Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Infinicept CEO Todd Ablowitz (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: When you have a very competitive market, people figure out innovative ways to differentiate. What I was probing for is, have you figured anything out that offers that kind of differentiation?

Todd Ablowitz: There is some interesting stuff, but it gets pretty obtuse. You can take data about these merchants. When you have enough of that data, you may be able to get insight or analytics to help them make good business decisions.

There are all kinds of interesting things that analytics can do. In the payment world when you’re touching national movement of money, you may be able to do some clever things to get merchants their money faster like instead of waiting till you get the money back from the profits, you pay ahead of time.

Risk management is another area. We talked about a simple example in the world of events. There are types of merchants that have a really hard time getting a good payment experience. If you get really clever with risk management, you may be able to serve some of them where your competitors couldn’t that’s highly vertically-specific.

Sramana Mitra: The differentiation opportunities are in vertical workflows. One thing I picked up in what you said is, vertical workflows do offer differentiation opportunities.

Todd Ablowitz: Massively. There’s also geographic opportunities. SaaS companies are getting global attention. As the SaaS companies offer payment to a merchant that operates in multiple locations or have customers that operate in multiple locations around the world, there’s a big opportunity there.

Some of the things that I find really interesting about developing markets is, when you bring electronic payment as a financial inclusion initiative, it creates jobs. It brings the lower class into the middle class. It creates financial opportunities for women who may be limited by their partners or family.

There’s a lot of effort going for Visa and Mastercard to bring card issuance and acceptance all over the world. There’s a lot of innovation that happens out of these. We see activity where they’re turning a phone into an acceptance device. You can tap your card or another phone to a phone.

The payment industry is such a network effect industry. The fundamental innovation generally happens at the card network level. 

Sramana Mitra: Talk about open problems in this very active marketplace. FinTech is one of the hottest areas of innovation right now. Where do you see open opportunities? Where would you steer new entrepreneurs to look for problems to solve?

Todd Ablowitz: If I weren’t doing what I’m doing, the two areas that I think are most interesting are network-level tokenization. What that means is when you put your card onto your iPhone, what’s actually happening is the phone’s calling the issuer of the card through a bureau that was created by Visa and MasterCard separately.

They each have this bureau that goes and issues an alternative card number to your phone. You’re actually not using the same card number. That’s called a token. Those tokenization networks are very interesting to me. The ability to do that on more types of transactions in real-time is interesting. There’s a company who’s working on this. They just raised a pretty sizeable round.

The second one is this B2B hub that I talked about where you’ve corporates and all of their suppliers and you link them together to do payment electronically. It’s almost all on paper. Everything B2B is a huge opportunity.

Sramana Mitra: Great interview. You’ve provided lots of insights in a complex area that is not so easy to synthesize. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Infinicept CEO Todd Ablowitz
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