The Payments Experts Podcast
Expert payments attorneys discuss the electronic payments industry from a legal perspective.
The Payments Experts Podcast
The Honest Broker: Why Transparency in Payments Actually Pays Off with Aacadia Payments | PEP054
Riley Bangerter, founder of Aacadia Payments (https://aacadiapayments.net/), takes us on a fascinating journey through the evolving payment processing landscape, sharing his unique path from stockbroker to payment expert following the 2008 financial crisis.
• Entered the payments industry seeking residual income after the 2008 financial crisis collapsed his mortgage business
• Founded Aacadia Payments six years ago and partnered with Daryl Peppers to create a balanced leadership team
• Specializes in challenging verticals including coaching services and social media platforms
• Recently partnered with LegitScript to expedite certification for telehealth merchants from 8 months to 2 days
• Identifies poor customer service as the biggest challenge facing ISOs and payment processors
• Implemented AI across business operations for emails, marketing content, and customer communications
• Predicts metaverse commerce and augmented reality as the next frontier for payment processing
• Advocates for industry-wide efforts to eliminate fraudsters and bad actors who damage merchant relationships
• Emphasizes that payments should fuel business growth rather than drain margins
Drawing from his background in securities and mortgage industries, Riley offers a refreshing perspective on payment processing as a financial service, highlighting the surprising lack of licensing requirements despite merchants completing what are essentially credit applications. This regulatory gap creates opportunities for both innovation and abuse – a tension Riley navigates with transparency and long-term relationship building.
Aacadia Payments has carved out success in challenging verticals like coaching services and social media platforms by implementing thoughtful risk controls. Riley shares a compelling case study of a social media app where users purchase digital currency to gift influencers, detailing how they transformed a fraud-prone model into a sustainable business through strategic value adjustments and monitoring.
The conversation tackles significant industry challenges, from agent hopping to Visa's increasingly stringent surcharge enforcement. Riley reveals how Visa "secret shoppers" document non-compliant merchants with photographic evidence, sometimes resulting in thousand-dollar fines for minor infractions. His strategic partnership with LegitScript demonstrates Aacadia's commitment to legitimate merchants, reducing certification timelines from 8 months to just 2 days.
Looking toward the horizon, Riley predicts metaverse commerce and augmented reality platforms will become the next frontier for payment processing, drawing parallels to gaming giants like Roblox. He details how Aacadia embraces AI across all business operations – from customer communications to marketing content – giving listeners practical examples of technology implementation that delivers real results.
What makes this conversation truly valuable is Riley's passionate call for industry collaboration. "Payments should fuel growth, not drain margins," he emphasizes, advocating for transparency, education, and removing bad actors who damage merchant relationships. Connect with Riley and learn more about Aacadia Payments at AacadiaPayments.net.
**Matters discussed are all opinions and do not constitute legal advice. All events or likeness to real people and events is a coincidence.**
Visit Global Legal Law Firm today: https://www.globallegallawfirm.com/
A payments podcast of Global Legal Law Firm
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Speaker 2:Gbt is insane yeah, it's, it is, it's, it's wild. I I don't know, because some of you know this or not our ring central, our phone system, it just started this thing where, on the call, at any point you want to, you click this ai button. It gives you a summary of the entire call and, it's incredibly, it even gives you action items at the end, kind of like here's what you said you would do. You know or what you know, what you need to accomplish now after this call.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's wild yeah. We need that for like every, every fucking video call.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right, right, no doubt. Welcome to the payments experts podcast, a podcast of global legal law firm. We hope you enjoy this episode. Welcome to the Payments Experts Podcast, a podcast of Global Legal Law Firm. We're very excited. Today we have in studio joining us the founding and managing partner of Global Legal Law Firm, christopher Dryden, as well as our special guest joining us remotely We've got Riley Bangader of Acadia Payments. You can find Riley over at AcadiaPaymentsnet. Riley, we're really excited to have you on the podcast today. Looking forward to this conversation.
Speaker 3:Thank you, me as well. I'm super excited. Thank you, guys.
Speaker 1:Yeah, great to have you on Riley. Known Riley for a couple of years. Part-time client yeah, doesn't need us for too many things, but we always try to make friends with the people that we work with and I can say this because I recently had interaction.
Speaker 1:They had a merchant that had a real issue internally that you know one of their employees had kind of done some bad acts and you know, riley immediately reached out to us, which was really cool, and we tried to get in touch just to kind of give that merchant just some guidance on how to handle it. You know, like not even not even from the purposes of like signing them for anything, just like you know, hey, here's, here's, here's what you should be doing If this happened at our business, this is what we would be doing. So it's kind of cool. I think the purpose of me saying this about Riley and Acadia is that, as a payment processor, your merchant reached out to you for something totally unrelated to payment processing. I thought that was cool.
Speaker 3:Well, and what's funny, we try and facilitate that relationship with all of our merchants just to keep it sticky for us. But you guys crushed it in that recommendation. And how many times do you see people not take the recommendations and do the stupidest thing ever? I mean, what they did was dumb.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I didn't. To be honest, I didn't really understand the lack of response, but that's okay, like you know. I mean if you got to put your hand on the stove to like realize it's hot. So, like I said, we've been working with Riley and Acadia for for a couple of years and really good guys, he and his partner, and you know one of the things that we like to do is kind of say you know, how did you get into payments, man? Like what, what kind of got you into this world?
Speaker 3:It's funny. So I've been in finance my whole life. I've been in. I got into the securities industry when I was 21, became a stockbroker and then um was was in that industry and then I started into mortgages around 2005 because we were selling a product that was specific, that helped us sell more securities products and more insurance products. And so we built up this mortgage business and it ended up being one of the biggest mortgage companies in the country at the time and we were in the process of being bought out by Washington Mutual. And then 2008 happened and the whole thing melted apart and so I got into payments because I wanted a residual income and I went. You know what is the most like the mortgage industry? That not a big pop-up front that will create the stability in a long term, you know, for a lifetime. And so I saw the payments industry and I went. You know that makes sense. It's essentially the same thing as a mortgage. It's just a credit application, and so it's very similar and it was easy to get into.
Speaker 1:It's funny you say that because, like so many, people don't realize that the merchant processing application is a credit application I mean it is 100 yeah, totally, and it's very interesting to me because you know, as you know, being in securities and then being in the mortgage business you can't lie on a credit app and if you do, it's really, it's really problematic for you. So it's yeah, I mean it like it's one of those things that I think people don't realize that payment processing is actually financial services.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So, so yeah, I mean, there's so much fair sometimes you know it blows my mind that there's no license needed. Like I got into this industry, having coming from the securities industry and passing the seven and then getting my mortgage loan originator license in the mortgage industry and then going into this, it was like, oh, I just want to sell payments.
Speaker 1:I can sell it. I don't have to get a license Well totally and it's problematic too, right?
Speaker 1:I mean, like we've talked about this and if we want to, maybe talk about it later on, I get your feedback on it. But there's agents out there that just hop and hop and hop and you know, take like an upfront bonus or even sell the residual and then just recapture it, and until the I would say larger-sized ISOs decide that they want to do something about that and create some sort of good standards list or a blacklist for agents or something along those lines, it's going to perpetuate itself for a long time.
Speaker 3:I heard that there was one of those. It was the Mac list or something like that. Somebody had told me about it.
Speaker 1:You can report people to the Mac. It's actually called AppNow. They changed their name. It's the Association of Payment Professionals and for those of you that don't know, for all of us whores over here on the sales side, there is an actual underwriting and risk side to this industry which is a little bit more conservative, and they have their own. We have the regional groups, wasa and SEAA, and we have the national ETA. App actually focuses on the other side of the industry, which is underwriting and risk focuses on the other side of the industry, which is underwriting and risk and and, uh, there, there is stuff out there. But the problem is is that those underwriting and risk people they're primarily working with merchants. I don't know how much interaction they have underwriting agents and I. So I know that there's kind of like a breadcrumb trail over there where people talk, but I'm not sure how much that really changes things. Cause yeah, cause, dude, I mean I, like you know we chased down.
Speaker 1:Oh, me too, man. We chased down agents. I will actually say this. So we had a litigation case where one of these agents, um, you know, took one of our clients, and for a significant amount of money, and this guy actually consented to a judgment for a significant amount of money. And this guy actually consented to a judgment for a significant amount of money and he had basically said that he had committed identity theft by taking the documents that he had received from merchants and just reused them for every single processing relationship and basically created his own email address to do the docu sign so that they could verify the email on the merchant app.
Speaker 1:This is the interesting part about it being a credit app, right and we had all of this evidence and he had basically admitted and consented to a judgment and we sent it to the fbi and it's been like a year and a half, two years and I'm not sure if they will do anything, which is crazy wow, yeah, I've heard that that's wire fraud.
Speaker 1:At least it's got to be something like that oh well, actually I think identity theft is one of the enumerated rico predicate. Yeah, I mean, it's like you should be able to get people on that, because they're taking driver license, driver's license numbers, social security, tax id, like all of the proprietary information a merchant provides to open a merchant account, and they're just taking that and using that. And then, oh oh yeah, we needed to get you new equipment and they just sent out a new terminal. Yeah, it's blatant right.
Speaker 3:So I had a guy send me uh, send me an app one time. That was he was completely fake and I didn't know it at the time. But we got boarded up with them with one of our isos and I started seeing some just weird behavior on this lady's part. He'd gotten a straw signer. So I'm talking to this lady and she has no clue what's going on. It's like did she ever even apply? And I'm like going something's up here. And they ended up. I guess it was a dark web like card spinning room that was trying to spin cards on this account that this lady had that she didn't know she had and it turned into a $30,000 loss for our ISO because we caught it in time. It could have been much bigger, but it was very strange and very eye-opening as to the level of fraud that people or the level of work that people will go through to create these fraudulent accounts.
Speaker 1:Well, it's interesting because I think that this is actually an important topic, because there are different people that play in this industry, and yourself. Even the way that you just described that last scenario you are looking at keeping fraudsters out because this is a long-term gig for you and it's not just some fly-by-night thing, and so I think that that's really important.
Speaker 1:The people that are invested in the industry, you know everybody wants volume, but like volume that you're just going to have to discourse later doesn't? Yeah, totally doesn't make a lot of sense, yeah, no yeah, I had to give up some individuals on that oh, I'm sure, I'm sure everybody does. I said it's a short-term goal, I mean a short-term win. Right, it doesn't make sense. So tell me about acadia payments when did you guys start?
Speaker 3:so we started I think we officially started it about six years ago um, and it was, I had gotten a job for somebody else in the industry and I was the director of business development and I don't want to say the company, but it was uh, we had issues there. I was doing a lot of work and it became an issue and so, um, the pay and all the things, it was just a bad thing. And so I just took off and I went I can do this myself. I built a huge mortgage company. I built a securities company like a securities firm. So I know I can do this myself. I'm out. And so I left and got some investors.
Speaker 3:That came on, about two, actually three years ago I brought in Daryl Peppers, my partner he was. He worked with me at the last company that I was at that I had taken the job at and then so I convinced him to come over and I haven't looked back. We've been, we were a good partnership, we you know, know my I'm pretty, I'm a visionary, and so I'm kind of I'm a creative type, so I'm off the wall a little bit and stuff, and so Darrell kind of grounds me on some of that stuff and then he's a little more timid where I'm just like let's go for it, fire ready, aim. And so he's. That helps him a lot when some things. And so we just play off each other.
Speaker 3:Well, and we haven't looked back, we've got a handful of agents that give us deals each month, and then we just find deals ourselves organically, and a lot of our merchants give us referral business, and that's how we've built up to where we are today. What are you guys focusing on? So coaching is our biggest vertical and probably our best vertical.
Speaker 1:That's a tough placement. It is a hard placement, especially when they have no business.
Speaker 3:Yeah, totally so. We've got a few good partners that we lean on for stuff like that, and then we have a big social media platform that is our biggest merchant, and they actually came from the Apple Play Store. They'd gotten shut down by PayPal, had some issues with Apple, as many developers have had issues with Apple and then they came to us and I said, yeah, we can probably get this done, and it was a nightmare getting it going. But we had a lot of fraud issues at the beginning, where it's basically a messaging app where people can buy a digital currency inside of the app and then gift that digital currency to an influencer and that influencer can cash it out for fiat currency, and so it was ripe for money laundering and all this stuff was going bad and so we implemented a couple controls and they haven't had a charge back in months and it's it's been. They're stoked, you know they love us.
Speaker 1:We've saved them so is that like a marketing budget for influencers that they're able to like, get them to? Weird thing, I'm not I'm not a social media guy, but I, I mean I can follow the dots, you know like see what's going on.
Speaker 3:What's funny is the way that they mitigate the fraud or the money laundering is it's less than a one-for-one exchange. So if you buy a dollar, it's worth way less than a dollar inside the app. So people aren't just going to throw you know $100,000 on their credit card and then take out $100,000 when they give it to their friend. So that discourages people. And then we've got a couple other things, but the the interesting thing on this one is the guy that spends the most money. So one person spent $540,000 in one month out of his B of a account in this app. And it's we. None of us know what he's spending it on, who he. They know who he's gifting it to, but they don't know why. It's the funniest thing. It's like, wow, that's what? Are you spending a hundred $540,000 on inside of a social media app? What? What benefit is that?
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, I mean, yeah, it could. It could have many benefits. I don't know if this is the show for that. So so, outside of that, so you're growing organically and through an agent base, but how do you guys find opportunity? Or where do you see opportunity these days in the industry? That's recognizable being a visionary.
Speaker 3:Well, let's all stop the race to zero, let's start with that and let's do some dual pricing the correct way, so that we can all play on the same field. What I don't like is when people go out there and they just do it however they want and not listen to the Visa guidelines and all that stuff, and it just ends up becoming a big problem for the rest of us in the industry. So I think some you know to kind of take it back to the licensing, I think licensing actually would be a good thing in this industry, just to have a uh, a standard that we all have to adhere to and play.
Speaker 1:I mean I'll, I'll tell you, man, visa's getting draconian Cause like, because we're a hub for information as people see our podcast and they see what we focus and talk about. I get a lot of people that send me information that I probably wouldn't have access to otherwise, that Visa is distributing out to some larger service providers. But you know they've got a dual track on how they fine and you know there's the cardholder fine and then there's the secret shopper fine and the cardholder fine. Actually, notifying the cardholder, notifying of violations, which I think is kind of crazy. It's not a one to one, it's a one to five, right, I mean like first, first it's a thousand dollars on the first violation for each one, but the second violation it's five thousand or twenty five thousand If it's the cardholder, they bang you again.
Speaker 1:And a lot of these merchants that are either like high volume, small margin or just mom and pop places, they can't handle all this and they don't get any sort of knowledge. Like we had a client that has a POS company and this guy's kind of a mover and shaker, he's got a lot of ambition and you know, he sent us the spreadsheet and he's like look, I had a bunch of merchants that got violations and you know they sent me all those data and and I, you know I thought that they were all compliant. We started looking at the pictures I mean it's like series of pictures the Visa secret shoppers they do a lot. For every instance there were six to seven pictures of what it looked like at product placement, what it looked at the counter, a purchase for the product that didn't have the correct dual pricing in cash, a receipt for credit and, and look there, and what you said is really interesting.
Speaker 1:There's these tools that are intended to be game changers and benefits for merchants, but when the merchants aren't knowledgeable because I'll tell you what we're constantly amazed by this but the surcharge rules, and maybe because I read them in the cash discount rules, because I read not just the rules from the card brands but the legislation from various states on the subject matter, it's very clear to me. But a lot of people get confused by this stuff. I don't know if you experience that, but they're really confused.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, like, what do you see out in the marketplace where people are like totally have a misperception, what do you see?
Speaker 3:out in the marketplace where people are like totally have a misperception. They've either been lied to by an agent, somebody out there trying to sell it, trying to get the deal, or they just don't care enough to actually educate themselves about it is what I've found for the most part, and so the people that you know. You run a business. The most important part of a business is how are you going to take payments? Whether you want to admit that or not, that's the truth, and if you can't get paid, why are you in business? And so I I think a lot of it is falling on the merchant's shoulders of they're just not educating themselves or they're getting bad information from a bad player in our industry, and well, it's interesting too.
Speaker 1:it's interesting to me because you know, I said for a long time, you know the card, especially with the chargeback regime, have a you know, conflicts of interest and that process creates revenue for everyone. Right, I mean, a chargeback, there's a chargeback. There's a retrieval request fee, there's a chargeback fee. You know, I mean all of these things have a spread built in. And then there's the mediation process and you pay the card brand to go through the mediation process and all of it has a financial component. And now I'm starting to see kind of the same thing in the surcharge violation world because it could easily be. I mean, I understand that they want people to be operating. This goes back to the licensing thing. I think that's really interesting what you said about licensing.
Speaker 3:I think it's important for for any financial services business, we're all. We're dealing with people's livelihood. Really, if you look at it that way, we're dealing and if we do something wrong and then they start getting fined by visa, that's a huge. That's just. That's not why I'm in this business. I'm in this business to help people. I saw that the payments industry was broken in 2008 and that's why I got into this. That's kind of the follow-up to the until I got in this. It's because it I needed to get into it. I'm a I do good business, I do transparent business and because I came from the securities industry, I really educated people about the products that they were buying and then let them make an informed decision, and that's what I do in the payments industry as well. We can go any way you want to go. Let's determine why you want to go that way.
Speaker 1:No, and I agree and I didn't really think about and I agree with you on the licensing part. You know ETA had the Certified Payments Professional Program for a long time, which I thought was a good idea.
Speaker 1:It was a great idea yeah actually, yeah, they came out with like standards of like best practices or self-guidelines and you know it's changed over time because regulation has changed over time associated with the payment space. But it's interesting to me because now all the violations kind of could be a profit center, an unintended profit center through enforcement, you know.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, we play it with the chargeback game. So we deal with a lot of higher risk verticals, and so we like to find those merchants that get chargebacks, not enough to blow them up, but enough to where we can have an income source off of it. Because, yeah, there is a spread and we sell the mitigation of it, and so it's a balancing act in the high risk game of we want somebody that does get charged backs because it's good for us, but not enough to actually shut them down.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but the but the surcharge thing, like the violations there's, I mean, I know a thousand dollars is the initial fine. No, that's all the card brands, and I find that the penalties don't generally match the infraction. You know like you've got somebody who was overcharged 65 cents and now I owe a thousand dollars.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I understand they want to curb bad business practices associated with card payment.
Speaker 3:But those two things, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Those two things don't reconcile, right. I mean like yeah, that's the kind of scary thing.
Speaker 3:So you know you've got the governing body that's making the rules and then taking the money when you don't follow the rules and it's literally.
Speaker 1:I saw the receipts like the. The overcharge was 65 cents on one of them, and and it's a thousand bucks for the fine and, like you said, what other game in town, right? I mean, how are you going to be in business if you can't accept electronic payment? Yeah, no doubt. So you guys recently partnered with LegitScript. We did yeah, yeah, how's that going? And tell us why you did that Really good.
Speaker 3:So we had a merchant of ours, a big telehealth merchant of ours, that was trying to get certified and it was just a nightmare for him. It takes like six to eight months right now to get LegitScript certified if you're just coming in off the street. And so I researched it and talked to some people at LegitScript and there's a streamlined process that they allow for some of their enterprise size partners, and so we became an enterprise size partner with them and we are now able to get people boarded up in two days and it costs the same amount or less than if you were just to come in off the street. And so we can save, save merchants money, help it, help them get it done faster and and they're everybody's happy. I mean we're happy because we pick up a merchant. The merchant's happy because they get through this process that normally takes eight months to do and they do it in two days and they're up and running explain for.
Speaker 1:Explain for our listeners who LegitScript is.
Speaker 3:So LegitScript is a company that monitors websites for telehealth, firearms and a handful of different high risk vertical industries so that they know that the product that is being sold on the website is actually the product being delivered to the customer, and so they do some due diligence and they do monitoring on the back end to make sure that you know if you're selling firearms is a weird one, because we have some big firearms merchants as well. So there's parts that look like dishwasher parts but they can be used to create a firearm, and so some people will sell these as dishwasher parts on their website, but they're really selling this so that people can make firearms, and so Logiscript monitors that knows how the industry is and knows that there's these are not dryer parts, there's parts to make firearms, and so they can go hey, this is not, this is not. Something's not right here. Let's look into this more, and then that allows us to to eliminate fraud and help merchants that want to do real business in either dryer parts or firearms do real business.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker 3:Make it seem something else real business.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's awesome. Make it seem something else yeah, that's that's awesome. And you know, most people don't know this. There are other web crawler systems out there, but they're wholly owned, like g2 is wholly owned by mastercard, and I think that they use I I mean, I understand the purposes of using it. Um, you know I've said this before. I don't know if you see this, but a few years ago it was during COVID we had a client that had it was like an alternative payment, where they were a metals company, metals company and they would they would allow you to purchase physical gold. Yep, that was actually backed by physical gold in a you know like wherever yeah, wherever they were depositing it.
Speaker 1:And then they had a where the merchants could take that and then create some sort of alter like alternative payment method where the gold would be purchased and then almost immediately liquidated. Was this for the cannabis business? It was for a bunch of different things, but the people that were engaged in it were actually from the metals business and they had I don't know who had approached them. But the crazy thing, the purpose of my story was I actually thought they were a little bit ahead of the game, but yeah, the the. The crazy part was that they had multiple times.
Speaker 1:One time they got backdoored through a processor into elevon and then it was found out and you know I was working on reserve issues for them. But on another one, paypal had, you know, approved them and they had a company. They disclosed everything about what they did. They submitted transactions. The processing itself would not have raised any red flags whatsoever, yeah, and three weeks after they were approved and run like a couple hundred thousand dollars in transactions, underwriting, comes back around and goes oh no, no, no, you can't do this this is with.
Speaker 2:Elevon right?
Speaker 1:No, no, well, elevon did something similar, but this was actually PayPal, yeah.
Speaker 3:PayPal okay.
Speaker 1:And it was crazy because To me there's this battle between ease of access and then like underwriting and risk, and underwriting and risk isn't really, it's not just the merchant account, it's, you know, transaction monitoring and then what takes place. But it seems like there's a disconnect because, yeah, we want to get people up and processing as fast as possible, but then the right hand doesn't talk to the left hand and then, boom, do you see any of that out there?
Speaker 3:I see it all the time it happens to my merchants all the time and it drives me nuts Because it's like you said let's get them up and processing, they're doing good business, doing great business, and then some risk manager goes wait a minute, what is this? And it's like what are you talking about? What is this Shouldn? Would you have not looked at that? And so, yeah, we have merchants where the brakes get put on all the time and it's very frustrating. You know, I call them the underwriting nerds or the risk nerds, because that's how I view them. You know, I think I'll have pocket protectors and hopefully no underwriters that underwrite my deals are listening to this right now, but I look at them as all the Rick Moranis Ghostbusters type character.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's that guy and I'm sure they're not that, but um, it feels like they're just trying to stop business and yeah, do you have any? Sorry, chris, I just go ahead. Yeah, right, I'm just. Do you have any thoughts as to what's the solution from your perspective, from where you're sitting? How can that be addressed?
Speaker 3:well, I think that they get incentivized to find the fraudulent deals. I'm sure that that happens and that's because, like we were talking about earlier, get the fraud out of the industry, because it's good for everybody. That's really in this for the long haul. So I don't know that there's a better solution that I know of to do it. I think it needs to happen, but maybe it needs to happen on the forefront rather than, you know, weeks later weeks later.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I agree, I agree, and and and. The thing that bothered me about it was that these people were forthright in the merchant application process. I mean they told them everything, right, I mean they had every opportunity to ask whatever questions they wanted, and then there was nothing in the processing, like I'm talking about like three chargebacks out of like thousands of transactions. Yeah, and I'm looking at it going how, how does this make sense at all? And people are, you know like, because they were dealing in physical gold, so they had to purchase the gold, so this was like, I mean, they were making smaller margin and they were just sort of acting as a almost like as a liquidator to a certain degree of being able to have an exchange, you know like and the fact that the gold value goes ups and down, up and down and fluctuates.
Speaker 1:I'm sure sure that there's an arbitrage thing going on as well yeah, but but they told them everything that they were doing and the next thing you know is a bam. You know, like a, they're fighting to get back money which they need just to like that they've invested in themselves. Yeah, totally Like that's the crazy part. So you know, as we move into. I mean we're getting kind of almost halfway through 2025. It's kind of interesting, but you know for you what do you see? The challenges that are out there facing ISOs.
Speaker 3:Oh, so ISOs. It's a huge challenge for ISOs. They just need to pick up the damn phone when their partners call them. That's the hardest part. For most of the ISOs that I deal with. It's like what are you guys doing? It's the customer service level has been dropped so far that the bar is not really that hard to reach anymore, and so we go. That's where we go above and beyond with customer service and service of our agents, because I hate getting bad service and I could name some big iso names and talk about how bad they are, but the reality is most of them all suck yeah, no, I mean, that's actually was like the birth of the iso, because the processors were horrible at it too yeah, totally yeah, I mean like why pay them an exorbitant amount of money to do customer service?
Speaker 3:just have them call me yeah, no doubt, and and it's true and it's. It's a funny thing for me because I we lean on partners whenever we can and whenever we need to, and Daryl has my partner. He's got 2530 years in this industry, so there's not much that we don't know. And when we don't know it we usually go to you guys and have you take a look at things and so between us and you guys interjecting, I don't think there's much that we don't know or haven't seen, and so we don't really lean on our partners that heavily. But sometimes it's like, hey, we need this terminal to be auto-batch instead of batching at a specific time, and then they send out the one that batches at the specific time and it's like what are you guys doing? Like, come on, Just little time. And it's like what are you guys doing?
Speaker 1:like, come on, just little things like that that drive me nuts. That yeah, no, there's yeah, unless you're going to be, like you know, downloading your own equipment and shipping it out yourself. I mean it's yeah, like you want to be able to rely on third-party providers to be able to do their job right? You know, I get that all the time yeah, but what do you?
Speaker 3:what do you see? We had a big one, so go ahead, go ahead. Uh, so we have. We have a big Mercedes dealership network that is a merchant of ours, so we dabble in low risk as well, with some Mercedes dealerships and our ISOs just every step of the way screwed up and then they send out like a how-to guide on how to reset the terminal and it's literally faxed copies of copies of faxes, and I'm like this is what you're sending out to our merchant. Like what are you doing?
Speaker 1:That's crazy to me. That is a very competitive market, and I will tell you that, and it's dynamic because auto dealerships are very different. Like they've got like five businesses in one and the fact is is that most of the people that I know that specialize in that industry, they're on site, like they go, they do the entire setup, they fly people out.
Speaker 3:You know, I mean that's what we should have. Yeah, the margins are tight.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the margins are tight, but those are. Those are lucrative accounts when you like. Yeah, they're never going anywhere.
Speaker 3:And so now it's they're up in Michigan too. So there's a few dealerships up in Michigan. So the next time there's an issue I'm flying up to Michigan to do that, to be boots on ground there and just facilitate the process. Otherwise it's a nightmare trying to trust that somebody else is going to do the job right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the other thing is that we have so much consolidation in our industry. Now it's not just processors buying processors, or you've got so much gobbling up of isvs. But you know, I go back to the the vantive mercury marriage where you had a payments company by a technology company and they could never really like merge their ops or their culture because they were so different. And now you've got the same sort of thing where you know I watch um, isn't?
Speaker 3:that what's going on with global right now? Like global and fiverr or something uh, global and world pay.
Speaker 1:Global, yeah, okay, but you know, yeah, how that's going to take place. Those are at least two payments companies. But I think when you get um because a software company, the payment is just like a part of it, it's an after payment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a such a small part of it and and right now, you know, we we had a podcast with alan koppelman a few weeks ago and I, you know he's like, if you're not out selling software, like I don't know how long you're gonna be around. But it's a different sale process. The payment just happens to be a part of it, but the software, right, I mean, that's not, it's, it's way more dynamic.
Speaker 3:And so bring that up, because we're actually in the midst of integrating in with a software company that does edge computing and actually it's a hardware company that does software and there's a another software company that comes in in the auto auction business and so we're integrating to both of these things and it's going another software company that comes in in the auto auction business and so we're integrating to both of these things and it's going to be this robust package and I've it just kind of happened by chance and it's like now I'm sitting here going yeah, this is the, this is the key to big wealth right there, like having some niche that you fill. You fill the void of and it's everybody uses it. I mean, look at toast.
Speaker 1:toast did that with the restaurant industry totally and and it's funny because I was talking to somebody I was uh down in mexico this past weekend at a music festival and the uh, I was taught we were. I was with somebody else and we were telling them about what we do in the industry we work in and the person had a little bit of knowledge and he was like, yeah, software gets so specialized. He said even today, he's all. I saw somebody who was like you know, I want to say it was like a pool and jacuzzi contractor software.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Does it get more specialized than that, right, yeah, you know so. Yeah, like software is becoming so specialized and any time that you have it, you need a payment application. But you get payments companies, because of economies of scale, they're just gobbling these things up, but they don't really know how to use it.
Speaker 1:Yeah right, I mean, I find it very interesting. The software system that we use for the firm is owned by a payments company, and the crazy part to me is that the software company, the minute it got purchased by the payments company, it will never become. I think it will obsolete itself at some point because the payments company oh yeah, look, we look at different softwares all the time. We want our software company to be nimble and ours isn't, and so we're actually migrating to a new one that's way more nimble way. It's just an easier use Like. It's much more friendly to the user and and anytime.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so Are there specific attorney products that that are used like do all the attorneys use, like the toast of attorneys, you know yeah, there there are many software systems, so we've got.
Speaker 1:It's interesting like yes, the? The simple answer is yes, but there's different aspects to like any business where the law firm has its own. We've got research tools, you know. There's some AI tools that are coming out, like you know, and they're and they're all different, you know, and and the utilization of them is all a little bit different and they're not necessarily merged, but everybody's building in AI into the software for whatever the use is, even for us.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you have to. Ai is crazy. I wanted to talk about that. We use AI every day, and ChatGBT, gronk and all the ones that are out there that are relatively cheap and easy to get into and every part of our business is being automated by AI, and that's how I see that these businesses are going to get bigger. Anybody in the payment scene that hasn't adopted AI is going to get left in the dust.
Speaker 2:Riley, can you talk about some examples? What are some ways in which you're using that in your business daily?
Speaker 3:I'll type up. I'll type up an email, or I'll get an email from somebody and I'll go to type up my response and I go no, let me just copy and paste this into chat GBT and let chat GBT do the response and that's how we started is just letting chat GBT rewrite our emails in a much cleaner, easier to understand fashion, and we had a great good success with that. So then we moved that to all of our marketing stuff, all of our blog posts, all of our white papers I mean, everything is created by chat GBT. At this point, it's funny. So I was working on my headshot to give you guys, so that when you promote this you can have a headshot, and I had chat gbt touch up the headshot and it's not there on the imagery. It's pretty funny. It's like here's me, here's the baby, yeah, yeah how pretty are you now?
Speaker 3:no, it wasn't even. There's like perfectly white teeth that are all centered there's like everything, and I'm just like my ears were bigger and my cheek bones are higher.
Speaker 2:I'm like that looks like my brother maybe, but not me it's called catfishing and it's now, it's now part of the industry. Yeah, absolutely, yeah, that's great.
Speaker 3:My wife's like you cannot send them that picture. I'm like why? I mean, it looks good, I got perfect straight teeth and they're like. She's like no, you cannot send that.
Speaker 1:That is not your doppelganger.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, it's clearly fake. But, yeah, I mean, that's why we're using it. We have ChatGPT do phone like inbound phone calls. Also, there's another program that is slipping my mind right now. If I think of it, I'll tell you, but it basically is a call-out program that does dialing for us. That is pretty dang good, I mean, it gets results.
Speaker 1:I'm waiting for that AI tool that has a dialer that says don't violate any of the provisions of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and you can program that into it.
Speaker 3:It'll figure out how to do it. I wonder if you can do that on this one I'll have to do that?
Speaker 1:Oh, you should ask.
Speaker 1:I think that would be funny so, hey, one of the one of the things, one of the things when we were talking about topics that I found interesting to talk about, which you got you kind of sit in the center of, is that? You know, in the time that I've been in the industry, the term high risk is just it's kind of a nebulous thing and it moves because, know, we go from like this is really like high volume. You know, high volume, high risk, and the subject matter of what high risk is it changes and it's changed over time. Right, where do you see high risk going? Like, do you? I mean, can you see, you know, kind of being a visionary what is out on the horizon?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I think that the metaverse and things like that, these augmented reality things that people are using I don't use them, but I think that that is where high risk is going. I think you're going to be able to do in-app purchases, whether you're playing in the multiverse or the metaverse or whatever it is. I think that that's going to be something that is not known, and high risk is always just what's not really known. You know what's not, what's not general business because, like five years ago, like you said, things have changed.
Speaker 3:Five years ago, e-commerce was high risk. It's not really high risk if you're doing straight retail e-commerce at this point. If you're delivering a product, there's real no risk. There's no real risk there at this point other than some friendly fraud, um, so that that tolerance changes over time and and morphs into different things. I think that the metaverses are the next big thing. We have a partner that invested into acadia and he bought into a metaverse company as well, and that company is about to do their ipo and it's going to be he's going to be a billionaire at this point, because as soon as that happens, I mean, it's just ridiculous the amount of people that are using the metaverse and metaverses that are out there. I don't see it, but I know that that's going to be a big payments thing.
Speaker 1:So you think that's like. What is that all through Oculus? How are people accessing that? Because for me, I'm with you, man. I'm too old at this point.
Speaker 3:The adoption probably isn't going to happen.
Speaker 1:But I know that it's out there and that people are going to do it and and and, and I can see how people while look like I'm not a gamer, right, I mean I? I go back to nintendo and atari and you know sega before it was, you know like we just bought, bought a Super Nintendo for my daughters, yeah, like. I date myself with all that Commodore 64.
Speaker 2:Yeah, zork, right, I mean, let's go back to it.
Speaker 1:But I will say that you know the gaming culture. I actually looked at this. I probably shouldn't even say this out loud. I think this is a great business idea, but if you could create a know how gamestop has kind of gone away. I think the next iteration of something like gamestop because there's a community around it is having kind of a community center, which is a business that does e-gaming, that does lessons, that does tournaments, that actually like where kids can go hang out, like the country club, with other kids that are doing something similar that they're all interested in. Well, I've heard that they have it in europe, but I don't know if they've got something here that's really focused on it.
Speaker 3:But I I do believe that I think e-gaming is going to be an Olympic sport in the next year or two.
Speaker 1:I agree with you, but I, oh yeah, and I think so too. But I also I think that there's a lot of business opportunities around that that people aren't really tying into where I do. I still believe that even with gamers, they like other people, they want to be around other people and they want to compete and talk shit, and so, yeah, not just do it online right, Like yeah. So I kind of feel like there's an opportunity to get into that, and even though I'm not into it, I see the opportunity and I kind of see the metaverses being the same thing.
Speaker 3:Look at Roblox, look at the company Roblox. I mean, they're a giant company, now publicly traded, and I know about them because I follow nancy pelosi stock trades and so I've done pretty well that way. Um, but roblox is a giant company. That's just a game company. That's crazy, and it's just in-app purchases and it's exactly what I think is going to the future of all of the games is going to I I mean, you're gonna be able to do call of duty and be able to buy stuff right then and there, immediately, and uh, yeah totally.
Speaker 1:Hey, look, I can get some dishwasher parts on my call of duty game, alexa. Yeah, all right ma'am. So I'm going to give you the last word. You know, this is this is somewhat your show Like what's the biggest takeaway you want to leave us with? About either Acadia or payments, or what do you think the most important thing is that you can share with us?
Speaker 3:I would say let's all get the fraudsters out of the industry. Let's get the people that are the bad actors out as many of us, the people that are here for the long haul let's get rid of the people that are here on the short-term side and band together, and to do that, I guess, is the best thing. If we see somebody doing bad business, let's let everybody know. Payments should fuel growth. I think they shouldn't drain margins. They shouldn't be a weight on the business's shoulders. Let's help people make informed decisions and make this a thing that empowers business owners to make more money, and then we make more money and everybody's happy.
Speaker 1:I'm with you. Hey, how do people get? How do people get ahold of you?
Speaker 3:So you can call me on. My cell phone Number is beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. Just go to Acadia paymentsnet and hit the email us or contact us for them, and we can get ahold of you that way.
Speaker 1:And just for the people out there that don't know.
Speaker 2:Acadia has got two A's at the front of it Two A's, that's right, just so you know.
Speaker 3:I meant to ask you?
Speaker 1:where did you come up with that name? Are you Cajun?
Speaker 3:No, when I was a kid, I was a professional wakeboarder and I worked in the wakeboard industry for 20 years of my life. Just on the side, it was like the thing that paid for the travel around the world. And so there was one of the people that was involved in the industry pre-2008 was a company called Acadia, and so this is like a show of respect to the wakeboard industry that I came from, that now I'm doing real business and I'm a real adult, really adulting, but still having fun with it, and so we keep it. You know we keep the logo and the colors schemes insulting, uh, but still having fun with it, and so we keep it. You know we keep the logo and the colors schemes and all that stuff changing and, uh, I like to. I like to do fun things like that and not make it look like every other blue and white website that's out there of all the other payments companies and just kind of set ourselves apart differently and then to show respect for my roots you know?
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, according to the painting behind you, I can see it, bro. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Funny story about this. We got these in Santa Cruz. I had some friends that own a restaurant and right when I met my wife at the time we just started dating she takes me to this restaurant that she worked at in Santa Cruz. She went to UC Santa Cruz and so I see this painting and I'm like dude, those are amazing, like I got to have that painting. Well, sell me the painting right now. He's like they're not for sale. And I'm like everything's for sale. Just sell, name a price, I'll buy it, I'll pay. He goes, no, they're not for sale. Well, like, fast forward 12 years, they sell the business, sell the restaurant. He goes hey, all those paintings you like, they're all for sale. And I'm like yeah, thank you. So he sold me, sells me all these paintings, 11 of them for six thousand dollars. Just like, cool, didn't think anything of it. I take them into the, to the local art gallery. They're worth like 20 000 a pop and I'm like get out of town dude like I felt bad I felt
Speaker 3:like I need to give you more money for this uh but that's the whole thing about art.
Speaker 1:Man, I bought so much art like just yeah, you know, you get it in art. We have art walk here in san diego and I go every year and I find something a little bit interesting and every time I go, you know, and I might pay, you know, 500 bucks for something or maybe 700, you know, and it I will tell you, like it, randomly, I looked at something that I bought and it appreciated a lot because the artist got big, you know and you just don't know yeah, well look at that banksy guy.
Speaker 3:I mean he's doing the people are selling his things for hundreds of millions of dollars.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's like basquiat right, I mean you know it was sort of one of those things where it's here. Let me draw something on a napkin like this is worth it yeah, all right, well look riley, bangor, from Acadia Payments. We appreciate you coming on and. Acadia is two A's at a net A-A-C-A-D-I-A net. You can reach out to Riley or Daryl Peppers' partner. Good guys, and we really appreciate having you on.
Speaker 3:Hey, thank you. I appreciate you guys taking the time to let me be on.
Speaker 2:Okay, absolutely See you on the next one.
Speaker 1:Thanks for having me be on.
Speaker 2:Okay, absolutely. See you on the next one. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Payments Experts Podcast, a podcast of Global Legal Law Firm. Visit us online today at globallegallawfirmcom.