Jordan Wright, CEO of Atomic, on building a framework for connected banking

There are not many fintechs that can say they work with nine of the top ten banks in the United States. Or that they are working directly on deep integrations with the likes of Apple and Amazon. Meet Jordan Wright, CEO and Co-Founder of Atomic, who can say all those things.

While Atomic started in direct deposit switching, a now relatively mature fintech product, what they have been working on recently is truly groundbreaking technology. They have built what they call a “Payments Hub” and have implementations happening at large banks now. This will make it much easier for consumers not just to manage their recurring payments but to take action, which has been a crucial missing piece.

In this podcast you will learn:

• The founding story of Atomic.
• What they mean by building a “framework for connected banking.”
• What Jordan is most proud of that they have built at Atomic.
• What their offering looks like inside a banking app.
• Why they are reaching out to merchants and connect them one by one.
• What happens behind the scenes for their TrueAuth product.
• Why they have focused their technology on the mobile-centric experience.
• How they were able to work directly with the likes of Apple and Amazon.
• How they are engaging differently with the large banks than the fintechs.
• What the flow is like when you are opening a bank account powered by Atomic.
• How they are working with the large credit card companies.
• Why they are focused on taking action rather than just information.
• How they are using Generative AI in their products and within the company.
• How Jordan thinks this new technology will impact financial health.
• When we will start seeing payments hubs at large banks.
• What Atomic is working on in the near term future.

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Transcript

Jordan Wright:
 When you talk to the largest banks in United States and you say, okay, well, where's agentic payments on your roadmap? Most of them are like, that's not happening next year. I'm focused on next year. That might be happening three to five years from now, but it's not happening next year. Most of them are saying what's happening next year is a payments hub experience. What's happening next year is I want to try to start pulling more people off of my bill pay system and onto a payment system, a subscription management technology, those sorts of things on the consumer side.
  

Peter Renton:
 This is the Fintech One-on-One podcast, the show for Fintech enthusiasts looking to better understand the leaders shaping Fintech and banking today. My name is Peter Renton and since 2013, I've been conducting in-depth interviews with Fintech founders and banking executives. Today on the show, I am delighted to welcome Jordan Wright, the CEO and co-founder of Atomic. Now, Atomic began life as a way to make direct deposit switching easy.
 
 But they've moved into other areas building what they call the framework for connected banking. Now we get into exactly what that means and the products they have built around it. But what is most impressive to me about Atomic is that they now work with nine of the top 10 banks and are actually moving the needle for some of these large institutions. As an example that Jordan shares in this interview, we also spent a lot of time talking about financial health and how Atomic's products are poised to make a major difference here. Now let's get on with the show.
 
 Welcome to the podcast, Jordan.

 JW: Thanks for having me, Peter. 

PR: My pleasure. So let's kick it off by giving the listeners a little bit of background about yourself. know this atomic is not your first rodeo. So why don't you tell us what you've done in your career to date.
 
 JW: Yeah, no, it's not. I got started in college. I was lucky enough to go work at a company as an intern. And then they went through a down round of funding, I want to say in 2009, 2010, as was common for that time. And they promoted me to something that was probably a little bit abnormal for someone my age. And I ended up having to fly around the country while attending school full-time when to Brigham Young University. So studying full-time and working full-time and visiting with…Our clients were McKinsey, Bain & Company, BCG, and spent some time with them. And I'd have to fly back and take red eyes and literally walk off planes and take tests sometimes. It was a neat experience for me. I was grateful for that opportunity. They required my senior year by Proofpoint, a cybersecurity company. And then they went on to, that was a company called NextPage. And I spent some time there as a product manager and then started my first company, Unbill, from there.

PR: So tell us about the atomic, what was sort of the, the founding story there.
 
 JW: You know, it's funny, a lot of people talk about these amazing insights or things like that. And frankly, I called my former business partner up, Scott Weinerd, and I just said, hey, I want to start another company, but I don't want to do it with anybody but you, so you down to start something. He said, yep, actually, yeah. So we just started noodling on ideas. We'd been in fintech for about a decade at that point on bill of being our first fintech company to start a direct to consumer, really in the payments in the bill pay space. And then got into our first kind of insight was some of our customers that we had worked with at Q2, who we sold on bill two said, you know, we really need to have something like this for direct deposit switching, not just payments. And so we kind of came at that from direct deposit switching standpoint that had great product market fit, we came at it differently than anybody had in the market so far. We had some unique skill sets in our on bill product was Plaid-like in terms of building connectivity into these systems and stuff like that. And MX-like, and Finicity-like, yeah, right? So there's certainly some of that lifeblood in our company. We started in Utah. So we certainly have, obviously Finicity and MX are both local Utah companies. yeah, it was more about the two of us wanted to do something together, feeling like we weren't doing the best work of our lives and wanting to get back to doing the best work of our lives. And it seems like the only way for us is actually starting a company to do that.

PR: Let's dive into Atomic. I'm on your website right here and I want to get straight into the explaining exactly what you do because on the website it says the framework for connected banking. So what does connected banking actually mean and what is the framework?

JW: Yeah, so for us, it's that banking has not been super well connected with the rest of my experiences that I have digitally. Right? If I see something in my banking app that I don't like or I disagree with, maybe a transaction that I don't understand, I have to leave the banking experience. It's not connected into whatever that merchant is that I'm engaging with. And so that's really what we're talking about when we're talking about connected banking experience, right? Because we shouldn't have to be leaving this app to go interact with other apps in order to engage with our finances. And so that would be the primary thing. And when we talk about framework, we're trying to build a platform like technology upon which other things can be bolted on. So if you look at us today, we started Direct Deposit when you and I first had a few conversations. I don't think I'd met you at our last company, Unbuild. But when we first started having conversations, was, all right, consumer signs up for a new checking account, let's switch to Direct Deposit.
 
 And that way they don't have to leave their banking experience to be able to move their paycheck to the current bank account. Right. That's, that's been great. That's that went really well for us. We work with nine of the top 10 banks on that product, 12 of the top 20 fintechs. That's gone exceptionally well. But in addition to that, there's also, you have a whole lot more things in that transaction list. If we bring it to our minds of transactions happening, whether that's on our checking account or a credit card that we want to bring that connection into the banking experience. So much work has been done the other way around to bring banking into these other experiences, right? We're trying to bring those other experiences into banking.
  

PR: Gotcha. then like direct deposit switching, I think is a pretty well understood product. You, you know, you sign up for a new bank account and get your pay going in there. What are some of the other things that you've built at Atomic?
 
 JW: Yeah, I would say the thing I'm most proud of, it's our mission to champion upward financial mobility. And when you think about that, the thing probably I'm most proud of is our subscription management bill management product that we launched last year. This is a product that I've personally saved money because of, and to the tune of three to $500 a year. But if you look through the last decade, the number of subscriptions we all pay has skyrocketed, right?
 
 I think in 2010, was probably around like just a couple, right? Now it's anywhere from 10 to 20 that oftentimes consumers are paying. There was a great Wall Street Journal article last year. Earlier this year, I think about somebody that canceled all of his subscriptions and bought a Tesla with the savings, right? And so, like, obviously this is, you know, it was a fascinating use case, right? But we see that kind of opportunity for people everywhere, right? Sometimes they’re annual subscriptions. So once we're connected into these subscriptions, maybe our initial connection is to switch a payment method, a default payment method on file. And then we start analyzing that merchant relationship and we start pulling that data back to the consumer and helping them make better choices. And then we can actually take action. So the agentic model everybody's talking about, we're doing it every day. We can come in and we can say, this consumer, do you want to optimize your spend on your cell phone bill? And we can go through and look through that. Do you want to optimize?
 
 And do you want to consider moving from one insurance provider to another insurance provider based on some of the key details? My bank might be able to tell me today that I'm paying a little high on auto insurance, but what they don't know is whether I have a teenage driver or that I have three cars on my account and a Ferrari. They don't know things about my account or my driving history. And we can get in there and we can extract that information and then make it easy for the consumer to be able to see their insurance policy side by side with one that might give savings. And the data says people switch, I think, every 18 months, they'll almost certainly save money. And so while I'm a Sapphire member or whatever at my insurance company, because I hadn't switched in 10 years, right? I'm certainly not getting any savings because of it. Does that help you?

PR: So then, and I presume you're working like inside a banking app. What's it look like?
 
 JW: Yeah, what it looks like today is integrating it into, okay, it's been very simple to start. Here's your transactions. Let's just show you everything that's recurring. And so then a consumer might see a recurring payments view so they can start getting handle on what the recurring payments are. But the way we see this moving forward, we just had a really great summit in Charlotte, actually, at the NASCAR Hall of Fame last month. And we were talking to our customers about what's coming in the future for them.
 
 And BillPay has been this decaying product for these banks for so many years. And our conversation was around when are we going to get rid of this thing? Right. And what is the product that the 85% plus of users that don't use BillPay, what is the product they want? And so a lot of the thought and theory right now is there will be a payments hub in the future. And next year we'll see multiple large banks launch this, a payments hub where I can see all my recurring payments, where I can also begin to do some of my own people call it PFM. And then if you say it, like some executives at some banks are like, well, I want to puke. I, you know, I hated how much work we put into that and how poor the adoption was. Right. Um, but really this is PFM with the ability to take action, but the data doesn't just come from a bank. It comes from the merchants themselves fed back into a system where now I can see, Hey, there's, I might get an alert tomorrow that says, Hey, you're, paying for a part of a plan that you have zero usage on for AT &T, do you want us to disable that? Like I just went internationally to Japan last two months ago. I turned on something, our product alerted me a month later that I had zero usage on something. I had turned on a month prior. And so I could just disable that. 

Getting back to what I think banking should be all about, which is helping people be better with their money. This is just helping the leaky bucket problem. That's one example. I'll share one more briefly, Peter, just cause I think it's crazy, but, you know, when you connect to banking, you don't see actually how many recurring payments somebody has if you connect to somebody's bank account, because many of these are actually processed through Apple and it just says Apple Digital Services and they might lump three transactions or five transactions into there. Same with Amazon. You might have a lot of recurring payments that look the same in your bank statement as a normal purchase. And so we can come in, we can connect to those and we can say, here are all the payments you're making through Apple, Amazon, Google, all this stuff and help surface those. some cases, people are making, paying two things over the two different platforms. In some cases, they aren't aware of a purchase their kids made, right? Like, and that was my case. And so I was able to turn that off via our product with one of our customers. So those are the sorts of things, Peter, that we're talking about.
 
 PR: I just want to sort of make sure I understand this correctly. So in the direct deposit switching, you were connecting to payroll companies, not relying on necessarily the, you know, having the person have to log in to that payroll company, right? Like you connected to payroll companies for direct deposit switching. Are you now going out and connecting to Apple, to Amazon, to AT&T, to all these other, like, is this sort of a merchant by merchant connectivity, you know, project?
 
 JW: Yep, it is. And if you look at our internal spreadsheets on tracking it, it's just exactly what you're saying, right? I mean, it's merchant by merchant, depending on search volume from consumers, how we're going after it. And some of it is logged in user permission sort of connectivity. We have a special technology called Truoff that we've patented that doesn't require us to gather username and password, but the user can actually log in on their device using the Face ID or using something like that to pre-populate the username and password. And that's been tremendously successful in increasing conversion rates for us. But yeah, that's exactly what's happening here, Peter. 

PR: Okay, so then the true auth product that I've read about that, I think you've even talked about it in the past, but can you give us some sense without giving away your patent? What's happening behind the scenes?
 
 JW: Yeah, so what happens is before, think of any open banking system before these merchant agreements, because we're still in the wild west. We have a couple of payroll agreements and we're working on agreements with merchants, but those are still very much in the air. So you have to think about, for those that are in fintech, think about it a decade ago before a lot of these merchant agreements were in place. And an open banking provider would mimic a login experience, say for Chase and say, take in a username and password, the username and password would go to that open banking provider's backend server, which would then go and try to log into Chase, right? So they have the username and password. And then some people were doing fairly nefarious stuff there on the open banking front. They might disable two-factor authentication to make it easier for them to come back in, all these sorts of things that were happening at that time, right? 

Well, TrueAuth operates entirely differently. It's client-centric model instead of a server-centric model, right? So everything's done on the client side, on the phone itself, right? So instead of us mimicking a page for Amazon for login experience, we just bring up the Amazon login experience. Because it's on the user's device within a web view inside of your mobile app, right? Of the bank or FinTech's mobile app. They're prompted for a Face ID to pre-populate username and password. They can go into their password, select one, and it'll go automatically in. They can hit sign in. And then true auth's magic is that we can identify once a session has been instantiated, and then we can leverage the cookies of that session to transmit additional data or pull additional data from that provider. So in the case of an Amazon, we could say, okay, we know where the flow is to change out the card on file for Amazon. We know the API endpoints for that. So we're just gonna call those once from the device. And also by the way, from a PCI standpoint, that's great too, because we do a lot of payment switching where we'll change out the card on file, right?
 
 And when we do that, that's all stored on the device. It can go straight to the device if for any storage needed, be there on the device and then be pulled off immediately afterwards.
 
 PR: You have read, access to some of these things. 

JW: Yes, it's all of them. Yeah, 

PR: I guess you have to, you have to, if you're going to be actually changing something that makes sense. okay. This is really interesting. I think. Then does it work on the web? Does it work? Like how do your APIs work? Can you do this on any browser? Like I imagine the…Obviously on a phone, you've got face ID. you know, pretty much everyone has it, you know, on a desktop, sometimes there's like a fingerprint. Sometimes there's not. What do you do cross platforms?

JW: Yeah, good question. So this is mobile, the True Auth technology is mobile centric. While it works on desktop as well, it's not as good for the reasons you just pointed out, right? And also native mobile has this ability to open up a web view that doesn't exist on a desktop per se. And so we've had to do some work, some, some workarounds for the desktop experience, but we really lot for payment switching and for bill management. We started with a mobile centric experience over a year ago.
 
 And that's worked really well because a lot of people access these sorts of systems via their mobile device anyway, right? And so even if somebody starts on a desktop experience, we'll oftentimes pull them back into their mobile device, which most financial institutions we're talking to are also trying to increase mobile engagement, right? And so doing this can also help increase consumer mobile engagement as well. But we bring them back into their mobile experience for a login, and then we might hand them back to the desktop to continue the other experiences.
 
 But yeah, we're increasingly going mobile with the majority of our experience. It works really well with our fintechs. Honestly, it works well with our large financial institutions. People say, what about all the desktop traffic? And they have it, right? But they want to push more and more mobile traffic anyway. And most of us look at these sort of transactions on our phones anyway. It's not like we're going and logging in our desktop all the time.
 
 PR: So then I imagine you're not a massive company and you're talking to some of the largest companies on the planet. How are you able to engage with Apple or with Amazon?
 
 JW: Yeah, it's fascinating because you're right. We're a 70 person company in Utah. So that's not the company that's going to go usually attract a ton of notice. But when we get to say that nine of the top 10 banks in the United States are using our products, that's certainly helpful. And those banks have leaned in and being helpful with us. Right. And not only that, we have partnerships with the mastercards of the world, right. That have been very, very good for us, right. Cause we can, we can leverage that to go jointly on some conversations. So.
 
 We do a direct deposit switching and payment switching partnership with them. There's lots of really interesting, we lean on partners certainly, but also having the backing of the largest financial institutions in the United States is helpful.
 
 PR: Yeah, that makes sense. So then you talk about nine of the top 10 banks. You also, I think, I can't read the number you mentioned, but you a lot of large fintechs. I'm curious to know when you're engaging, obviously the banks have the scale, but sometimes they don't move as fast as the fintechs. So how are you engaging differently with the banks than you are with the top fintechs?

JW: Yeah, it's definitely been a longer process. So, you know, we, we first wanted to come to market with this product. The largest Neo bank at the time went live with us. Was our first customer, which was kind of crazy in 2020. And, um, and then pretty much every other large FinTech piled on within six to 12 months. Right. At that time, we started approaching the banks. US bank was the first top 10 bank to go live with us. And that was in 2022. They were the first top 10 bank to launch this technology.
 
 And then it really, honestly, the main reason why we've been successful with large banks is when the deposit crisis happened post SVB, the fallout with SVB. We had seen one RFP the year prior from a top 10 bank. After SVB, we saw six within 12 months. Right? And so all of them were looking for how do we get more deposits? And we had this great narrative where US Bank has been so kind to us, right? We'd get on the stage and say we could attribute $175 million in net new deposits to Atomic, right? And our relationship with them. And so I think that was a very natural thing coming out of the timing. And sometimes it's better to be lucky than good, right? And certainly it was our case that we were very lucky in the timing of SVB. Sad for those that were impacted by it, but lucky in the timing because that tremendously benefited our business.

PR: Yeah, I was few fintechs that were winners out of that. Actually, and some, a few of the large banks were winners as well. Okay, so then, like, I'm curious about the, so someone signs up for a bank account, maybe signs up for a new credit card. What is the flow like? And is the flow pretty much the same for like payment switching or direct deposit switching? I'd like to kind of get a sense when you're opening up one of these new accounts. been a while since I've opened up an account at a large bank, but could you just take us through the flow and how it's different with Atomic Technology versus without.

JW: You're probably familiar with, and I am too, the flows of five years ago, right? Nowadays, if you open up a bank account with any one of these top 10 banks, almost all of them will now say at the end of, okay, you now have an account routing number. Now go set up your direct deposit and they'll be invited. And we have some relationships with some of the large payroll systems in the United States, right? And so we might be able to do a lookup behind the scenes and see if they're employed by an ADP employer and then help them through an experience where no login is necessary.
 
 And we do that with several different payroll companies. But in addition to that, we also have the ability to have somebody just look up their employer or a payroll system, connect to that, and then we'll put that account and routing number on file. Most of our customers that see the most success actually include this as part of like a 90-day onboarding flow or into their chat experiences, all these sorts of places to help a consumer set that up. After they've completed that, the financial institution might select one or two top places they expect this person to put their card on file or start paying for things from their checking account and then say, hey, connect Amazon and change out your card on file there to get started paying from the card method you just set up. Now, if it's checking account, they might be less likely to set up a debit card as their payment method out of Amazon. So they might say a utility provider or their mortgage or things or their rent, right? Those sorts of things are things we can connect to. And that's going to be the second step oftentimes in that flow.
 
 If you were a VC listening to this conversation, and we're not fundraising, we don't need the money right now, but what's interesting about those two models is that they're very dependent on marketing dollars, on volumes, of what's coming inbound, right? And you could certainly see that as a weakness in our business. The nice thing about the bill management side of this is that every single customer in their mobile app will have access to these sorts of features, where I can pause and cancel my Netflix bill, where I could check the leaky bucket problem on Amazon and Apple and other places like Google, right? All that sort of thing is a monthly usage, right? And we have access to the entire customer base. So we're going on access to 108 million households in the United States. There's not many more than that with our bank relationships, right? And it's super exciting that we're going to give so many people access to these sorts of tools to be able to save more money, hopefully do wiser things with that money because of these tools.
 
 PR: Are you working with credit card companies like when someone has a new credit card because I imagine there's huge numbers. I think about my credit cards and like, there's got to be dozens and dozens of things that are going on every single month. So is that a focus for you guys as well?
 
 JW: It is, it’s fascinating too, Peter, because you're knowing this space so well, you could probably empathize with this. I came more from the depository side of the bank. So we walk into these credit card side of the business and they're like, this is gonna, I'm like, this is gonna be great. People are gonna be able to cancel these unused subscriptions, blah, blah, blah. They're like, we want more spent, not less. And it was a fascinating first conversation with them. But I think they also realized the need to provide great experiences to those people, right? And so it's public information that Capital One invested in us last year.
 
 You can read the tea leaves from there on some of the large credit card companies we work with, but there's others. Almost all of these nine of the top 10 banks we work with have large credit card arms, right? And we work with those groups in many cases to enable them for both making their payment the primary card on file at the merchant, but also to enable and are working on a payments hub-like experience where somebody can come in, see recurring spend, cancel, pause, make payments to merchants, those sorts of things.

PR: Okay, yeah, that's quite amazing to me. mean, as you mentioned, the PFM type space hasn't really taken off. A lot of it is because you get information, but you don't get an easy way to take action. And it's the action piece that's missing, right? So that's a lot of the things that you're working with banks, right, that are focusing on the action piece.

JW: Exactly. And the other thing is the quality of the data, right? So if I get all of your banking data, that might be interesting, but if you don't know usage on the other side of that, so if I know who you pay, but I know nothing about your relationship with that merchant, it's really hard to recommend any action at all, even recommend it. We can actually take action for the consumer, but it's because of the richness of the data that we get the merchant data itself, right? So we can say, we recommend you turn off your international plan.
 
 And do you want us to do it? Yes or no? Yes. And which is just done for them automatically, right? Like that's pretty powerful in terms of what PFM promised to be initially.
 
 PR: Right, because that's why I feel like we're about to enter the 2.0, probably 3.0 era of PFMs. And this brings me on to my next question, because a lot of what you're saying feels like it's custom made for like an AI agent to go out there and do some of these things. So how are you thinking about, you know, generative AI inside your business when it comes to maybe having some things that actually help with the taking action?

JW: Yeah, one of the first products we built for this is actually a cell phone optimizer product. so consumers can connect via Atomic, their cell phone plan. We use generative AI in a few areas here. It was funny because maybe I'll share some of our lumps from our work here too, Peter, some of our warts about it. But initially, it's so amazing when you first start using this, you're like, oh my gosh, this is going to be so incredible. But at only 85 % or 90 % accuracy, it starts to fall down pretty fast when you're trying to sell this into the third largest bank in United States, let's say. But initially it was connect your cell phone bill, then we would be able to use it to categorize all the bill and put it into a JSON format that was easy for us to manipulate and utilize. And then we would say, start making recommendations for savings for this consumer. And then let's go take action on it. So all three of those things we would do with it. And it was very good at converting it into a JSON data format for us.
 
 And then we'd say, start making recommendations of savings. And it would, at first they were awesome, right? And then it would say something like, well, just don't pay your state sales tax, right? Which is obviously not an option, right? 

PR: Consequences there.

JW: Yeah, that's right. And so, and I'm not even sure you could technically do it either online. So there were just, there were some fast, so we had to start building, okay, we only have to, we can only allow these eight suggestions to come through. Now these 12 suggestions to come through over time. So we had to build guard rails around it so that we were making sure delivering something that could actually be achieved. And then on the other side of that, helping the user can go through and either taking the action on their behalf or guiding them through taking the action. It was amazing to us. And when you talk to the largest banks in the United States and you say, well, where's the agentic payments on your roadmap? Most of them are like, that's not happening next year. I'm focused on next year. That might be happening three to five years from now, but it's not happening next year. Most of them are saying what's happening next year is a payments hub experience. What's happening next year is I want to try to start pulling more people off of my bill pay system and onto a payment system, a subscription management technology, those sorts of things on the consumer side.

PR: Right. That makes sense. then one of the things that I've had guests on this show and I've talked to many people at our events over the years: financial health. We haven't really moved the needle that much in financial health. We've certainly done a great job with financial inclusion. We're now pretty much anyone who wants to have an account can have an account, whether it's at a FinTech or a bank, but financial health, just feels like people are always you know, people are always struggling. The majority of the population is living paycheck to paycheck. And it seems like now we're on the cusp of something that can move the needle for a lot of people. And is this really what banks should be focusing on? There's lots of fintechs focusing on this. Where do you see financial health going with some of the technologies that we've just talked about?

JW: Yeah, I'm of two minds on it, Peter, because one thing is we're fighting human nature, is human nature wants to acquire and human nature wants to have everything. human nature, I mean, in an age of social media where we see all these people that have other things, like that's the one side of my brain just says, I don't know sure how much I can fight human nature. But there's another side of my brain that says, for the people that want to do better, we are going to provide great tools, but literally don't…like they can't just track it all. How can you keep track of all of it, right? We're going to help those people do better. And I feel very confident we can do that. We're working on our goal right now. I don't know what it is, but there's going to be a goal in the millions of dollars of savings we provide to consumers next year through our technology. And I think that's a noble thing for us to chase. Now, if they choose to go redistribute that into a vacation with their family, I think that's great, right? I mean, we might differ on how they should use that money, right? But the fact of the matter is, we're helping them save money so that they can hopefully spend it in a place that's best for them and their family and their lives, which I'm excited about and which keeps our team excited. I would say one of the best parts about this product versus direct deposit switching and payment switching, which we all appreciate having, The best thing about this product is everyone working on it wants it to exist inside their bank for themselves because they want to use it, right? It's like, yeah, I can't wait until I connect all these merchants and then make it really easy for me to pause, cancel, do all the sort of stuff that I want to do. Everybody wants this technology. And so maybe ask me again in a year or two, Peter, because I feel like we're still just launched. We've launched it last year. It's just picking up steam, but I really feel like there is an opportunity for those that really care to maybe be 30% better than they were prior to it.

PR: That's the thing, think you mentioned there are people who will probably always live paycheck to paycheck no matter how great the tools, matter how great the agentic commerce works and they just want, they just see money and they say they want to spend it. But as you say, the people that want to change, think that's what we're getting to now are tools that are going to really make it much easier to change than ever before. I think that seems like it's the key.
 
 JW: Agreed.

PR: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So two part question. I feel like when's this payment hub, when do you think we'll see it in our, you know, in widespread usage and then looking out further, what else are you working on that you are looking out for like, you know, 2026, 2027 is less than 18 months away, I mean, it's going to be here soon. What are some of the things that you're working on?
 
 JW: Yeah, so prediction on the payments hub is you'll see a top 20 bank launch it next year, maybe two or three of them launch a payments hub of some kind next year, probably half a dozen to a dozen fintechs launch it in some way, shape or form in the next 12 to 18 months. And I think within three to five years, it will become a default technology. One of the nice things about that, by the way, is I get worried about the pinch happening right now in consumer finance, right? It's getting more expensive to support these accounts because of cyber and all the kind of stuff. And it's in, you're making less on them generally. mean, Trump's doing a few things to maybe change that regardless of political views. But, but I think that one of the interesting things on that front is that if you refer somebody to new car insurance provider, the money a bank makes on that could flip the tail on whether or not that person's cashflow positive for the financial institution, right? If they're putting more money into account because they're driving more payment volume, the net interest margin on that checking account is going to increase, right? So I think there are lots of things I'm very bullish on in terms of financial institutions improving their financial outcomes with consumers and consumers improving them as well in that case. 

With respect to what Atomic is working on the future, you named it on agentic, right? We wanna be able to take more and more thoughtful approaches to helping people save money. So right now there's cancellation, there's some really neat savings things we can do. We haven't even really touched negotiation very much though. And that will be a big part of our future is how do we actually, I mean, people talk about these bots warring on behalf of consumers and on behalf of the company going back and forth. It's gonna happen. And we're going to be at the heart of some of that because we're inside the consumer's account, right? On their device and we can help move that forward, move the ball forward. And the better our agent, the better our ability to be able to help that person find and counter savings. I just got a notification this morning from Apple saying my bill is going from $9.99 a month to $12.99 a month. Well, on some of these merchants, all you have to do is say, I don't like that. And they'll say, okay, nevermind, it's $9.99 a month. Apple may not be that way, but we can go in and fight that battle on behalf of consumers.
  

PR: Okay. That's a great place to end it. Well, Jordan, it's always great to chat with you. think it's really exciting stuff, you're doing at Atomic. And thanks for coming on the show.
 
 JW: Thank you, Peter. I might add one more thing if I can, and that would just be to thank you. were recently in Salt Lake, put on a great event here. We appreciated that in conjunction with another group. I'm failing to remember their name, but appreciate everything you do for FinTech generally. And also when you come to places like beautiful Salt Lake to be able to help us in our FinTech environment.
 
 PR: Yes, indeed. was a lot of fun. It was great to catch up there. Anyway, thanks again, Jordan. I appreciate it.
 
 JW: Yep, thanks, see ya.
 
 PR: Jordan and were just chatting after we stopped recording there and I commented on the fact that fintech is about to get really interesting. While I don't want to downplay the progress we have made over the last decade or more, conversations like this make me convinced that we are about to make a quantum leap. The ability to take action quickly, easily and dare I say it autonomously is going to have a profound impact on consumers and small businesses. We'll start to see products be released in the next year, but it is what will be developed by the end of decade that really excites me. And it sounds like Atomic is going to be in the thick of things here. 

JW: Anyway, that's it for today's show. If you enjoy these episodes, please go ahead and subscribe, tell a friend or leave a review. And thanks so much for listening.