Ionia’s fix for payment delays & fraud

Stephen: This is the Around The Coin podcast. I just had one of the best conversations with Marshall Greenwald. He's the founder of IoniaPay. These guys are creating seamless, one touch, immediate payments, instant transactions. But we talk all about fraud, we talk about compliance, we get into why is the payment sector so disjointed and so segmented, we talk about, you know, a little bit about the U.S. regulations. It was such a great conversation. We have lots of jokes in this one. Honestly, Marshall is just one great guest. So insightful. A lot of great examples and real life metaphors to help people understand the payments sector. And for you entrepreneurs, he even gives us some really good insights if you're looking to enter the payments industry or any industry if you're looking to exit your business.

This is a must watch. You are going to love it and reach out to Marshall and his team because they do payments for, you know, everything under the sun and you may have some connections for you. I don't know. Let me know how you guys liked the episode. Reach out to me or Marshall and let's go talk soon.

Stephen: This is your host, Stephen Sargeant, the Around The Coin podcast. We have probably the guest that has had the best shirt. I just noticed it before I pressed record. We have Marshall Greenwald, the founder of Ionia. Marshall, first of all, that shirt is amazing. And since this is a video podcast, I think we gotta, you know, we gotta give some praise to that shirt.

Is that a custom shirt from you and your company or where'd you get that from?

Marshall: Yeah, thanks, man. I appreciate the shout out. Yeah, actually, I'd show you the back, but I'm not sure I can here. But the back says if you're having, or sorry, I got 99 problems, but fraud ain't one. And then talks a little bit about how Ionia eliminates fraud. So yeah, this is custom. Our marketing team's amazing.

Some really cool stuff they've put together for us.

Stephen: I love it. I love it. Before we jump into Ionia, can you tell me where the name came from? That seems like a very unique name. Usually when companies have a unique name, it's like, you know, the Greek goddess that talks about, you know, how she bartered, you know, shells back in the day, it's always this illustrious story.

Is there anything behind the name? Or it's like, Hey, I just put two words together and that's what came out.

Marshall: You're actually not far off the mark. It is Greek. You, you nailed that. And it does have a backstory that I, I was particularly inspired by. so Ionia, uh, you said it right, by the way, most people take a couple of stabs to get it. You got it right the first time. So Ionia is a region that in ancient times was right at the heart of the Silk Road and it's in Greece.

And. Because they were positioned where they were in the world, they were forced to kind of innovate. How do you trade between people from all over the world that are using different commodities? Some people use pearls, some people use shells, some people, you know, all these different commodities they're trading in.

And they were the first, they're credited as at least as being the first, region to ever create a, a true official currency. And actually, if you look at our logo, which actually I don't have on the front of the shirts on the back, but the logo is like a beacon, like an icon for Geo. And then the middle is a square kind of rounded square.

That is the, the stamp that they put on their coins. And so, most people don't know this story of Ionia, but we all use coins and have used coins in the past. And so they've improved how we trade for thousands of years and people don't even know that, that history. Right. And so we see ourselves as improving how trade works for the next several thousand years.

And yet we don't need the credit. We kind of sit behind the scenes, we interact with merchants and they use our platform, but we're kind of, not a consumer facing brand, if that makes sense.

Stephen: interesting. You started out like many great payments entrepreneurs, probably working for the traditional sector. It looks like you dove deep into payments, but you even thought about going into law a little bit. He'll walk us through like really quickly what your journey, what you thought you were going to start out with and how come you stayed in the payment sector for so long.

I think almost 20 years in the payment sector.

Marshall: Yeah, it's actually dating myself here, but I think this next year will be year 25 in payments. I think my 25th anniversary will be in April. So I'm, I'm getting old here, but lots of experience, love the industry. It, it really was something I kind of fell into while I was in school pursuing an education to go into law.

My, my dad, who's also my co founder here, is an attorney. And I always saw what he was doing and loved what he's doing, but it wasn't until I was in college and started having these deeper conversations with him about it. I realized he really wasn't practicing law. He was, he was running a business, right?

And so even though he was general counsel, he was also EVP. And it was the business side that really interested me. And while I was in school, I was working at a bank in their credit card division. And I saw a lot of things that I just was like, Man, you guys are getting in your own way. Like, you've got a big bank, it's successful, but these things that you're doing today are going to slow that success or curb it.

And I, I got kind of interested in learning more about payments. That's kind of what headed me this direction. And I kind of just fell into it and kind of fell in love with it. I would go out and talk to clients that I was serving. And they were like, look, I, I would do anything with you for payments because you're sincere, you're honest, you're hardworking, you're here when we need you, you're reliable.

Like that, that was what kind of inspired me to go try to solve some problems for them.

Stephen: What's it like working with your father? I can imagine me and my dad working. We're generations apart. But I can imagine trying to like show him like, hey, this new technology or this is where we can use AI and some of the no code stuff. What's it like working with your father? Is he like innovative too?

Or he's like, okay, let's go try that out. Let's like, you know, let's break some things. Tell me about that dichotomy of working with family.

Marshall: Yeah. I, I couldn't say enough good things about my dad to do him justice, but I've been very fortunate, but he's got this unique ability to kind of challenged me to be extremely cautious where I'm naturally very optimistic, kind of go getter, like, here's an innovation, let's go run to market. And he's always like, look, yes, I think that makes a lot of sense, but let's evaluate the regulatory schemes.

Let's evaluate the legal risks. Let's evaluate everything before you jump right in. And so we balance each other really well, where we can have this healthy dialogue of like, Hey, I have an opportunity. It's huge. And then he plays devil's advocate of like, let's evaluate all the risks and all the challenges and what needs to happen, what kind of money it's going to take to do it.

And so there's a great blend there and we can kind of meet somewhere where we go, okay, we agree on how we're going to actually tackle these problems and how we're going to mitigate any risks along the way.

Stephen: And I think for, you know, the entrepreneurs that listen to this podcast, they're looking for a general counsel or a legal advisor. That has that, not no, but like, Hey, let's explore exactly. You know, I know you want to jump into AI and offer AI virtual assistance and chatbots, but let's walk through all the risks of that.

And then I think that's a great process because you probably get to a point where like, okay, this may not work. He's right there. We have to manage this risk. And to your point, you know, that product that you're probably releasing is a lot more beneficial, probably to the customer and a lot more safer to the customer versus him just saying, no, this is too risky.

And that's the end of the conversation. I think that's what more payments, crypto fintech companies are looking for in their general counsel, but if I've ever known

Marshall: Definitely. And I think to your point, actually, Steven, there's also something important about just having people who will kind of challenge your ideas before you execute on them. Because that's how you, at least in my experience, that's how I have been able to take what I think was originally a good idea and turn it into a great idea.

Because I have people saying, well, what about this? And is that going to be a problem with this? And whether That's from a user experience, whether that's from a cost perspective, whether that's from a risk perspective, having people around you who, who will, and you give them authority to say, Hey, let's have this dialogue.

And you have that healthy conversation about all the different things. And it helps you solve each of those problems. in a way that you're kind of getting a 360 view of the problems, not just like what you personally have experienced. Because no matter how much I've been in payments, you know, everyone's had different experiences in different areas than I have.

And getting those viewpoints early and often is really important to the iteration of the product.

Stephen: That's really interesting, I'm even scared to ask this question because I'm scared of what your answer might be, but in those 25 years, what's, what's changed in payments? And what, unfortunately, what stayed the same over the last two and a half decades

Marshall: You know, In particular, the last couple of years, there's been a lot of innovation to what I call the consumerization of payments. If you go back 15 years ago, most consumers had no idea that merchants even paid any fees. They didn't really understand anything about payments. And I think with the advent of systems like Square that kind of opened up niche markets of micro merchants, now there's somebody who might've had a garage sale last Saturday, and all of a sudden they understand merchant accounts, at least some of it, right?

And so consumers are now much more aware of how payments work, and now they're starting to get more control and decision more options and be able to make those decisions themselves on how they want to pay to a merchant. So that's where I, I see a lot of change. On the back end, it's fundamentally unchanged since, at least since I started in the early 90s, or sorry, excuse me, the late 90s, early 2000s.

The, the back end of how a payment settles, how it authorizes really hasn't changed much. Although I will say I am old enough. That I did sell the knuckle busters, you know, the, the imprint slips, right? And you'd, you'd use a big we call them knuckle busters, but big imprinter and you run it across the card on a double or triple paced paper and they sign it and then you take it to the bank.

I did actually sell that for a couple of years and then electronic authorization become much more popular and affordable. But you know, on the back end, it's basically the same old thing.

Stephen: I'm curious, when you look at the, you know, some of the things we see Neobanks, Crypto, Bass, Fintechs all attacking the same problem in payments. Why is it still so fragmented? Like, why are we still running on old rails with so much innovation? Now it seems like with all that innovation, we almost need that interoperability layer for all that innovation because we're still running in silos.

Why can't we find at least, you know, a uniform solution when it comes to payments?

Marshall: You know, I think it's a blessing and a curse for the U. S. market that we have capitalism applied to this industry. So we have way more financial tuitions than other countries have which means they can they can. Innovate and adopt innovation much faster than we can. If you were to think about it this way, depending on what you consider to be a financial institution and how, whose numbers you look at, it's between 10 and 15, 000 financial institutions in the U.S. If you wanted to launch something that was compatible with consumers, you have to basically be compatible with all of those banks because the consumer could bank at any of them. And then same with the merchant. So to make that work, you either partner with the existing companies that exist, Visa, MashCard, Amex, Discover.

They have tons of these banks. Most of these banks already fully integrated, or you have to go one by one. And that's just, you know, a huge uphill battle, right? Even, even the Fed has struggled to get bank adoption for Fed now. Even the clearing house that already has relationships with most financial institutions for ACH.

Hasn't gotten, I think they're, they're, they've made some progress. I think they're about 70 % coverage now for US bank accounts, but they've been doing this more than 10 years as the clearing house that all these banks already participate in. So even with a huge advantage and a lot of backing, because they're actually owned by the banks.

They still haven't gotten 100% adoption in 10 years. So you, you really have to start by looking at what does our ecosystem look like? There's a couple of really big players. Everyone's going to have to tap into them, but then you layer on the regulations. And getting those really big players to adopt your innovation means they have to not only want to do it, they have to feel that it's on the right side of every regulatory framework that exists, whether that's FinCEN's BSA and Patriot Act, or whether that's from the FDIC or the OCC, there's a ton of regulations for these financial institutions to make sure are completely checking all the boxes and they're, it's very clear lines that you're on the right side of everything.

So innovation often is not that easy to fit into regulatory framework and then get a really large partner such as, you know, the card networks.

Stephen: When you were starting out just before you got into Ionia, was there anything that you were looking at, any companies, projects, you're like, oh, that's really good, that kind of inspired you, like, that's good, that's winning, but I still think I can tweak, or you know, add another feature, or make it faster or more scalable.

Was there any companies that you were watching, you were like, hey, they got a, they're doing a great job, I think I can do something a little bit different. Maybe better for a more nuanced customer.

Marshall: You know, that's a great question. There's a lot of companies that are very innovative. provide a lot of value. I'd say mostly they're innovating on top of the existing frameworks. And so fundamentally, there's some things that they can't change. And that's what we really set out to do in Ionia is to change the outcomes that I was hearing from my merchants for decades.

So having to take all the fraud risk and waiting several days to get their money, that's something that no matter how much you innovate on the existing system, Without a new paradigm, you're going to have those same outcomes. And so I did just a quick backstory. I sold my company in 2013. One of my other payment companies.

And I spent two years really just interviewing merchants, just trying to understand what do you need? What's wrong? What can I do? And all the problems they described, I had no control over, right? And so I was like, well, there's got to be something out there. I did a ton of research. I found if you look up like instant payments, you'll see tons of results.

None of them actually move the money from the consumer to the merchant instantly. It's just like an instant authorization, which is like, Expected today because the card networks provide that on every transaction globally. So there's a lot of things that sound very promising. There's a lot of innovation out there that is really cool and very valuable.

But I'd say that they're tweaking the existing systems that exist to get a slightly better outcome. We've basically fundamentally rebuilt a new system from the ground up. To get dramatically different outcomes. So I think while we do partner with those companies to get pieces of what they're doing and bring the best of class into our network we also had to do a lot that was just ground up innovation.

Stephen: And why is that important versus like instant authorization versus instant payment? Cause for, I'm assuming the consumer touching it, they don't care, right? They still walk out the store. They continue on with their day. I'm assuming it's the merchants are like, Hey, we can't really forecast this. We have to wait three days for this to touch our bank account.

And, oh, we'd love to, you know, maybe set up a new store or set up another product line. Oh, no, hold on. That was fraud. We got now 60, 000 worth of chargebacks. Like, where's the issue that you're solving for? Like, why does instant, you know, authorization differ from like, hey, instant payment?

Marshall: Yeah.

You know, consumers definitely care about instant authorization. Can you imagine how long it would feel to have every time you swipe your card or tap your card, it took two minutes to authorize? Like that would feel like an eternity when you're just standing there looking at the cashier like, can I go now?

Or what's going on? That feels, I mean, even 30 seconds feels like a really long time when you're just staring at the credit card terminal or staring at the cashier. So it's really important to have instant authorization. Consumers still feel like that was instant money movement, and it's not. Really what the merchant gets is an IOU. And that IOU will be paid within a few days. But like, let's think about this last Monday was Veterans Day. It was a national banking holiday. That means if you ran a small business in the United States and most of them, let's, let's face it, rely on card payments for their primary source of revenue. Everything that happened late, you know, Thursday night or on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, the consumers walked out of your store or left, you know, you've shipped their product, whatever, like your products and services are out. You haven't been paid. If payroll was Tuesday morning, you had to fund payroll.

You're going to have a bit of a problem unless you have really good cash flow or some extra reserves. So a lot of businesses in America struggle with that timing. Every time there's a bank holiday, every weekend, especially payroll is Monday or something like that. It can be really, really trying, but even enterprise merchants were finding, even if it's not a problem from a cashflow perspective, it has a cost to them, right?

Let's face it, even if you're. And we have clients that we've done this analysis for that do billion plus a year in card payment revenue. They still can benefit from getting the money faster. It could be 10, 20 million dollars in cash that they'll never be able to utilize because it's always in a perpetual float.

By getting it to them faster, they can invest in marketing, inventory, expansion you know, whatever it is that is important to their business. But we want them to be able to make that choice and not to be stuck in the hurdle of the money's never accessible. Now, Stephen, you asked a compound question, so I'm going to answer the other part, which is fraud.

This is a big topic, and so I'm just going to hit on it really lightly right now, and I'm sure you'll have more questions for me on this topic. But fraud is growing very rampantly, and the best analysts are expecting significant growth in fraud rates because of AI. Right now, there are systems that can do this.

barely, barely reduce fraud risk to a merchant. They certainly don't eliminate it. They have some positive impact, but they're always balancing. Do, do I let consumers go through a checkout that's really simple, friction free and, you know, let them go and check out? Or do I put in some sort of deterrent to prevent the criminals, but it could potentially punish legitimate customers and harm my brand?

That's not a decision we believe merchants should have to make. They should have the option to eliminate fraud. And still allow consumers a good checkout experience and not punish the legitimate customers coming to them.

Stephen: I love it. Even when you mentioned that, I feel like, let me talk to you about, you mentioned the word paradigm, has our paradigm shifted around fraud? Like I remember the Seinfeld episode where Jay wrote the bad check and had to get the rooster to fight to take down the bad check, like we really looked at fraud, like, Oh my God, you wrote a bad check.

Now it's almost like, hey, inflation's up, it's a recession, if you steal a loaf of bread from the store, the police officer should let you go, and I might be simplifying it, but now, and they even use the words friendly fraud for chargeback of things that you've received, but you've just told the credit card company, like, hey, I didn't get that has that shifted, have you noticed that in the last 25 years of payments, where maybe early on it was like, oh my God, to like now it's like, Hey, they're telling you on TikTok how to commit fraud and how to go do check fraud at Chase Bank, and look at the Rollie that they just picked.

Like, it seems like more of a gaming the system, more than it's like a, that's a, that's a, you can get, go to jail or that you can be penalized for it.

Marshall: No, I mean, it's interesting because there's a dramatic difference between like gaming reward systems to maximize your value and gaming the chargeback systems to get money back fraudulently for products that you did receive and did order. And there's nothing friendly about friendly fraud. It's kind of a strange name for it, but you know, for, for those who aren't aware, like.

It is a growing problem. Very, it's probably the bulk of any disputes or chargebacks that any merchant's going to face. In the future, because it's so easily gameable. And like you said, there's so much information out there. It's prevalent. I can't tell you how often I've had merchants where they're dealing with a dispute where they did everything right, right?

And, and the person did authorize the payment and they know that to be the case, but it doesn't really matter in the outcome. They're going to lose the money. And it, there's almost nothing more frustrating. So even if you run a restaurant. And you don't have a lot of fraud happening there. It could be that somebody comes in with a large party.

They spend a ton of money with you jump through hoops, provide good service to this big group and everything feels like it went really well. And now there's a dispute on it because maybe that person overspent, maybe they got pressured to pay for the whole group and they didn't really have the money to do that and still make rent next, next week.

Right? So

Stephen: seen TikToks of that too, boyfriends, the girl goes out, the boyfriends, They're like, Hey, come on, take care of me and my friends. And the guy's like, I'll buy you dinner. I

Marshall: Yeah, yeah.

Stephen: of you.

Marshall: It's, it's kind of absurd, but it has become like culturally more acceptable to do it. Now I'd say that shouldn't be the case and people need to realize that it is fraud. Like the friendly part is a misnomer, but fraud is not. It is fraud to do that, but people do it and get away with it. And so what we've really realized is that we need to step in the middle, provide the technology To eliminate that from being a problem altogether because we can't, you know influence, maybe you can have some influence, but you can't dramatically change how consumers behavior behave across the entire ecosystem because it's so large.

Although I would say TikTok has had a negative impact on that. We won't even talk about some of the scams that they got people to pull and the banks that are now suing them. It's, it's absurdness. But people are so easily influenced individually, but culturally as a whole group. It's really hard to get the, the impetus to say, Hey, stop doing that.

That's not right. Especially when there's no consequences to them.

Stephen: Can you walk me through the differences between, you know, what we're seeing right now where the chargeback is going to the credit card companies? And I'm not saying there's any wrongdoing there, but it seems like more people are winning those disputes than normal. But I do think there has been pushback from some of the credit card companies.

Yeah. But how can the merchants go from no charge, like, from that situation to absolutely no chargebacks? Because I'm assuming that's why they're knocking down your door. Because the amount of time, resources, and then eventually, as you say, sometimes they're losing that money anyway, is the main reason why they're coming through your company to conduct these transactions.

Marshall: That's absolutely right. If, if you think about the situation of the card networks and the way everything is designed today, you mentioned earlier how hard it is to change this. Imagine how hard it is to change a global payment system that's connected to every financial institution, right? So we're kind of stuck with those systems the way they are.

The the outcome of systems that are inherently not secured, meaning we walk around with our card number, right on our card, we give it to every business we transact with. Like that's not a secure way to transact because the only validation that's really available today is the address and the CVV on the card, Which by the way, if your card information is stolen, guess what that means about the other information?

It was stolen with it, right? So, the outcome of that is that the networks have to protect consumers. Otherwise, we will lose consumer confidence in the card networks, and, and it would be catastrophic. So, we have to protect consumers. That's why they win about 95 % of disputes, even when it's clearly friendly fraud.

So how do we address that? The first thing is we started with a much more secure method of authorizing the payment. We do tap into Visa and MasterCard. We check the balances with them. We make sure that they're good, everything like that. But we have another layer of technology we use on every payment.

It's proprietary. And in short, what it does is it verifies, this is Marshall Greenwald. This is Marshall Greenwald's phone, and this is Marshall Greenwald's debit card. If we can match those three things together, then we know for sure this was not fraud. Right? That this was being authorized by Marshall.

So, all we do to do that is we send a simple link to the user's cell phone, and they click the link one time. When they click that link, we're able to verify their device ownership, we're able to to say, hey, this is confidently Marshall, and then we check with the networks. We have a connection to the issuers.

To see who the card was issued to and marry those things together. By requiring all of that for registration of a user, we, and again, it's very, very low friction just to click the link one time, but when they do that, we, we now have that profile, we've validated it, we know it's legitimate. Now we're looking at this and saying, okay, so what if it was fraud? Whose fault would that be? Would that be the merchant's fault? Or would that be our fault? Well, if we're the ones validating everything, then it falls on us. So we simply have made the decision that we, we trust our technology. We know it works. We've used it extensively. We've tested it in market. We've adapted it as we found shortcomings.

We know that it is solid and therefore we've made the decision to indemnify the merchant against fraud at all costs. Like, so if there is fraud, that's on us, not on the merchant. They never even would know that fraud occurred on a payment with them because it comes to us, not to them. So it's just a different design

Stephen: Which is where they're spending most of it. And to be quite honest, if you're a small business anywhere, these things add up mentally, right? You're spending so much time, so much energy. You're frustrated because now you have to go about defending this even though it's like, Hey, we provide the service.

We provide the product. In the example you just gave me, could I not still call as the user and say, Hey, credit card company, I didn't do this transaction, charge it back, or would that now charge back dispute come through you and then you have the ease of like, Hey, nope, we verified ABC, which, you know, pretty much kills a lot of these friendly fraud charges because you're able to dispute it accurately with more information than a traditional merchant would be just based on the credit card transaction.

Marshall: Bingo. Yes, we still protect consumers against actual problems, Right.

Whether that's a merchant who didn't deliver the product or whether that was somebody using their card without their authorization, but the bar is incredibly high for that to have happened. And so it's an acceptable loss rate for us to say, we're going to absolve the merchant of any risk here.

We're going to take that internally. So this provides a much higher value than just the fraud that's being eliminated. And you hit on it perfectly, Stephen, when you said you've got to deal with it. Well, what does that mean? Well, what are the outcomes? Well, think about this, In the restaurant scenario I gave you, what if that table that paid, you know, 1, 000 for their meal that night also provided a really big tip to your server?

What do you do? Do you go back to the server and say, hey, we need that tip back? Of course not, right? But, but now you've paid a tip out that you never got paid. You've had all your products and services. You've had everything that costs you money still applies. And now you're going to have a charge back fee with your processor.

If you have a lot of those or a good number of those, you could end up having higher costs in the future with your processor. You could have a reserve account in the future. You could even get terminated in the future. E commerce business is more relevant than a restaurant, but this happens all the time in, in across every size of business, these types of challenges.

There are even, you know, multi billion dollar a year revenue companies who lose their merchant accounts. Like it's ridiculous, right? But it's not their fault that these problems exist in the payment system. It's just they became a target for whatever reason and they lose their processing or they have to pay a significant reserve balance on every transaction. So, you know, then you have other costs like actual, you know, logistics and, and collections and all of the legal fees. So it costs on average, like 3. for every dollar in fraud loss. So if you have a quarter of a % of your volume as fraud, it's costing you closer to 1 % of your volume. So you imagine what e commerce business in particular run in margin today, it might be a 10 % margin business and 1 % of that.

is gone due to bad actors and system design. So having,

Stephen: When I think about this, I think the critique would be like, Oh, you know, this is a lot of friction. But it also attracts the best customers. If I know I can't just call up the credit card company, then I'm not going to be like, I wouldn't use that company that's using IoniaPay, I'll just go to a regular merchant down the street.

So it seems like it would cause more friction, but it's going to attract those customers that appreciate the customer experience. And it's going to just reduce the amount of fraud that you're dealing with anyway. So it's like. Kind of like you're killing two birds with one stone. You're not dealing with the fraud now because Ioni is.

And two, you won't even attract those fraudsters to begin with because they realize like if I go through this process, it's harder for me to win in a chargeback dispute.

Marshall: yeah, it's, it's really difficult for merchants to think about it this way, but if they kind of think about, you know, I'm attracting the right customers and detract, detracting the criminal organizations that want to target businesses like mine. It's, it's a really great barrier to have there. We're, we find that good consumers are actually used to doing things like a 2FA.

You know, there's other payment systems out there. They're very popular, like ShopPay that require You to put in an OTP. This is a little bit easier than that. You just click the link, but it's not a lot of friction for consumers and they recognize inherently that you're protecting them. The criminals are the ones that are being protected from and so they don't like it.

So they try to stay away from things that take more effort. To, to, you know, get through the system. And and, and then the, the good actors, they actually appreciate the protection. So, it, it's possible that introducing something that has a little bit of friction can impact your conversion rates. This is one of the reasons that we actually partner with Merchant's existing payment system.

If a consumer doesn't click the link, Or we can't approve the transaction or it's not a compatible card. We don't just give a decline response. We actually take the payment based on the merchant's instructions for configuration. We take that response and we send the card to their traditional processor.

So there's a path there to a traditional transaction going through and that actually gives you two bites at the apple actually, right? Because maybe the card would have gotten declined with us and not with the other or with the processor and not with us. So there's kind of invisibly two bites at the apple happening on every transaction if we can't approve it.

Stephen: I, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So the transaction could still go through the traditional way and then like, Hey, if only a small %age of people aren't clicking the link, then that really brings your sample size of potential fraud down even more because the easier, I think now we're used to like, Hey, you have to put in the code.

But now with the iOS systems, at least I know, like, the code will send me a text message, it'll automatically populate in the play, so I'm not having to go back and forth between my text messages and the website. It pre populates, so I think we're getting a little bit more used to these things, where it's just kind of second nature now.

And I think before, when you had to go back and forth, that was kind of the annoying part.

Marshall: Yeah.

Stephen: Give me some of the use cases. I'm assuming that you're probably popular with e commerce. What are some of the other use cases, or maybe that's not an accurate statement, but I'm going to assume, you know, one click checkout that it seems that you have is going to be very popular going online and purchasing items.

Is there any other use cases that are interesting, maybe like barbershops are using this technology because it's so easy to make these transactions in places where maybe it might be cash intensive?

Marshall: You know, there's really A couple of core value propositions to IoniaPay the fraud elimination we've talked about, the faster movement of money, and there can be a cost reduction to the merchant as well. Everyone's got a different prioritization of those values, right? If, if you are having problems with fraud, That's obviously going to be at the forefront of your mind.

You want to be like, that's going to be highest priority. Let's get rid of fraud or reduce it. Whatever we can do here. The majority of small businesses have cashflow challenges today. It's actually there's, there's research out there that says that like 70 to 80% of small businesses are struggling with cashflow throughout the year in 2024. And so every type of business is interested in getting their money faster. I don't think you could find a business that you said, Hey, if I get your money faster, would you want that? And they'd say, no, right? Like, yes, of course we want our money faster. They just don't know that it's possible until they, they see how our platform works and what we can do for them.

But getting your funds in eight seconds, instead of four days. Makes a big difference whether you're a hair salon or barber shop, whether you're a restaurant, whether you're e commerce or whether you're you know, a niche product. You know, there's some bike shops that I've worked with for years where their average price of an actual bike is 5.

is like 000. These are like really heavily specialized road bikes for high performance athletes, right? And yes, somebody might go in and do a tire repair once in a while, but most of the time they're buying either a new bike or parts for their bike. And so their ticket size is really big. As a %age of customers who come to them, the, the number of people who are Not legitimate users is not high.

Stephen: Right.

Marshall: So, so that is a problem. But in every case, they're going to go replace that inventory of that 20, 000 bike. They want to put another one in the shop. So they have two choices. They can either work with us and get their money faster. Or they can put more money out to get their inventory that they need, Right.

And that's an easy decision.

Stephen: And I think for, you know, like, I think this is a subconscious thing and maybe that's the way I run my business, but like I'm on 30 day terms, 60 day terms with a lot of my clients. So, you know, especially if, you know, times are tight with the cashflow, I put it on my credit card. I'm like, Oh yeah, I'll pay that off in a couple of weeks or a couple of days.

But for a lot of your clients are probably using credit lines of credit that they put these, you know, the, the charges on, and then they're like, when they get paid, they might get around to it, but then something else might come up. So now they're paying interest on these credit cards because it goes past the 30 days or 60 days that it starts collecting some of this interest.

So I can see that being a huge savings like mentally if the funds hit the account, you can start doing your accounting that at each transaction versus waiting three or four days and you have this pending, but now you have this expense that's coming out so I can definitely see where it's beneficial.

But I was looking at your website and the web, a simple transaction goes through the amount of intermediaries. My financial brain goes off is like, each one of those parties are charging you a %age of this transaction. So by the time it goes through eight people, eight companies, eight, you know, chief revenue officers, and it comes out the other side, although it's a small %age, you're still paying a %.

Is that kind of where you have that less rate for most of your merchants? Cause it's not going through all these parties. So they're just paying you a %age. Versus paying eight companies a small %age that adds up to more than what you're probably charging.

Marshall: Yeah. I mean, you're hitting on the, the fundamental problem with payments, which is, it's so big, it's so fragmented, but there's a couple of key players. that hold all of this thing together. So everything's got to go through them, but that means it's going through all these other parties to get a transaction, right?

And what we looked at is the consumers and the merchants have different bank accounts, different relationships, and there's no visibility between them. And that's, so every one of those parties actually introduces cost, which you mentioned, Time, right? They have to look at it, process it, send it, whatever.

And then it also introduces risk because now you're further and further disintermediated between the two parties that are transacting. And so there's no visibility like the merchant acquirer has no visibility to the history of the consumer's account and whether they're a good actor and all this kind of stuff.

There's, there's just no way for those to talk. What we've done is we've brought the consumer and the merchant directly into IoniaPay's system. And there's no parties between them. We have a sponsor bank that holds the funds And moves the funds, but it's really the consumer and the merchant interacting directly, sending the money directly.

So when the consumer clicks the link on their phone, they're saying, yes, I'm sending this money to this merchant, and it moves just like that. We don't have to go talk to all these different parties to make that happen.

Stephen: And I think if you think, like, most people are like, okay, what's 1 % if it was 3. 5 to use Mastercard and 2. 5 to use IoniaPay? You have to think, like, you know, if a business is making $250, 000, like, that's a trip to Disney, like, 2, 500 is a lot over the span of a year that you're missing out on, just, and, like, the added fraud implications and risks.

Talk to me a little bit about Gen Z. You guys wrote a great article on your blog about how Gen Z is really disrupting the way traditional payments have been made. We can see that with things like Whatnot apps, which is like your live shopping, TikTok live shopping. People are buying things on the fly.

How has that changed for your merchants being able to, you know, like, tell me about this, like, evolution of QuickPay, LivePaying, Twitch, all these other kind of streams of income that we weren't used to 10, 20 years ago.

Marshall: Yeah, there's an interesting convergence of kind of natural growth of e commerce and digital payments and the forced up you know, ramping up of that through COVID, where people were like, Hey, I'm going to go do this online now instead of I used to do this in store. Also, at that same time, Gen Z became the largest category of spending, the largest group of spending. And so all of a sudden you've got a tech savvy group that grew up with cell phones in their lives, right? I didn't have a phone I shared with my sister until I was in college. Can you even imagine sharing a cell

Stephen: Not with the sister. I couldn't even get the house line away from my sister. That's where they spend all their time. My parents had to get another line because of my sister.

Marshall: but that, that's just a different, a different generation, right? I'm, I'm millennial, but. My kids are way more tech savvy than I am, and their kids will be more tech savvy than they are. It's just the natural progression. So We have a very tech savvy group in a digital world where the, they are now pushing the commercialization of all digital platforms, right?

The idea of social media was originally very basic, like share information with people that you care about. Now you can actually go to people, you have no idea who they are, you just found their channel. And they've got a cool looking product and you can hit buy and buy that product right now. This pushes us into a more globalized economy, but it also pushes us into a more instant fulfillment economy, right?

If I see in the, in the past, if I saw something that I thought was interesting, I might write myself a note. Oh, maybe for Christmas, I'll look at this. Or maybe I'll look into this in the future, look for coupons, whatever. I know I'm really dating

Stephen: man, you remember? Like, we had those big juicy catalogs and that's all we'd spend all day doing, just circling

Marshall: Just, yeah, like going through and you, yeah, I made my Christmas list off of catalogs back in the past. I can't remember which ones, but there's some really cool ones that had cool stuff in it. I gadgets.

I

Stephen: don't know if you guys had it in the US, but consumer distributing was like, a huge one for us in Canada.

Marshall: You know, I'm not familiar with that exact one, but I did the exact same thing. I was always like finding what I want for Christmas and birthday gifts in these catalogs. And today, kids on their own can find something on TikTok or Instagram. Click a button and buy it with mom and dad's debit or credit card right now.

Stephen: It's so true. It's so true. Tell me about, you mentioned the pandemic. Obviously you probably saw an uptick in your business during that time. Have you seen that carried on? Cause it feels like it maybe just feels like a lot of people are like, Hey, I'm at home. I got a little extra time. I can sell these tchotchkes or like, Hey, like I didn't like my job that much.

I'll take a little bit less money and open up my business. Have you seen that demand stay pretty up there since COVID or have you noticed any trends downwards?

Marshall: No, absolutely. There's, there's been and I think in particular, there's a lot more people that are making e commerce purchases, starting e commerce businesses, but there's also a huge increase in fraud, unfortunately, I mean, 20, 30 % increase, depending on which timeframe and who you ask, but really substantial increases in fraud rates.

But, you know, overall, I think these problems have been brewing for a long time, the problems that we're solving. They become more and more important as we become more globalized and become more instant fulfillment, instant gratification economy.

Stephen: Have you noticed something? I know there was a trend, I don't know if it was a couple Christmases ago, or around Thanksgiving, where the fraudsters started to attack Some of the service providers that were supposed to be fighting the fraud and getting into those systems to take advantage, has, is that still a problem?

Like has, I know these conversations must come up at every payments conference, or even with the conversations of people running to use your services and products, have you noticed that the trend of fraud is really impacting people's business to the point where if it continues, they won't be able to continue operation?

Marshall: I will never cease to be amazed at the ingenuity of criminals and how they Go to attack the systems. And in fact, one thing that we've done from the beginning, I think is pretty unique, but I think people will start to adopt this same strategy or something similar in the future is we've, we've used all of the best in class, you know, military grade, bank grade security systems to keep criminals out of our systems.

But we've also eliminated PII from our system. So the, the card data that's, that's really super sensitive, we've never seen it. It never hits our system other than in a tokenized format. So it goes to get tokenized first, then goes to our our provider that does our routing and kind of DDoS prevention and stuff like that, then it hits our APIs and it's fully tokenized and scrubbed before it hits us.

So we never see. Any card information for any consumer and, and yet we can still use it. Like if we have to go forward that card number to Visa for processing, we send it, we de tokenize, we use one one half of the de tokenization code. When it hits Visa, they do the other half. So only Visa in that case would see the card number.

And then it gets, you know, a response comes back to us. We have the ability to process the cards, but we never actually see them. So should a criminal ever figure out how to get into our system, there's nothing of value there. Like it's just completely empty vaults of, of meaningless data, right? So, because of how sophisticated criminals are and how they will get more sophisticated with the use of AI in the future we've just taken a very proactive approach to say, we don't want to be a target.

If we do get targeted, we don't want them to gain anything from compromising our system. So we have a lot of confidence in what we've built being very secure, but in the off chance that somebody, you know, North Korea decides to target IoniaPay for some reason, they're not going to get anything out of it.

Stephen: That makes a lot of sense. And then was that built in straight away when you were designing IoniaPay? Is that something you're like, Hey, we should probably start doing this. Then the more you saw, like, Hey, if we don't have any critical information, the less we have to even worry about when it comes to securing data.

Marshall: You know, it came up very, very early. I've always kind of had this philosophy like from many, many decades ago, but it wasn't necessarily possible back then. And so as we were thinking about the architecture here, we're talking to our sponsor banks and they're saying, if you process millions of transactions every month, you're going to have to have a huge insurance policy, like, because there's a lot of risk there.

And so we went back to the drawing board and said, how can we take this idea, Of not having anything of value in the system and implement that today, but still be able to do everything we need to do to operate the business. So we, we, from the beginning designed it that way, found the right partners to help us with the tokenization and encryption.

So we, we've partnered with some really innovative companies that help us. actually get that outcome that we've been seeking.

Stephen: Talk to me about the banking partners, sponsor banks, you know, banking as a service has blown up over the last couple of years. But it's also come with a ton of risks what is some advice you have for someone that's looking to get into the payment space and, you know, maintain these relationships that you have with your banks?

What is there any words of advice that you can help them with? Cause I think, you know, getting banking is always the biggest issue, right? It's not regulation. It's not customer fraud. If you can't satisfy your bank, especially with the fraud, they're like the bank doesn't want to see too much fraud coming through your business either.

Otherwise it gets too risky for them. Is there any words of advice for anyone in the payment sector that you've seen work?

Marshall: If you're going to seek a sponsor bank, they're going to do a tremendous amount of due diligence on you. So be prepared for that process to be more costly and take way longer than ever anticipated. I always say, you know, if an engineer tells you it's going to take You know, X amount of time to build some feature for you.

You always triple it, right? You triple the time and the money that it's going to take to build a feature on your platform. And that's only if you think that they're pretty good at estimating as an engineer. The same applies for banks, right? If a bank says it's going to be 180 days for you to go live, plan on it being much longer and much more expensive than what they think it'll be.

The other thing is do your due diligence on the bank. We have lost a bank sponsor unrelated to us. Thank goodness we were able to survive, but the bank that we used originally for IoniaPay, they themselves got into some trouble. And we're under consent orders as we were trying to go live. They were no longer allowed to set new clients live.

And we had no visibility to that until we talked to some regulators and they told us what was going on, but like, we just got frozen out of it. And, and if we were still waiting around today, we still wouldn't be able to go live with them. And so finding the right bank partners. Is incredibly, incredibly important.

Not just that the bank will accept the risks that you bring to the ecosystem, which you face it as a fintech or payment company, you do bring some risks to them and they want to make sure they're, they're managing that, but they bring risks to you. So you have to do your due diligence on the banks. Out of, you know, 12 banks that we investigate and talk to and find alignment from a tech perspective, we'll probably do three of them where we actually go into due diligence, right?

The rest of them we've weeded out because of risks on one side or the other or misalignment on something. So don't just jump to a bank that says that they're willing to work with you and go through the process. It's very expensive. And very costly or very time consuming to change your bank that sponsors your system.

So do it right the

Stephen: thought about that. I've never heard anyone say that. And I guess the reason is, is because it's so hard to get these banking partnerships and relationships. You don't think of that. So it's like a desperate person looking for a job. They're not doing much research about the company. They're just trying to sell themselves to get a job.

But to your point, You know, working for a company or getting hired by a bad company isn't going to be a better situation for you, especially if the company folds. Speaking of like, you know, interview process, you're hiring for regulatory or compliance positions. Like, talk to me about your regulatory requirements.

What are you passing on from a KYC perspective? Like, how, like, what does your regulatory framework look like?

Marshall: Awesome. You're the first podcast host I've been with that mentioned KYC specifically. And you've obviously been around the block on this stuff.

Stephen: I'm a compliance guy, what can I say? Every, if you've listened to this podcast, you know, a lot of the L2 projects are like not sure what you want me to say about that, but I'm here. I'm a compliance guy. You're getting a compliance question for sure.

Marshall: I love it. I love it. Yeah, we're growing our compliance team. We've always taken, I mentioned my, my father who's my co founder and, and very conservative attorney. We've always had a mindset of compliance and, you know, risk mitigation first. And so we're growing that organization. We're really focused on as we grow, how do we continue to, you know, be best in class for all of these areas.

And how do we adapt to the changing environment, right? Not, I, maybe three, four weeks ago, the FDIC published a proposed rulemaking. It'll probably pass as it was proposed. This was in response to the Synapse debacle, if you're familiar with that. And it, it has to do with the exact scenario that we use with our sponsor banks, which is a non financial institution that is a custodian over an account that has funds on, on behalf of somebody else, right?

So we have to keep up with that. We do keep up with that. I read it the day it was published, you know, twice to make sure we understood it. But it does require some changes to your policies, procedures, the way you work with your bank. So every, we, we anticipate that regulation will get, you know, more stringent and changes will come faster in the future rather than the opposite.

And so we want to make sure to stay up with that. We have to be, you know, compliant with things like the BSA and Patriot Act, which come from FinCEN. We have to be compliant with FDIC rules. So there's a lot to consider. But we have built all of that into the platform and we've built in, I think, Critically important is the flexibility to make those changes as they come.

So what that means for somebody who's maybe building something in payments or fintech, you want to build functionality that is more granular than is required by current regulations or needs of the business. And here's an example. You may have a requirement to say, you know, for example, consumers can only spend 10, 000 per day.

Right. That's a, based on certain types of industries, FinCEN would have that requirement to minimize your KYC requirements. So let's say that you make that decision. My recommendation would be don't just put that control universally globally in the system. Be able to control that at the individual user level and say Marshall can only transact a thousand dollars per day even though Steven can transact five thousand a day.

Make that more granular and maybe you won't use that. Right? But the day that a regulation comes that makes you use that and you don't have it, you've got a major problem on your hands. And regulators don't really care that it's going to cost you millions of dollars to re engineer your whole system from the ground up and do new architecture.

They're going to pass the law. And, or the regulation, and you're going to have to comply period. So build it to be more functional and more granular controls to be compliant in the future. And by the way, you'll probably find some really great use cases that are not regulatory, not driven by regulation, but driven by your own business opportunities or business needs.

So build it to be way more functional than you actually need it to be.

Mm

Stephen: And I think, you know, I come from the world of crypto. I think, you know, we've always kind of played in this gray area. Well, they didn't specifically say to do that. And then, you know, things like the travel rule come up and then you're like, Oh, looking at them, well, it's going to cost me millions. And there's companies like the Coinbases of the world.

Like, no, it's not going to cost us millions. We've always been doing this. I think you have to be forward looking. And it is a competitive advantage when something like Synapse, I believe the name is, like, that was a vast compliance nightmare. But it's one of those things that if you're doing it right, if you already have, like, you're like, hey, we're good, that's a competitive advantage.

Because now more companies are a little scared to get into these type of relationships where you've proven like, oh, we did nothing like they did. Or hey, like, we understood that risk and we never went down that route. So the more people I talked to, the more compliance is becoming, the more trust is needed.

As you're seeing even in FTX and all these other things, when things collapse, the companies that put these processes, the compliance requirements in place beforehand, are kind of just laughing because they're getting all the customers when all those other customers have nowhere to go to. Where do you see the future of payments going?

Obviously your, One of the contributors, you're one of the stakeholders and pushing this along. What do you see happening? Is there anything interesting coming together in the industry, whether that's M& A, mergers acquisitions, like, we've seen, you know, I think it was Stripe bought out of Fintech, our crypto company, Stablecoin.

Like, companies I've never heard of all of a sudden now they're worth billions of dollars. Where do you see the industry going when it comes to payment?

Marshall: The pattern of acquisition will continue and it'll it'll expand the types of companies that are being acquired. There will be acquisitions that you think, how does that make any sense? I'll give you a couple of examples that make a ton of sense, but when they were first announced, everyone was scratching their heads.

GoDaddy buying First American Payment Systems. I think that's who they bought, right? GoDaddy is not a payments company. And they bought a massive payments company out of Texas. Like why, what, how did that make sense? It makes a ton of sense because guess what? They own the domain registration and the website hosting for millions and millions of merchants and being able to offer them card processing simplifies the journey of I've got an idea and I want to launch a website to enact that idea as a business.

And they capture additional revenue along the way. So they simplified, they took one of the main pay points that GoDaddy customers had is integrating a payment system. They took that friction away by integrating it themselves and generate additional revenue. There's another one which, uh, and I may have had some of the names confused, I apologize.

It's been a while since I looked at who the acquisition was, but Deluxe, which was like a check Company bought a payment company as well. And maybe it's the other way around. I don't remember which one bought which, but again, another example where you're kind of like, well, there's not really a lot of overlap there, but there actually is a lot of overlap strategically speaking, and we're going to find that that continues, that pattern continues.

Whether it's buying a crypto platform where you thought, you know, maybe that represents additional. Risk to somebody like Stripe, who's publicly traded and very valuable company, maybe that is a risky move, but the way that they implement it is yet to be seen, right? And I think they're going to implement it in a way that provides value without introducing too much additional risk.

There's also going to be purchases of companies that are more consumer facing. And they're being purchased by merchant companies or vice versa. So that pattern will continue as I think consumers will drive more and more of the changes in the merchant systems, which before they really didn't, didn't have a lot of influence there.

That's starting to change. And that consumerization of payments will rapidly increase and continue the way it's going. You

Stephen: I think, you know, as entrepreneurs and businesses, we look for what are we spending the most on, and how do we remove that or absorb that cost? On this podcast, I was speaking to Charles Hoskinson, who's the co founder of Cardano. And he was talking about like, you know, we used to spend so much money building these buildings for a lot of the projects.

He's like, the construction charges were crazy. So we just bought, or we just created a construction company. And now the revenue we make from that construction company pays for the construction that we have to do for our organization. And it's like, these things that you would never think of. You'd just be like, throw up your hands and say, that's the cost of, you know, doing business.

That's the cost of building. But to your point, you're going to see that, yeah, if you could control all the parts of your expenses, it makes a lot more sense. Where are we going, like, with regions? I know, obviously, you're in the U. S. But we're seeing Latin America. I think NewBank just, you know, just reached a hundred million customers or something crazy like that.

We're seeing APAC region a lot with their, their WeChats and their WePays and AliPays. What do you think about, you know, whether it's expansion for you or just thinking about maybe partnering with other payments infrastructures around the world, what are your thoughts on that? What are some of the challenges or restrictions?

Or is this like, there's so much to do in the U. S. market that you haven't even hit the tip of the iceberg yet.

Marshall: know, it's a little bit of everything, right? So number one, biggest market out there, most complex market out there. If you can capture significant market share in the U. S. market in payments and fintech it will make it very it'll feel easier to go into other markets. At the same time, there is so much opportunity here.

When do you say, okay, it's time to expand? I think there's really two things we think about when it's, when it, when we think about expansion. It's what is the, the hurdle? To expansion, that could be cost, it could be infrastructure, it could be regulatory, it could be connections. Maybe we just don't know any banks there or don't know any players there.

And how does that weigh against opportunity? And when we think about opportunity, we think, okay, we've got a U. S. customer that has a huge presence in Belize. We know that they, we've already talked to them. They will use us if we launch this in Belize. Okay, maybe Belize makes sense. Now let's evaluate that against the cost and the barriers to entry.

We would probably never as a startup be able to justify opening up multiple other regions without direct, directly attributable revenue that's already lined up and ready to go. Now, with that said, we anticipate we'll be acquired by a larger. Payment Company, and if they are global, then it is much easier for them to implement our technology across their current infrastructure than it is for us to go build that infrastructure from the ground up.

So most likely, we'll launch in the US, Canada, maybe one other region before acquisition. And then most likely the acquirer will take it global.

Stephen: I love it. How hard was it to you to focus on one thing? We have a lot of payments companies that have been on this podcast. And you go through their website and their product list is longer than their blog, their blog entries. How did you decide that like, we're just going to be fast, one touch, fraud prevention, and like, just stay in that lane when there's, you, you see the shiny objects all around you once you get into this payment sector.

Was it your experience being in this industry for so long? And just like, Hey, let's just stay focused. Don't worry about, you know, AI payments or virtual influencers. Let's focus on one thing.

Marshall: You know, I already own another payment company and have for years that, that does kind of everything to everyone. And it's, it's great because you can get a lot of opportunities through referrals and stuff like that. But it, it also in some ways is, is an inhibition. What it does in my mind to have so many opportunities is that you never become.

Truly known for having an expertise in one area. And so driving deep relationships with, you know, referral partners that have a market share over a segment is really difficult when you're a generalist, right? So if you just say, Hey, we do processing for everybody and we do kind of every system and every, you know, whatever, then where do you ever get a deep relationship with, you work with?

A dental software manufacturer that can drive you to 80, 000 dentists or where do you ever get the hair salon software vendors to say, Hey, we really trust you to do our payments for our hair salons. Like you can get those relationships, it is possible, but by being really specifically focused on one solution, one thing that you're doing better than anyone else, it, it actually, you'll find it still appeals to everybody, but everyone knows now that you're the expert on that one thing.

And so there isn't another option from IoniaPay to accomplish fraud elimination or instant funding to a merchant of a consumer payment. Those two things don't exist outside of Ionia. So our platform, IoniaPay is our sole focus because it accomplishes something that is valuable to the market. And that no one else can deliver.

Everybody is coming to us asking for this, whether it's an enterprise scale business, we have those conversations every day, or whether it's a small business that just wants a really good payment outcome.

Stephen: I'm looking like, yo, I don't want to be waiting 30 days for my clients. Like, yo, I need to set them up. I need a faster payment system. Let me know when you come to Canada. Last thoughts, you're an entrepreneur, you exited businesses. You are obviously talking like you're exiting this business. It's like your mindset is there and you've been deep industry expertise.

We also see payment companies starting up, as you said, in these little sectors, all over the industry. Any advice from someone that's looking to build into payments? What's that one thing that they're not thinking about when they're like, Oh, all I have to do is like take 3 % off of every transaction I do.

This seems easy.

Marshall: You know, payments is both easy to get into and hard to get traction. There isn't really a lot of like. Red tape to starting a payment company. It's not really officially regulated directly. There isn't licensing requirements. So it's easier to get into than a lot of other financial service kind of professions.

But you've got to figure out. In this highly competitive industry, because that's highly competitive, obviously thousands of people can offer merchant accounts to businesses. So how do you compete? I think whatever it is that's your background, it's going to help you see things from a unique angle and align with other people where they see it from that same angle.

So if I had a background in construction and I was starting a payment company, I might think about how do I serve construction companies? What are their unique problems and how can I solve them for them? And maybe it's as easy as I know their business and so I can help them better. Or maybe it's, we form a partnership with the software vendors they use or whatever it is, right?

There's all sorts of ways that you can do that, but I would leverage your background and experience to do it in a way that provides a unique value proposition so you can drive relationships on day one, instead of just trying to go out and market and hope that you can get business because it's incredibly competitive.

I stopped doing the whole, Door to door and phone call thing back in early 2000s, because it was already ineffective. 2024, I can't even imagine if somebody called my business and said that they wanted to offer me credit card processing, I'd even bother to like continue the call more than a few seconds to hang up.

Right. So it's, it's

Stephen: With the amount of fraud going on, Marshall, we're not even picking up the phone anymore. Like, if someone calls us and we don't recognize that number, that baby's going straight to voicemail, if not just getting the int. Now that, you know, Apple has the, pretty much, FU button, that's what that's getting really easily.

Marshall: And even, even your carrier will tell you, Hey, this could be spam. Like who answers those calls anymore? Yeah. You've got to have trust. And that trust can be developed through expertise, through experience in their industry, alignment with their industry. And it can also be through relationships. Right. And that's.

I think one of the really important things I've tried to make sure Ionia is aligned with all the payment companies. We don't feel like any of them are direct competitors. We actually go to market through partnership with them. And so by being friendly with the people that I've known for 25 years in this industry, we're able to grow very quickly.

You know, get to dozens of resellers of our platform very rapidly because of those relationships and preserving relationships long term. You know, 20 years ago, I had no idea this is what I'd be doing today, right? But relationships have always been a key thing to me, one of the most important things for me.

Stephen: I love it. That's a fantastic way to end the conversation, Marshall. Where can people get at you? Are you on Twitter? It seems like you're more of a LinkedIn guy. My kind of style, but I'm not a hundred % sure

Marshall: Yeah, definitely. I have a Twitter account. I do go on Twitter to read and see what's going on, especially on crypto stuff, but I just I'm mostly on LinkedIn. But you know, go on our website. You can submit a, a request in there and talk to our fantastic team about our product. If you're interested, if you want to just talk more about business stuff, hit me up on LinkedIn.

I get a lot of messages on there, but I read all of them and try to respond to all of them. I can.

Stephen: translation, like I I have a, I have 150 unread messages, but eventually I'll get through them sometime by 2025. Marshall, I knew as soon as I saw that T-shirt last minute, we were gonna have a a, a fun conversation. This has been one of the funnest conversations I've had. Talking about payments on this podcast.

I really appreciate it.

Marshall: Thank you. It was a lot of, a lot of fun for me as well. And I'm going to go back and watch your whole back catalog. I've watched a few of them, but I'm excited to see more and hear more of your perspectives.

Stephen: Awesome. Thank you so much.

Marshall: Thank you.