Fund collections getting creative: Michael Kaplan with PayNearMe

And today as a guest speaker, we have Michael Kaplan, the chief revenue ofcer of PayNearMe. And in
this episode we're going to be taking a very deep dive into pay ins, specifcally QR scan enabled solutions for debt
repayment, for collections, for bill pay, and pretty much any other use case.
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
And we're going to be taking a very, very deep dive into how the connection between QR code scanning works with
connecting to specifc sub ledgered accounts, how the funds are not being intermingled. Are they intermingled? If
so, how is this handled? And much more. Again, donut know much about the subject, which is why we have Michael
here to tell us more about it. So Michael, let's kick it off easy. Tell us a bit about yourself and about PayNearMe.
Mike Kaplan
Thank you. Well Paul, I appreciate you having me on. Yeah. So at I'm the chief revenue ofcer for the company. I've
been with Payoneer Me for almost 15 years now. And so, you know, long standing, long time here at the company. At
Painterme, we build technology that simplifes the entire payment experience for businesses and customers. We
make it easy to accept, disperse and manage payments with a single platform. We process a variety of different
payment types including Cards, ACH, PayPal, Venmo, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and even cash through our proprietary
network that allows consumers to make cash payments at more than 62,000 locations throughout the country.
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
That is crazy. And that's going to be one of the questions for sure. So people stay tuned if you're curious how the hell
that can work.
Mike Kaplan
Yeah, we'll defnitely do that. We primarily to your intro, we service the bill pay market, specifcally lending, property
management and tolling as well as the regulated real money gaming market. And our ultimate goal is to lower our
clients total cost of acceptance and increase revenue, thereby improving their overall Proftability, the way we do it is
through payment experience management, which is a combination of software and infrastructure that optimizes
every touch point of the payment journey across the customer support staff and even backend operations. So that's
us, that's me. And what we do, boy, lovely, great.
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
Intro Fields practice which is, you know, checks out. 15 years at a company, I think I'm three days short of being two
years at checkbook. Feels like a freaking lifetime at this point. Anyways, let's start with the specifc use cases. I like
to cover a specifc problem that we're solving in very specifc terms. We can make up a company that you're solving
it for or you can take a real customer of yours if it's allowed to disclose specifc. I'm assuming you are. So give us an
example, like some common use case for paying your meat and then we'll go from there.
Mike Kaplan
Yeah, it's a common use case and I think for what we do and when we think about experiences, you know, again
we're trying to fgure out how we remove the friction and how we reduce, you know, make it easy for the consumer to
pay. And one of the ways we do that is through our SmartLink technology. And essentially what Smartlink is a pre
staged transaction. So it's a transaction that sits in the cloud and we associate that to a specifc URL for the specifc
customer. And so when you think about when you get an invoice, let's say you get an invoice, this tolling is a great
example of this. When you get an invoice because you drove through without a transponder and now you get an
invoice, you need to pay that toll. Right?
Mike Kaplan
The person who's sending you the tolling company that's sending you that invoice, they already know everything
about you. They had to because they sent you an invoice. Right. And so what we do with SmartLink is essentially we
take all of the data from the tolling company, we stage that transaction in the cloud and we associate that to a link.
So when you get that link, you simply click on it and all of the relevant information is available for you to pay right
there. The amount you do, amount due, the account number, you know, anything else about your balance, all of that
is basically pre stage in the cloud and now ready for you to make a payment. You now just have to choose the
payment type you like and within two clicks you completed that payment. Right. That is a very typical fow.
Mike Kaplan
Now we can do that through sending it, Sending a link to you through a text message. We can do it through an email.
We can also associate it with a QR code and put it on the invoice that was mailed to you. And that is a very common
use case. We work with a lot of billers in the lending, in the tolling and the collections market where essentially we're
taking a QR code, we're putting it on the invoice. When the customer sees it, they scan the invoice and they scan that
QR code and they're dropped directly into a payment fow. They don't have to add any, you know, they don't have to
log in. They don't have to go through sort of all of the hurdles that might get in the way of you making that payment.
Mike Kaplan
They can, you know, click on that link. You know, if they're using Apple Pay, boom, they sort of the problem is.
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
Apple Pay done, solution is clear. And I'm still, you know, 200 bucks in debt to my dentist because they were asking
me to send a check.
Mike Kaplan
So the problem, you get it, right? It's not that you don't have the money. I mean, I'm sitting here looking. It's funny, I'm
looking at two statements sitting on my death care. One is for $30 and the other one is for a whopping $5.70.
Neither one of them have been paid, by the way, because they want me to write them a check or write, I mean, worse,
the one wants me to write my credit card number on the buck slip, put it in an envelope and send it back.
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
Who's going to take it? I don't know. I have not done that in my entire life. I think I have gone through collections at
least twice like this for amount of 30 something bucks.
Mike Kaplan
And then again, when we talk about things like cost of acceptance, what is it costing them to send that bill multiple
times, to send it to collections.
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
And then send it to collections? Yeah, yeah. It's ridiculous. We're going touch on some of the pricing later on and see
which ones of our listeners should be looking at this and which ones might be too small. We'll get to that later. First,
let's focus on the tech that I'm perfectly unfamiliar with. So, okay, let's dig in. Let's take an example of paying a link to
a user to pay the toll, right?
Mike Kaplan
Yep.
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
And let's say that the user is going to choose Venmo as a Paying option, they plug in their username or do they go
into their Venmo account? Let's go through a Venmo fow.
Mike Kaplan
Yeah, so the Venmo fow is where essentially when the customer choose. So we have an integration directly in with
PayPal and Venmo. So we're integrated into, you know, our platform is integrated directly in via API to sort of all of
the sort of most traditional payment, most popular payment options. In the case of PayPal Venmo, we have an
integration directly in with PayPal and Venmo. And essentially what that fow looks like is when you click on the
Venmo button, we're essentially going out where you're authenticating, you're logging into your Venmo account and
then you're sort of brought back into the fow to complete the payment. So we take you out into the Venmo
application to basically authenticate in there and then we're bringing you back into the fow to complete the payment
with Venmo.
Mike Kaplan
Okay, so that's pretty simple standard fow, if you've ever used Venmo to do not sort of payment. And very similar
with PayPal and also with Cash App. They, they're all sort of a, you know, similar variety of, you know, sort of
authenticating with the actual application and then coming back into the fow payment.
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
And I would imagine it's pretty standard fow for, you know, card acquisition. It's just going to be an iframe that's
popping up for the user. You plug it in, move on with their lives. Right?
Mike Kaplan
Yeah, we can do this through. So from a technology perspective, depending on how we're doing this, we can do this.
We can iframe into somebody else's fow. We have some native stuff that we do as well. We can, you know, we have
lots of integration options for our clients. Sometimes we control the whole fow, sometimes we allow them to control
the whole fow. We're completely PCI compliant and so, you know, PCI level one compliant. And so all of the sort of
things that necessary and one of the important things is we do is we keep our customers compliant as well. So they
don't need to be PCI compliant.
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
Yeah, yeah, that's like 30% of the point of payment. Companies like Checkbook, we're all in the same boat, just
making clients lives easier. All right, in that case, let's talk about the following fow. So the user authenticated their
Venmo, they're back into the payment fow, they send the money where does the money land? Is it a big Venmo
account that is sub ledgered by Venmo and then, you know, subledger is hosted within Pay near me or how does that
work?
Mike Kaplan
Yeah, it's Subledger. So basically what happens is we act as the merchant of record for these transactions and then
we are, then funds are settled to us, and then we have those funds sitting in FBO account for our clients. And then
we settle those funds to our clients on a, you know, on a daily basis. So all funds, you know, we are a licensed money
transmitter in every state, I think. And then we are, you know, we're essentially settling funds. And the nice part about
that for our clients is that whether they paid by a Venmo, whether they got paid by a Venmo PayPal card, cash, what
have you, we are sort of giving them one settlement fle and one reconciliation fle for all different payment types.
And that way they don't have, you know, multiple fles coming from multiple places.
Mike Kaplan
And then they don't have to also don't have to set up accounts at all those places either. Right. Cause that's a, that's a
heavy for them.
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
Yeah, yeah, but I mean, the main issue there would be reconciliation. So. Okay.
Mike Kaplan
Yeah, gotcha.
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
So the funds would be settling with you. You're the merchant of record. Makes sense. And at the end of the day, I'm
assuming you're sweeping up all the funds that are sitting in the Venmo PayPal or Cash app account, pushing them
out to your FBO accounts that belong to the user. How does that leg of the transaction work? So I know that Venmo
PayPal, they make a good chunk of money off of the instant versus ACH, where for instance, withdrawal, they charge
what, 2%? Something insane. How do you deal with that? I'm assuming we're not paying them 2% to pull all the
spots.
Mike Kaplan
Yeah, I can't get into specifc, our specifc commercials for that, but we are paying them a per transaction fee. And
then we are paying, we're sort of marking, we have essentially a buy rate, if you will, with PayPal, all the different
networks. And then we are then, you know, adding our software on top of that and our fees on top of that. And then
we pass that on to the merchant and that's there. And that varies depending on, you know, volumes and, and you
know, how the merchant, you know, their payment amount, et cetera.
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
And we, so we're going to the standard payment space. That, that part is boring and very individual. So we'll skip that
part for now. We're going to come back to it later in a tad. Okay, that is very interesting, very good to know, and
basically just have direct relationships with all, you know, people. Cash app that allows you to instantly pull the
funds. There's no settlement delay for you or the user, and then the user can withdraw the funds from there. So then
the funds are within paying your ME FBO accounts that belong to the user, and then they can deposit it to their
external bank accounts or.
Mike Kaplan
Well, in this case, it's. We're doing it on behalf of the client. Right. So the client is out as a lender, for instance, or the
tolling company. We have a FBO account set up for them, and then we settle the funds to those guys because,
remember, we're accepting funds from the client, from the consumer, and then we're pushing those funds to the, to
our client to fll on their obligation. So we're, we push funds every day. Generally, we do it through ACH or wire.
There's two general methods that we use for settling funds to our clients.
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
Okay. And then that's the part where it's going from FBO accounts of your clients to their external bank accounts.
Mike Kaplan
Correct? Correct. Okay, that's exactly.
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
All right. All right. That's. That's the part of the leg that I was trying to understand. Yeah, gotcha. Understood. Okay.
Now another question on the ACH versus wires versus RTP ft. Now, wire, why not in the rails? Is it just due to the
volume limitations that RTP, FedNow, save the ACH have just most of the transactions are above a million or.
Mike Kaplan
Yeah, primarily. Right. And so when we're collecting for most of our clients, they're bumping up against the limits that
we can do on the RTP side of things. So we, you know, we have to use. So, you know, that is something we are
looking at. But, you know, currently it's not a practical option for the types of dollars we're settling generally to our
clients.
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
Yeah, that's what I was imagining. But when you said, my frst reaction was like, Jesus Christ, why?
Mike Kaplan
Yeah, I know.
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
I know damn well why. Yeah, just for the listeners. So that people are aware that we are not stupid. That has been
thought through by paying your me's team, of course.
Mike Kaplan
Yeah.
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
Nothing here is random. Okay. Makes a lot of sense. So now let's talk about the QR code specifcally. Slash the
generation of the unique links. How does that look? Like, so the whole point is that you send it to the user, it's unique
to them, but it's somehow connected to the payout rail. So I don't understand exactly the connection between the
unique link and the receiving or the process of paying your me receiving, I don't know, $5 to their Venmo account.
How do you connect it to.
Mike Kaplan
Yeah, so, so it all starts with data transfer between us and our client. And I'll go back to that polling example. Right.
And so when we integrate in with a client on the back end, we have some sort of data exchange that we're doing
either in real time by API or depending on the client, we may be doing it in batch by a fle, but essentially we're getting
data from them around their list of consumers that have an obligation to pay them. So in the case of Polling agency,
they have, let's call it 10,000 invoices that they need to collect on. They're sending us the pertinent information
around those 10,000 invoices, the account number, the amount due, whatever it is they want us to display to their
end client.
Mike Kaplan
They're going to send us that data and they're going to do that either through batch or they're going to do that for
API. We're going to take all of that, we process it and then we essentially create what we call internally orders. But
think of, yeah, think about it as almost like an invoice sitting in the cloud waiting to be paid. We then associate that
with a URL and we then deliver that URL to the end consumer and we can do that through a QR code which we would
print on a bill and then they would get sent out. Or we can send it as a SMS or what, you know, a text message or,
you know, however you really want. And once we've created the URL, the delivery of the URL is really about how you
communicate with your client.
Mike Kaplan
When, when the consumer then gets that they're accessing that link, we have this staged order that we call it
internally, but it's essentially, it's an invoice sitting in the cloud waiting to be paid. That's all pre flled out. Now once
that consumer gets there.
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
When you say pre flled out, you mean with the user's name, Their, Yeah.
Mike Kaplan
You know, not necessarily their name, if we don't need their name, but their account, the pertinent information for
them to pay that bill, it might be the amount due, the account number, whatever it is that's necessary to pay that bill.
The idea is they don't have to enter anything, right? They don't have to know their account number. They don't have to
know. They don't even have to know the amount due because we're going to tell them what the amount due is.
Because again, we know all of this. It's not a secret. The biller sent them a bill, and so once they hit that screen,
they're presented with a list of payment options. Use whichever payment option you want. You want to pay with card.
Great. Enter your card information you want to use. If you have Apple Pay enabled on your phone, Great.
Mike Kaplan
Use Apple Pay. If you want to go out to PayPal or Venmo, choose that. If you want to pay it in cash, we're going to get
to the cash one. But essentially at that point, the client, excuse me, the end consumer, is choosing the way that they
want to pay. And at that point we're processing that transaction. We're signaling the biller on the back end that the
transaction, obviously we go out, we authenticate. If it's a car transaction, we're doing all things we need to do there
to make sure the money's there, et cetera. Once the transaction is complete, we're basically letting the biller know
that the transaction has completed so that they can update their system. And then we're sending a receipt to the
consumer so that they have receipt of payment. And that's how the transaction works.
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
Makes sense. Makes sense. And very excited to get to the cash part. Let's jump there. Let's jump there. After the
cash part, we'll discuss, you know, who, which ones of our listeners should drop everything immediately and reach
out to your team to get on board versus who. All right, in that case, we'll start with the cash part. It was. Sounds very
interesting. It allows users to actually gain cash. Something that is essentially a digital invoice. How does that work?
Mike Kaplan
How does that work?
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
What is going on there?
Mike Kaplan
Yeah, and so basically what we've done is we have wired up and connected 60,000 retail locations. Think 7, 11, CVS,
Walgreens, Walmart, Family Dollar General, those, Casey's General Store. I'm sure I'm forgetting one and they'll be
upset with me. But ultimately we have these 60,000 retail locations that where we are connected into the point of
sale system at that retail location. And so what we do is, in the same way that I described the transaction before, you
have this invoice sitting in the cloud. We send the consumer a link they open it up and they choose to pay with cash.
When they choose to pay with cash, we're going to ask them, okay, where would you like to go? And let's assume for
a Second they choose 7 11.
Mike Kaplan
We are going to display a barcode on their phone that they can then take down to the seven eleven store. They can
have that barcode scanned. The point of sale system reaches out to us to basically authenticate that transaction.
They then consumer then hands over cash and then again the point of sale system tells us that the cash is in hand
and then we signal to the biller and then send the customer receipt. So that's how we digitize the transaction is
again, it's basically. We're basically using the point of sale system right at the retail location to say, identify that this
consumer wants to pay this staged invoice and that they're doing it with cash. And so that's how we digitize that
transaction.
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
I cannot even fathom the amount of work that went into that integration. Now I'm going to try.
Mike Kaplan
So by the way, that is the way the company. So that is the way the company started. That was the initial product that
we built was this cash at retail product. We started as a cash at retail company. And what we realized in the journey
was that because that was hard. And by the way, it's sort of interesting, maybe your users will be interested. The
actual reason that we have this staging technology where we actually put everything in the cloud staged with all of
the necessary information was because of cash. Because we never knew when a consumer was actually going to go
make the payment. But when they showed up at the store, we needed a process that could be executed by a variety
of different. Like every retail location sort of has their own store operation.
Mike Kaplan
So we have to sort of boil this down to something that could be executed by, you know, 60,000. You know, at the time
were working primarily with 7 11. They had to. We had to make it so that a 711 store associate could reliably do this
transaction without having to enter in, you know, lots of information about the consumer. So we three stage the
transaction, associated it with a barcode gets scanned, hits us, and we know everything about that order in order to
fulfll on it.
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
That is crazy. That is crazy. I wonder, out of curiosity, what is. I'm trying to phrase the question correctly. How
popular is that paying rail nowadays? Is it 3% of your transactions?
Mike Kaplan
Oh, what is it as a percentage? It's a relatively small percentage of our overall business but it's an interesting. It is a
problem that almost that every one of our customers have. It is an out. It is outsized. It may be only 2 or 3% of those
transactions, but they're the most costly transactions they're going to have to do. Right. Because I've got this
consumer that needs to pay me. Right. They only have cash to do it. Well, how am I going to get the cash? Am I
going to send them? Am I going to have them walk into my location and have them hand me cash? Well, that's not a
great use of my resources. Right. Not a great use of the customer's time and not a great use of my resources.
Mike Kaplan
There's also then the sort of security and issues around handling and managing cash. So it is an outsized economic
problem based on even if it is only a small number of transactions.
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
Beautiful. Absolutely love it. I did not think I'd get so excited about the catch part of it. All right, that is delightful. So
now let's hear it for the people who are as excited as I am about specifcally who should be reaching out to you right
now. We defnitely can't say everyone who is your ideal customer profle, who you usually work with.
Mike Kaplan
Yeah. I mentioned earlier we sort of split our businesses into two different areas, bill payment and regulated real
money gaming bill payment. Looks like anybody who. Bill payment is primarily our big focus is our lending. And
that's a variety of different types of. That could be personal lenders, auto lenders, student lending. Anybody who's
sort of done is in the lending market, mortgage. Those are all clients that we service today. And we have a platform
that's really well designed to do that. Tolling is another one. So if, you know, we work with a lot of polling operators,
property management is another area of focus for us. And so those are. And then the last one, we've been doing a
fair amount in collections, particularly collections in the tolling and lending markets. Right. And again, those are all.
These are all.
Mike Kaplan
I'll tell you who we don't service. We are not in the e. We are not in the E commerce business. We do not focus on
commerce payments. That's not an area of, you know, an area of interest to us. There are plenty of people out there
that provide really good service in that market. Yeah, yeah. And we don't. We don't, you know, not an area that we're
going to bring a whole lot of value. But if you are a client that has already delivered a service and now is in the
business of having to collect from that client. Right. You need to collect money back for a service you've already
delivered. That's where we shine. Right. Because through driving a better payment experience, we can ultimately
reduce the total cost of acceptance of accepting those payments. Right. And that's.
Mike Kaplan
That's really where we're focused on is those types of clients.
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
Makes sense. And now the gaming part. I forgot the term that you've used already. Memory has absolutely
demolished. So let's talk about the gaming. Why are the businesses split? I'm assuming it's due to the regulatory
requirements specifcally for gaming.
Mike Kaplan
It's just. It just has a slightly different.
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
Use.
Mike Kaplan
Cases are slightly different and the value costs a little bit different. But ultimately it started in the same place. When
we got into real money gaming, it was because they recognized that consumers needed to people. Many of their
consumers wanted to load their accounts with cash. Right. And so it's because for gaming, cash is a great budgetary
way of managing things. It's also has no chargebacks. There's also lots of advantages. That's originally how we got
into the gaming market was with our cash product and we serviced pretty much we service a signifcant percentage
of the gaming market with our cash product. And like all the other markets we played in, once were in working with
cash, they recognized that we could do a lot more for them.
Mike Kaplan
And so that's, you know, so the only reason it's split is just, you know, the targets are very different in terms of how
we sell to them. But you know, the use and the use cases are a little bit different. We're not necessarily doing QR
codes on statements. Right. Gaming operators.
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
Oh yeah.
Mike Kaplan
But the, you know, the technology, the underlying technology platform is still the same.
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
That makes sense. The fows are going to be exactly the same, I would imagine or almost exactly the same. Gotcha.
Makes a lot of sense. I'm distracted thinking about gaming and game clients there. Forgot what I was gonna ask.
Dang it. Completely left my brains. The settlements. I'll touch back onto that. Specifcally for gaming. I know that it's
a big thing for them where you know, from the moment that the client deposits the funds to the moment when
they're cleared in their accounts and they can start gambling was crucial for gaming space. What's the settlement
delay there? From the moment that the client pays in either through credit card or Google pay or through cash
potentially.
Mike Kaplan
So we're signaling in real time. Potentially real time. Right. So when the client pays, we're signaling back. I'm sorry.
When the end consumer pays, we're signaling the gaming operator essentially in real time. They are then crediting
the customer's account basically in real time. Settlement occurs behind the scenes. Right. However long it takes to
move the money from the card networks to us to the gaming operator. But we're sort of guaranteeing that
transaction, we're acting as their agent to accept that transaction. So they're giving the end consumer essentially
real time credit for their load. Right. So if they walk up and if they go online and they say I want to deposit $100.
When they deposit that $100, the gaming operator generally gives them access to it in real time. And then we settle
behind the scenes.
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
How long is that behind the scenes settlement taking roughly? I mean obviously it depends on the paying methods.
Mike Kaplan
Yeah.
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
Since we touched onto it so many.
Mike Kaplan
Times at this point, it does depend on the payment method. It also depends on the client. But usually we're initiating
an ACH transaction on the next day or the are the second day. So if payment is t 0, we're initiating an ACH on the
next day t 1. And then depending on how quickly the Fed moves the transaction, they're probably seeing that on T2.
Right. And again depends on the payment method. Sometimes we're initiating Rach on T2 and then they're seeing it
on T3. But that's generally what settlement looks like.
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
Sweet. Makes a lot of sense. It's just a very frequently asked question for me in my day to day, which is I'm bringing it
up. Makes a lot of sense. In that case, let's talk about pricing. Just generally what can be disclosed, how does it
work? It's based on the volumes. Is it based on the number of paying Rails that you're allowing? So the more paying
Rails that the user has, the more they are charged or is it based on the collections? What are we talking here?
Mike Kaplan
Yeah, so pricing is super fexible and we have the ability to sort of price at, you know, not only down to the tender
level. Right. Not only down to the payment type but also based on the payment channel. And then we can price it as
a embedded fee where the our client absorbs the cost or we can do it as a convenience fee where the consumer is
paying the transaction fee as a convenience. So and then we can mix and match that pretty much in any way we
want. So we can make it so that your recurring ACH transactions are embedded and the client pays for them. But if
they want to do a one time debit, then the customer Pays a convenience fee. And that convenience fee is going to
range by the market we're servicing.
Mike Kaplan
And frankly the average payment amount that we're processing for that particular client and we mix and match that.
Right. And so if it's a more expensive transaction to the client, we can make that a more expensive transaction to the
consumer.
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
That part is pretty standard for the whole payments industry. Another thing that's standard is monthly minimums or
monthly platforms. Is that something that.
Mike Kaplan
Yep, we have platform fees and we have a minimum transaction amounts that we have based on the cost the client
we're working with.
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
Gotcha. Understood. So let's say that we have a client who is, I don't know, dental practitioner, the one that I owe 200
bucks to. They are saying most likely, I don't know, 20 bills like this per month. Would they be reaching out to you or
is that too small?
Mike Kaplan
Yeah, like somebody who's. That. That's probably on the small. Most of the clients we're dealing with or sending, you
know, in the lending space, for example, we look at the number of loans and so that they have on their books
because that indicates much they're how many payments are going to be. So, you know, a couple of thousand
transactions is sort of on the low end of what we do. And then we do customers that have multiple millions of
transactions a month. So you know, sort of varies based on industry. And then we have some partners that we work
with that aggregate some of that for us so that do some aggregation and then, you know, we can service them that
way too.
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
Makes sense. Very familiar with the process as well, which is why I was asking like, you know, because again, most
likely my dentist is not going to be listening to this, but if they are, frst of all, if he was not going to pay you 200
bucks until you send me a normal request that I can pay like a normal human being. But yes, yeah, don't reach out.
Nonetheless, too small. So with all that being said, let's move on to the last question of today's episode, which is our
standard wrap up question, which is, you know, if there's one thing that you can lend into people's brains all across
the world and make them understand one thing about the payment space, it can be anything. It can be banks are
scamming you all, start buying gold and they will just follow that advice.
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
What would that advice be? What would that not be?
Mike Kaplan
I will say it is for the clients and businesses that look like us that the payment experience really matters. So driving
really solid payment experiences is the best way to sort of reduce the total cost of acceptance. If you know, to your
dentist comment like if you make it easy for your end consumers to pay you are going to get paid faster, you're going
to get paid more reliably and you know, and that's what it's all about right is how do you've already, you know,
acquired this customer, how do you service them in a way that is going to reduce your total cost and payments is
part of that and it's more than just the transaction cost. Right? The transaction cost is only a portion of it's the
overall experience from end to end is where your costs are.
Mike Kaplan
And by providing a really good experience you'll reduce your cost, you'll get paid faster and you're going to be a more
proftable company. And that would be the thing I would tell people to think about when they're, you know, if you got
that bill, would you want to pay it? And if the answer is no, then you need to look at Your.
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
Experience now 8 billion people are horrifed as to what they just heard in their brains but it's a good notion to have
for I don't know, 0.01% of the population which are dealing with this stuff. So yes, great wrap up on my side I'm going
to say take a look at the notes of the interview. They're always in the description. There can be links, there are going
to be links to pay near me. There's going to be a link to Michael's LinkedIn probably to something else. Oh our self
stack where we take very, very deep dives into very random interesting things like R codes for ach disputes or how
just in time funding for virtual card works.
Konstantin Dubovitskiy
So if you are very interested in payments, if you want to learn more about things that most people don't know, take a
look at the description stuff will be there and as always have a great day. All right, we are good.