Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Infinicept CEO Todd Ablowitz (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You provide Escrow-type of service?

Todd Ablowitz: We provide just SaaS tools. Our customers can send us the transaction information. We don’t process the transaction. We don’t get into the chain. We teach them how to do it. We enable it and make it better, but we don’t compete with our customers. We don’t get a percentage of the transaction.

Sramana Mitra: I understand that. The question I’m asking is, what you described right now is a feature of your software. If a customer wants to hold money in Escrow, and if they need to return the money, you provide them with a facility to do that.

Todd Ablowitz: Yes. How it works is, you have the transaction created in our system. You can set it so that when you import those transactions, the transactions import on hold, so they don’t get funded until the event. You make an API call to us to say the event happened, and you can now fund the merchant.

One of the big trends is, big corporations are often changing how they do accounts payable. They’re getting issued purchase cards to pay out to vendors.

One payment facilitator is creating merchant accounts for the suppliers to their corporate customers who are using their card. They get the corporate to introduce them to all the suppliers and then the suppliers can then click the link and sign up through a very short approval process. I actually use this to get paid by someone. We don’t even know the card number.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk trends. What are you seeing in the payments space?

Todd Ablowitz: Starting in 2001, payment companies started seeing software companies as a sales channel. They started allowing them to sell the acceptance.

It was 2011 that they started taking over the operations. They’re taking the risk of what I described to you away from these large payment companies. The payment companies are supporting them to do it. That’s leading to new use cases.

The fact that the software company can bundle the payment acceptance solution is causing more rapid adoption. We’re seeing things like instant payout. For a fee, you get paid in 30 minutes. You’re seeing financial services offerings like Square and Stripe announced.

What we expect to see is payment facilitators continuing to follow those trends offering a suite of business services to their customers. This idea of software is eating payment is the biggest trend in payment.

Sramana Mitra: When you say additional services, what kinds of services are those?

Todd Ablowitz: Small business loans like Square Capital and Stripe Capital. I see them offering vertically-specific services. In the case of RunSignup, they started doing timing later. Broader than the payment trend is that these vertically-focused software companies are filling in everything that that business needs. They become the operating system for that industry. It’s highly verticalized.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Infinicept CEO Todd Ablowitz
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