AI and Small Business: Tips from Joe Casali

Episode Summary

In this episode of "Wrestling Payments," host Joe Casali dives into the details of National Small Business Week. He emphasizes the importance of utilizing available resources, such as the SBA’s virtual summit and educational programs, to help small businesses thrive. Joe highlights key sessions on AI, cybersecurity, and marketing strategies that are crucial for business growth and stability in today’s dynamic environment.

Joe also discusses the practical aspects of running a small business, including managing cash flow and leveraging e-commerce. He underscores the significance of tools like positive pay for fraud prevention, sharing real-life examples to illustrate its benefits. His insights provide actionable advice for small business owners to navigate challenges and secure their operations.

Throughout the episode, Joe reminds listeners of the critical role small businesses play in the economy. He encourages owners to utilize community banks and credit unions for support and stresses the importance of staying informed about the latest industry trends and solutions. This episode is a valuable resource for any small business owner looking to enhance their operations and safeguard their future.

Key Insights
AI Can Drive Small Business Growth

Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers numerous benefits for small businesses, from generative AI to automation and pattern recognition. Generative AI can create content, such as business stories and marketing materials, efficiently and effectively. Automation and pattern recognition help businesses spot trends and anomalies, enhancing risk management and decision-making processes. AI's potential to streamline operations and improve accuracy makes it an invaluable tool for small businesses looking to grow and stay competitive in a rapidly changing market.

Cybersecurity is Critical for Remote Work

In the current landscape where remote work has become prevalent, securing business operations is more crucial than ever. Small businesses must prioritize cybersecurity to protect sensitive data and ensure smooth operations. This includes implementing robust security protocols and educating employees about best practices. With the increasing threats of cyber-attacks, having a strong cybersecurity framework helps businesses safeguard their assets and maintain trust with their customers and partners.

Positive Pay Prevents Fraud

Positive pay is an essential tool for small businesses to prevent fraud. It involves the business providing a list of authorized checks to their bank, which then cross-checks any checks presented for payment. This system helps detect and stop unauthorized transactions before they can cause significant financial damage. The use of positive pay can save businesses time and resources by preventing fraudulent activities, thereby maintaining the integrity of their financial operations and protecting their bottom line.

Link to Positive Pay Survey: Positive Pay Market Survey (neachgroup.com)

Transcript

NEACH - Wrestling Payments - Joseph Casali - AI and Small Business: Tips from Joe Casali

 Joe Casali: [00:00:00] Hi, welcome to Wrestling Payments. In this episode, I think I have just an interesting riff, if you will, on Small Business Week, I was in the preparation of a podcast. I was going to talk to a small business, look at all the issues small businesses face. And I did my research and my marketing folks presented, May is National Small Business Month. So I had to do my research. That's what I do. And I found out it is actually National Small Business Week. And National Small Business Week goes from April 28th. Now I'm speaking today to small businesses and if you're a small business, you know how hard things are.

For example, my studio is currently my kitchen table [00:01:00] because They're building our office and they're still building our office and it's been weeks and weeks and weeks For that I get a studio. That's my kitchen table as you think of small businesses. There's lots and lots of data out on sba.gov 

I’ll put a link in the description. There's just highlights of things that are going on, and I'm going to look at the agenda, if you will. There is a virtual summit. It is a free two day event for small businesses. And I know, finding time as a small business owner or a small business staff is really hard, because You're busy.

There are things that have to be done and a two-day training is not one of them. But if you could make it over to this virtual training there's lots of the co-sponsors and you can imagine, we speak [00:02:00] from the heart here on Wrestling Payments You can see the speakers Are all vendors, right?

So the vendors are trying to get your attention. Whatever you think of that, they do have some expertise in the different topics and the topics they're looking at right now is to accelerate your business growth with the help of AI. May be helpful to you, may not be helpful to you. Securing a small business in a work- from-anywhere world.

That is really high attention. If you're in an industry where you have remote employees, highly important on how's that going. We got all pushed into it. If you weren't doing it before COVID, you definitely were doing it after COVID. How's that working out? What resources are available?

How do you make sure they're the most efficient? The next thing is Learn about the no cost SBA thrive education program. I don't know what that is, but I [00:03:00] can tell you as I was doing some research, I saw educational resources. I just saw the tab. I don't know what's under it, but as a small business, again, where do you get your advice?

Where do you get your help? Sometimes you feel like you're in it alone and there's nowhere you can go to other than a lawyer or an accountant to figure it out. This may have resources is the whole SBA thing. I, we are not getting paid by the SBA but they can help you wrestle with your challenges like that.

You like how I work that in. More AI stuff, unlock AI potential for your small business. AI, if you're not familiar with AI, you will be soon because. It's like the third word everyone says when they're talking about something today. AI AI. It's been around for a long time. It's only just getting it to its growing, into its spurs or whatever the saying is.

It's growing into its potential. And lots and lots of it has been around [00:04:00] generative AI. Having, hey AI, write a story about my business that highlights X, Y, and Z. Cite this, that and it'll write an article. That's a really good article. That's going to tell you all the highlights about this business.

So generative AI words are very helpful. The other AIs are patent recognition and Automation. Maybe your business needs that as well. It's a different flavor. It's definitely a different flavor, but it can, we work mostly with financial institutions. One of the things AI can do is spot trends, spot recurrences of something that a person may not notice right away.

The AI has multiple runs to be able to say, let me look at that again. Let me look at that again. Let me look at that again. And can spot the trends or the anomalies, and they can use that in risk management. But lots of the AI today is around generative. I want to ask a [00:05:00] question from a publication.

I want to ask a legal question, and it'll pop back up. Be aware, sometimes AI isn't 100 percent there. I can give you an example, NEACH Payments Group did an AI experiment and it said, Hey, as long as financial institutions follow the NEACH guidelines, they'll be all set. There aren't any NEACH guidelines.

Don't know where it got that. So AI is good. It's helpful. It's not a. It's not the Terminator yet, so it hasn't taken over. Anyways, back to the agenda. Again, free, two day event, April 30th, May 1st. You do have to register, but it's free. Unlocking AI's potentials, we just talked about that.

Building a foundation in online marketing success, review, plan, and execute. Marketing is really a key part of your business. Getting those eyeballs on your business is really important. Constant contact. If you don't know, is an emailing business very successful, very large. They've been doing it for a long time, so [00:06:00] they're probably a really good trainer for that session.

Leveraging e-commerce to scale your business. Really important. That's where Wrestling Payments spends most of its time thinking about how your payments are being processed, how and what challenges, what you're wrestling with in processing payments. Sometimes it's turning on a credit card machine and letting it run and that's your payment solution.

If there's ever a time you want to lower costs or figure out other ways to bring in income, that's when you can start wrestling with payments more. How do you start a food truck business? Great. Look at that. Great session. How many folks in the audience have thought about that?

I actually have a, I'm a pizza connoisseur. And I thought, what about, what if I could just run a truck and if you've ever seen the great food truck challenge on the food network, a lot of great success stories out of that, even the shock tank has launched truck food businesses [00:07:00] and that's going to be taught by SCORE.

SCORE is the organization or the people that work with the Small Business Administration to talk about starting a business, helping a business, growing your business, all of those things. The next thing on the agenda is eight practical skills to run a successful business. You get a lot of credit for starting your business, but do you have all, whatever these eight skills are, do you have all the skills necessary?

I know you may be strong in one thing. You may know that you're weak in this other part. My son started the business. He was weak in the financial and the bookkeeping part. I helped him with that. He didn't have to worry about that. He could just worry about running the business, navigating your cash flow as a small business. 

Cash flow is everything and working capital is everything and making sure when you have those low times, my talk to all. My son is in the food industry, January, February in New England, pretty [00:08:00] sparse. So how do you make it through those months by taking care of your cash flow and it's done by Chase.

Chase is one of the biggest banks in the country. Probably a good session to look in on even if you wanted to just see what they were talking about. The next few are how to turn a side hustle. right? How many people out there have a side hustle? How do you turn a side hustle into a business and secure your first loan?

So they're going all the way to the loan. How do you start your business? You may have a great idea, but you're not going to be able to do it with just help from family members and friends. Maybe you need to secure that loan. This session may help you with that. The future of commerce 2024. If you haven't watched how commerce has changed in the last, let's say five years you need to watch that.

We're seeing payments, we're seeing payments. So I'm, we are the payments folks. So we're [00:09:00] seeing payments. We're seeing digital payments go up. We're seeing card payments go up. We're seeing ACH payments hit a new height, all time high. We're seeing checks continuing to decline but leveling off.

So checks are way down from their high point. But they're not going away. And there's a lot of things we could talk about checks. There's a lot of fraud happening. Mailbox keys getting stolen. Check fraud is definitely actually on the rise. All kinds of fraud are on the rise. So as a small business.

You are not immune to that. You will see a fair share of fraud attempts on your business. My son has seen at least two solid, hardcore fraud attempts. He hasn't been in business for a year. Good. Understanding your commerce, future of commerce, 2024 would be helpful. Square. If you don't know square, square is that.

They started as a, we could process your credit card from your iPhone because we put [00:10:00] this little device in your iPhone. They've since graduated to point of sale purchase point of sale terminals, and they offer If I know that if you're a business and you're looking for a loan because Valentine's weekend is this weekend and you need the supplies, but you don't have the cash flow, they've offered loans.

Again, not any sort of, Hey, you should use them. You should be aware that's an option available. The next two are kind of important for my SBA. SBA can be a partner for you. Again, we have no relationship. We're not connected to the SBA. This is just knowing that they are a good resource for you.

And finally, if you are a nonprofit. So NEACH is actually a non profit at the same time where a trade association for credit unions, financial institutions, fintechs how to write a grant proposal. There's a lot of money out there available through grants, but for example, if you're working with the government, those grants have to [00:11:00] have.

all the pieces included, otherwise it goes in the trash. You could be the ideal partner for the government on whatever service they're looking for. If you left out part six, you are in the trash. So excellent session to look at. It looks like a virtual event. I again highly recommend it as well as using the SBA site for some resources.

This year as they celebrate Small Business Week, they have awards they're going to be giving away. There's articles and press releases available. And then there's some, if you want to look back on what they did last year and how that turned out, there's that material available as well.

With that, I just wanted to do a quick introduction to Small Business Week. Understand, if you dig into the details of this SBA site, you realize most of the business in the U. S. [00:12:00] is small business. And, sometimes you forget that when you're looking at the speakers at this event, T Mobile and Verizon and Chase, big behemoth companies thousands, maybe tens of thousands of employees.

Your five-person shop may think no one cares. You just gotta get through the day. You got to make your profit. You got to hit all your schedules. There's resources available to help. And I would be remiss if I didn't say, your community bank or credit union is there to help as well. They have continued to watch these trends and understand you need working capital and they may have a solution for you.

So that's the first place you should start when you look at that. I'd ask you to stay tuned for future episodes. We're going to dig into a little bit for a fraud coming up. Fraud is fraud is, I hate when people say [00:13:00] this, but fraud is probably at the worst it's ever been.

It's on the rise. You can watch the news. If you're watching news for the week, you're going to see the next post office person that gets held up for their post office key for their mailbox key. I was at an event today where my boss was giving us a speech on the tools that are already available to fight against fraud.

Positive pay. He's doing a survey on positive pay. I'll include that link as well. Positive pay. If you're unaware, Positive pay is a protection over your financial account. I won't say a bank account or your credit union account. It's a a cover over it that if something comes in that you didn't tell the bank, Hey, I wrote a check for $10,000 if you didn't tell them

who that was for and when you wrote the check and what check number it was. And someone takes your hundred dollar check to a vendor, stole it out of a mailbox, turned it into a $10,000 check. Positive pay is [00:14:00] one of those things that the bank will get that check and say, Whoa, we don't have any mark of a $10,000 check.

Hey, business owner. Did you write a $10,000 check? And they give you the ability to say, no, I did not write that check. Do not pay it, otherwise you may find out, when your accountant reconciles the account two months later, trying to fix a two month old check that was cashed for $10,000 is probably virtually impossible.

I'm not saying it can't be done, but the amount of effort and time you're going to spend in a legal process, because at that point, The banks are going to say, it's not us anymore. Go back to the other bank and figure it out. Positive Pays helps. I'll include a link to the survey. If you want to include your data in it, it would be helpful to us.

We're getting data from companies and we're getting data from [00:15:00] financial institutions to try to say, what are the disconnects? And it's only the first part. of a series of surveys talking about the, again, the tools that already exist to help fight fraud. I can tell you the argument is I don't have time. I don't have time to do this.

What's going to happen is, I can tell you where users of positive pay, you're going to get an email in the morning. It's going to say, Hey, you got an item in the positive pay, and you're going to go, Ooh that's a problem. Let me do that right now. Cause that's the bank and that's money goes in and shows you.

Oh, it was just I told them I sent a check. I scrambled a couple of the numbers. Great. No, we want to pay them. Yes, please pay that. Or. In the better example, no, I have no idea what that is. Do not pay it. Again, it saves that time, that delay and you recognizing you got an unauthorized entry to your account.[00:16:00] 

They have it for ACH. It's traditionally a check product where you say, I wrote all my checks today. These are the three checks I wrote. These are the amounts of the checks. Those are checks are okay. Don't call me if those checks come in. But if something's weird. the credit union of the bank could get in touch with you.

Anyway, I've went on a long time. We are here, so we, I have an opinion of this. I think positive pay is a good thing. I think it's an easy decision. It does take 15 minutes of your time. You may not have 15 minutes of your time, but how much time do you want to spend trying to get your $10,000 back?

It's a trade off and I will guarantee the first time someone steals $10,000 from a fraudulent check you're gonna say I wish I had positive pay and I have it now going forward trying to save you that loss . But you're a business owner. You got to where you are because you are a decision maker, a business owner, an entrepreneur. I wish [00:17:00] you all the luck in the world.

We run the country. We small businesses run the country. If all the small businesses disappear, everyone would be out of a job. And again, those stats are all on the SBA. I don't have to say them. Thank you very much for joining me today and happy Small Business Week.