think, you know, merchants have to be somewhat cognizant and aware of, like, overburdening the consumers. And so, yes. Right. I think we’re fine. But, uh, and I think it has started to like, mellow out a little bit in that regard.

Kevin Rosenquist: It seems kind of you said you were at a fancy restaurant, so maybe they don’t. They don’t care. But it doesn’t make me split up the tip between the front and front house and back of house. I mean, that’s ridiculous. Like, that’s not I don’t need to do that. I just want to eat food and have a good time. Drink a little cocktail. I just want to. Exactly. Mobile processing is something we’ve seen a lot more of. I know you guys are heavily involved in that. You know, you’ve got your food trucks, your farmers markets, even salons. I mean, I like my chiropractor uses uses one of those, you know, that is that like going to take over as if our terminal is going to go away at some point. You think.

Kevin Rosenqvist: I don’t.

Afshin Yazdian: Think terminals go away. I think they’re still going to you know, they’re going to still be part of the ecosystem, especially for, you know, larger retailers and so forth and so on. But you know, we’re invested heavily in a company called Paisley. The little I can do is a little plug there.

Kevin Rosenquist: Do it please.

Afshin Yazdian:but yeah, the mobile POS system is growing. You know, the whole concept of tap to pay um which utilizing I’ve been I’ve used it a few times. It’s really cool, you know, those kinds of things. So, no, I don’t think it completely takes away the terminal. I think it just expands the scope of where you can accept payments and how you accept payments and so forth and so on. You know, great example there is, you know, somebody comes to your house that, you know, cleans your carpets as an example, and instead of them sending you an invoice and then eventually you’re using your credit card like you did, you know, to get the points online to pay or whatever it is, or sending them a check. Some people still do that right there and then you can see the invoice. You can either pay on your own phone through Apple Pay or Google Pay right there on the invoice. Or you can tap your phone on your credit card and they walk out. That person’s happy because they’ve just gotten paid for the service. You’re happy. You don’t have to deal with invoicing and getting something in the mail. Et cetera. Et cetera. So in those scenarios, absolutely. I think it has an impact. But I don’t see the need for like, not everyone’s going to have that necessarily. Um, you know, from a go forward perspective. So I don’t think terminals are dead by any sense. Yeah.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah. That makes sense. That makes sense. All right. Well, Afshin, thank you so much for being here. It was great chatting with you.

Kevin Rosenqvist: Absolutely.

Afshin Yazdian: Thanks for having me. And, uh, look forward to catching up again soon.

Kevin Rosenqvist: Sounds good. All right.

Afshin Yazdian: Thanks, Kevin.