Rick Morgan, news editor at Bank Innovation

Hi, everyone, and welcome to this week’s episode of the Weekly Wrap part of our FinTech Unfiltered brand. I’m Rick Morgan, a news editor at Bank Innovation. And I’m joined by my fellow news editor, Bianca Chan, as well as Michael Seaman of SwipeSum. Michael, thanks for joining us today. I’d like to start by thanking our sponsors Blend, Mambu and Kunai. Thank you for your support. As always, it’s been a busy week. This is the week ending August 28. Before we get launched into the news, Michael, maybe you want to talk a little bit about SwipeSum and your role there and what you guys are all about?

Michael Seaman, CEO and co-founder of SwipeSum

Yeah, for sure. So I’m the CEO, and one of the co-founders of SwipeSum. And we’re in the most basic sense, payments consultants. And we built a lot of software to make that job possible. So consulting sounds human heavy, but we have a pretty slim team and deal with some large like fortune 5000 type companies but basically any business, small business $2 billion a year and payments can come to SwipeSum will do solutions due diligence and find the best providers here in mainly North America, but we do have some very large international clients. After we do that due diligence, which manually if you were to do it, it’s like a three to nine month process. But our software does it instantly. And then we help pre negotiate the best terms conditions and prices. So short example this week’s big win was one of the largest e-commerce companies out of New Zealand. Use our process and we were able to eliminate a couple people’s like most annoying manual processes in their jobs. We saved them a half million dollars a month. Which was, which was massive savings for them. And also, it’s a good kind of end result for us. So it’s absolutely free for any business to use our services, we do have pretty impressive results on cost reduction, or just improving processes. And we get paid as a referral from any payments company or solution provider out there. So we have agreements that touch basically all 5000 payments options in the US. So using us you kind of avoid any sales channel or anything else, you end up with the best solution at the best price to accept any type of payment.

Rick Morgan  

Fantastic So one thing that Bianca wrote about this week that we can start on is about credit card customer satisfaction. Bianca What did you find? And then maybe Michael can weigh in on as well.

Bianca Chan, news editor at Bank Innovation

Sure, sorry, I’ve got some construction going on outside so hopefully it’s not too loud. So yeah, so some data from JD Power, kind of gauging credit card customer satisfaction here in the US. And although we started the year off, that was supposed to be one of the highest kind of record years in terms of customer satisfaction with credit cards, it actually took a pretty big decline 10 points on a 1000 point scale. So not that crazy but pretty big considering that we were on our way to being one of the best record years. And that decline was driven throughout the pandemic the past five months, with just a lack of communication. And another one of the big drivers was issues with the credit card terms. The folks over at JD Power said you know, throughout these economic kind of uncertain times, trust loyalty, brand image advocacy, those are some of the really key drivers are really important things to consumers and I found it pretty surprising that according to JD powers research, only 36% of credit card customers, so they’ve been proactively contacted by their card issuers in the past 12 months. And now we speak, you know more with banks on the kind of retail or commercial banking side. And from what we’ve heard Rick, throughout the pandemic, there was a lot of kind of proactive communication out to customers, you know, whether that’s kind of new tools like new online banking tools, or anything about government stimulus packages and kind of processing those checks. So pretty interesting that I think there’s got to be some sort of improvement in that proactive communication between the card issuers, the credit card companies and consumers.

Rick Morgan  

Yeah, definitely. I mean, that’s what we kept hearing was people were reaching out to their consumers and customers and, you know, trying to let them know about whatever, you know, new deals, were available to them new rewards, points, etc. So it is kind of interesting to hear that Michael, I don’t know if you have any thoughts?

Michael Seaman

So we see transactional. For thousands of clients, and throughout the year, the kind of trend that we experienced and we touch every possible vertical, retail, e commerce business to business was a decline in the usage of cards, or just volumes were lower, even with stimulus packages or whatever happened. I think it’s interesting on the credit card side, because for the first time, a lot of people were pressured financially. And so maybe if they did get email or text notifications, it’s so easy to ignore, with all of the noise that we have coming to us. If you don’t care. You know, like I have Amex and in chase cards, and I rarely click on anything unless it’s like, you know, free tickets to x. And then you click on it’s no free tickets.

Rick Morgan

It’s never actually free tickets. Never free tickets.

Michael Seaman

I don’t know why I get those emails. But it would be interesting around terms because you have people that have annual fees that come up, that obviously hopefully that you know, this year, there’ll be some relief. If you’re looking at your terms, there’s probably some issues going on. Or maybe you issued a dispute or you want to do a chargeback. But the brands are clearly trying to protect revenue. But getting ahead of it communication wise is probably the best way to maybe protect your revenue and your customers.

Rick Morgan

Yeah, one thing that I wanted to touch on as well, Michael, we had some we were doing a story as well about tech talent, and where there’s a gap between tech talent hiring and tech talent, jobs, and the actual tech talent itself. They found this was from a study a company called Mendix. They did a drought developer drought index, where they looked at where there was a lack of developers relative to the number of jobs and they found that counties in New Jersey, South Dakota and Mississippi actually had the biggest gap between companies that were hiring and people to fill those jobs. I know you are based in St. Louis. And I believe that’s where SwipeSum is based. Maybe you can talk a little bit about the tech scene there. What the talent sort of looks like the types of jobs that are hiring and just how it’s evolved over time.

Michael Seaman

Yeah, that’s, that’s crazy. And it’s tough. We started in kind of remote across the country, but I was in Venice Beach where there’s a surplus and nice, highly paid group. But I think what we saw kind of in 2016 to 2020 was, you know, real remote work is possible, you know, if you can actually like find the people and we’re seeing a lot of like, at trade shows and conferences, there’s a lot of startups that that can find you tech talent across the globe. Obviously, when you’re working in close groups, and in the office, which is what we prefer, we feel like collaboration is unmatched in St. Louis. When we got here. We have a software that runs our whole business. It’s called Staitment. And I’ve been building that for a long time. And it was tough to find engineering talent. While we were here. There’s a couple programs that give away grants for companies to move to the area. There’s a lot of incubators, you know, it’s your classic kind of like, new Midwest hub in different spots where business owners, trade companies, and you know, the government are trying to help people get off of the coasts, and you know, create tech jobs and talent in St. Louis. And what we experienced was we, we struggled at first and had to get really involved in the community. And so we used basically an outsource group that we had met out of Boston, and their job was not they were not an agency trying to build software, they were working on their own product, but they had enough time to work on ours as well. It just ended up working the best. And with time, as we, you know, got to know more people that are extremely in the know in St. Louis, you know CTOs of some of the bigger companies and seeing some of the success stories of people raising money in the teams they grew. We were able to find a curate in house engineering talent here in St. Louis, that, you know, is stellar, just as good as anything you’d find on the coast. I think there’s another interesting thing happening because you have COVID now, and people can kind of live and work from anywhere. But we’re seeing kind of an influx of kind of shocking companies you would never see coming to St. Louis, coming to St. Louis. And even smaller, kind of like, suburbs of St. Louis having their own kind of tech scenes pop up. And I think, you know, we would have liked maybe In 2020 2018, to say, like, engineers are moving off the coast. And there’s jobs, you know, in St. Louis and Detroit and Cincinnati, and you know, some of the places you don’t normally think, as tech hubs. But now here we are, again in August, and everybody’s remote. And so you know, does it matter where, where people are? And that’s one of the problems and things we’re trying to figure out. Now with sales, talent and tech talent, anything else we’re hiring for is like, do they actually have to be in St. Louis? Because last year at this time, we thought they did. And now we’re nice and unsure.

Bianca Chan

Yeah, I mean, Royal Media is headquartered in New York, but Rick and I are both in Seattle. So we’re super used to work remote and I think as journalists and reporters, it might be a little bit easier to do. So I mean, we are working close to the east coast hours but what you’re going to do, but I mean, it’s kind of interesting. You know, you were in the office? How do you find? I mean, I don’t know if any of your workers are remote right now or not working in the office, but how are you finding that kind of like, development or innovation process? I mean, you don’t have a whiteboard, that you’re all kind of in the same room at that you can just, you know, doodle out ideas.

Michael Seaman

Yeah, we’re, we’re making it work. So I am in our office right now. And half of our team is also here. And we’ve just had to roll with the punches. So in St. Louis. We went remote for three and a half months, right. As soon as stuff went on lockdown, our revenue plummeted. transactional volume that we saw plummeted. And realistically about 50% of our employees were able to work remote and the others like checked in for meetings, but when we got into the data, they just were not able to like self manage, which was kind of disappointing. And so now you know, something Some people are still with us and some aren’t. And we’ve built a lot of trust in people saying, you know, you can work from anywhere. But we just had lunch even two days ago to try to figure out, you know, are we hiring across the US? Are we just in St. Louis. And kind of the end conclusion was we there’s some teams that have to be together and we can’t, we can’t collaborate the same way on a zoom call as we can, when we are in a room with a whiteboard, as you said, kind of like in this conversation, I’m sure if we were in person, we would cut each other off a little more and maybe, you know, interact a little a little better and say some things are, you know what I mean? But it’s just, you just communicate even a little differently. But I don’t know you know, if and when this is going away, and so the thing that we’ve done the the best on working in the office, And maybe like human talent, human resources is kind of even narrowing our, our focus and find finding like who’s actually like the best employee when, you know, I think it could, you know, easy to miss. When we’re all together, or you know, through the transition of going remote, we found the people that were like all about it, and very like good self managed self starters. And then also with our clients we were able to have record months for the last two months and very, everything is just going great. Couldn’t be better. But we did the same thing. We had to narrow our focus of who we were going after to the people that kind of were not affected the biggest opportunities that will close today. Yeah, it’s been a unique year.

Bianca Chan 

Sure, I mean, throughout this, you kind of learn that you need to be able to rely on the small teams that you have so far.

Rick Morgan   

Looking ahead to next week, Bianca, what are you working on?

Bianca Chan 

Taking a closer look at how this kind of shift to digital banking and mobile banking is impacting the way banks are thinking about their physical branches and how they’re tweaking that kind of strategy to fit in more with the digital side or not.

Rick Morgan 

Yeah we’ll find out. I’m gonna work on a story, a few different things. But one of the bigger ones is how banks are sort of condensing or combining banking and accounting capabilities. So the bank so their clients, their small business clients can do it all in one place and have it all managed under one roof. So that’s something that I’m going to be looking at next week. Michael, looking ahead, is there anything that we should keep an eye out from SwipeSum?

Michael Seaman

There are some things. I like the idea of the banks and the accounting piece. We work with a lot of banks, and I think it’s really interesting. They’re starting, especially this year, getting very concerned about QuickBooks becoming a bank, Square becoming a bank, Stripe becoming a bank, which takes their deposits. And so I think this year has definitely caused an acceleration in kind of digital adoption. But it’s kind of funny, not funny. It’s just, yes, it’s it’s impressive. It’s impressive to see kind of legacy companies trying to innovate quickly or, you know, do or die. We’re going through a rebrand. And so I’m very excited because if you go to our website today, it’s gonna look hundred percent different next week, and we’ve been working on it for months. And so we’ve got web launch, new software development, business as usual. You know, it’s always changing.

Rick Morgan 

And is it gonna keep the same name I assume?

Michael Seaman

We’re keeping the same name. When we started SwipeSum, as you know, many startups do. We thought we were very sure based on our research and companies that we were working with that, you know, we’re the best solution, we find Any business the best solution at the best price. And we went after every single possible business. And we had a lot of small to medium sized businesses. And it was a lot of work for us, you know, to save them maybe like 200 bucks a month, and they just wouldn’t switch. And we realized that we had a very enterprise solution, which also made us a lot more money and a lot quicker adoption from name brands. And when we talk to name brands, they you know, they’re like, we already have the best rate. We’ve done this many times we have someone that does this in house, and which we always have to say, after we get their documents, you know, you guys have done great, you’re very smart. We’ve never seen rates like this, but we were able to find another half million dollars a month.

We have a new service that is it normal and payments, and so the new branding reflects that we are an enterprise solution. It’s not as much catered to small businesses. So small businesses, when we first launched our marketing piece, like the service is still the exact same, but we showed it to people as like, the first marketplace for payments. Like, you know, there used to be travel agents now use hotels.com, however, big, you know, 200 location companies don’t want to go to a marketplace to find their payments, because you know, they’re such a big deal. And so we changed it to and now we say that we’re software enabled payments consultants, and it’s the exact same offering, but presented best for enterprise clients. And I think it’ll help us get more inbound leads, which who doesn’t want that?

Rick Morgan  

Of course we’ll definitely keep an eye out for that and we’re excited to see what the rebrand looks like. Thank you both for joining me today. This was an exciting talk. So as always, we will post this as part of As a podcast as part of our Fintech Unfiltered brand, we will also post it on our site, please let us know how we did reach out to us on LinkedIn, reach out to us on Twitter. And always feel free to reach out on finainews.com. We hope to see you there. We will have a lot of good stories for you next week. So please check those out. And until next week, thank you for joining us, and I look forward to talking to you guys then, and hopefully, it’s an exciting week, and I’m glad you were able to join us.

Michael Seaman

Thanks so much.