The Payments Experts Podcast
Expert payments attorneys discuss the electronic payments industry from a legal perspective.
The Payments Experts Podcast
Why Smart ISOs Don’t Get Locked In | Build Optionality Into Your Payments Stack with NMI | PEP069
NMI’s message is clear: you don’t need to lock into a single processor or bank to scale. With modular tools and real-time control over key systems, ISOs, PayFacs, and software platforms can adapt faster, negotiate stronger, and retain full ownership of their merchant relationships.
Whether you're building a payments stack from scratch or optimizing your current setup, this conversation offers concrete strategies for preserving optionality, tightening operations, and future-proofing your tech.
Payments Shouldn’t Feel Like a Marriage You Can’t Leave
Featuring: Rob Hoblit, CRO at NMI (https://www.nmi.com/)
Hosts: James Huber (Managing Partner) and Jeremy Stock (Podcast Producer)
📍 Presented by Global Legal Law Firm
In this episode:
We sit down with Rob Hoblit, Chief Revenue Officer of NMI, to explore how payments infrastructure can stay flexible, modular, and future-ready—without locking you into a single processor or bank. Whether you're an ISO, PayFac, or software platform, this conversation covers what it takes to stay in control of your merchant relationships while building toward scale and valuation.
🔥 Topics Covered:
NMI’s evolution from gateway to full-stack modular platform
Tools like Merchant Central, ScanX, and network tokenization
Transparency in residuals, reporting, and onboarding
ISO strategy for 500+ MIDs vs. vertical SaaS exits
Why modular architecture = optionality, higher valuation, lower risk
💡 Who Should Watch:
ISOs and agents building long-term book value
SaaS leaders looking to monetize payments without replatforming
Processors and PayFacs aiming to offer a stickier, flexible solution
Fintech developers needing smarter merchant onboarding and oversight
📊 Takeaway:
Optionality isn’t just nice to have—it’s the strategy.
Start with flexibility. Grow with transparency. Scale with control.
👉 Subscribe for more expert-led conversations on payments, fintech law, and merchant processing.
**Matters discussed are all opinions and do not constitute legal advice. All events or likeness to real people and events is a coincidence.**
Visit: https://www.globallegallawfirm.com/podcasts/
A payments podcast of Global Legal Law Firm
But what I've always liked about Iris is one, they were the first to really go, hey, here's a tool that everybody can use. And it has always been choose your own adventure with Iris. It was never in a box. And so when I saw it was selling, I was going, you know, great, congratulations to the former owner. Um, but that it was being sold to you guys in particular, because if FiServe had bought Iris, which they probably should have, um, it's a whole different story. But when you're selling to a company like NMI, who, like you said, is behind the scenes and we're having this is just a suite of tools, it really elevated that company because there's competition out there. There's prior priorities MX system is fabulous. Everybody loves it, but you're married to priority. When you go to NMI's tools, it's you get to do, like you said, still choose your own adventure. You guys aren't tied to the processor, to the bank, to anything like that. And you're also not competing with them.
SPEAKER_00:Welcome to the Payments Experts Podcast, a podcast of global legal offer. We hope you enjoy this episode. We're very excited today. We have an in studio podcast. Joining us as a special guest, we have Rob Hoblet with NMI over at NMI.com. Rob is their chief revenue officer. Rob, it's great having you in the podcast studio, as well as our usual, our regular James Huber managing partner of Global Legal Law Firm. Gentlemen, we're looking forward to a great conversation today. Take it away.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, well, NMI is a huge company, and we're standing at uh, you know, everyone knows NMI, and Rob will tell us about this a little bit. And I think you came up at the conference and we're doing our thing at the booth. And I don't know if you knew or somehow it came out that Rob's actually my neighbor and just moved to my neighborhood. And so he's on a group chat with like 30 or 40 other dads. You know, we're right about to hit the limit where we probably need to go to WhatsApp. And I added Rob to that. And then immediately after it was just an eruption of our HOA is doing this, that, the other thing. And I was like, Hey, Rob, you having fun? And he's going, you know, walking down. He's like, I had no idea. And I was like, You're probably sorry now that you know. It's one of those things where it's like ignorance is bliss. It's this beautiful, wonderful committee, but then you see the underbelly, the sausage being made.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what you don't see on the outside can shock you sometimes. Yes. I was, I was uh, I'm not moving. I'm gonna stay where I am. You're gonna stay. That's good.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:But uh no, crazy. Thanks for uh thanks for having me on. I actually I think I walked up to you in Chicago and asked you if you knew Travis.
SPEAKER_02:Yes, right.
SPEAKER_01:Uh because I have met him and I've you know I've had lunch with him. I know him as well. He's a local as well. And then we got to talking, and here I am. So excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_02:And we'll try not to talk about our 18-foot 18-inch elevated concrete sidewalks that our community just paid$700,000 for and kids are falling off. We won't talk about that. We won't even say which HOA it is, maybe. How about that?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Because you don't want a lawsuit, James.
SPEAKER_02:Well, not another one. So uh, anyways, why don't you tell us? Because a lot um, you know, people know in the industry, they know who NMI is, but it's such a powerhouse company. Why don't you tell us a little bit about what NMI does um and do and maybe what they're planning on doing?
SPEAKER_01:Okay, awesome. Well, um, yeah, so I joined NMI three years ago. Uh, I lead our customer-facing teams, uh, sales as well as support. And, you know, basically, we're a we're a payment acceptance platform. We offer a lot of services. We work 100% with partners. So our customers who we work directly with are ISOs, software companies, and banks, uh, probably in that order in terms of how big they are. Um and we started out our, you know, our the company started almost 25 years ago in Chicago. And the first thing was payment gateway. And essentially matching, you know, processors on one end and shopping carts and devices and that kind of a thing. And over the years, we've really grown that um to do a lot of addition, a lot of additional stuff. We, first of all, for our customers who are on uh the payment gateway, we offer a set of additional extensions. Probably the hot one right now is a product called network tokens that we are in the process of of ramping uh kind of as we speak. We, as you I think uh mentioned, James, we we are uh we bought a company called Iris. We uh our our term of art now is Merchant Central. Uh that's the product uh that ISOs predominantly use. And you know, the way that I like to talk to customers about that is are you happy with your tracking prospects? Are you happy with onboarding? Are you happy with your reporting? Are you happy most importantly with your residuals? If it's not perfect on any of those things, let's chat and talk about that. And so that's something um we've added, as well as we now offer a product called Scanix. You may have heard of a company called Agreement Express. Uh, and what this does is automate uh for companies that are risk-bearing the process of doing underwriting and that process. Uh the other thing that we recently have gotten into is uh we have a uh an integrated solution where uh partners of ours can essentially do NMI, use work with NMI all the way from the gateway to the processing to the acquiring. So this was something that we uh kind of have assembled in uh you know almost like Lego pieces. And that's a big part of our value proposition is that flexibility, modularity, and choice, where our view is you've heard of us, right? Because you're in the industry, but we actually are not there to get the glory. We are there to operate underneath the covers. Our partners know who we are, they take advantage of that, and then they build the solution that works for them. And sometimes that means using, you know, maybe a specific piece of technology that we offer. Other times it, you know, the full kind of schmear, as it were, in terms of what we offer. But you kind of make those choices, and in many cases, those choices are gonna change as your business grows.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_01:So you start off with something and then you kind of uh you know you grow from there.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, you tweak it how you want. I mean, I have a long, somewhat checkered past with Iris. Um, you know, Dimitri, I consider him a friend. Um, except for one time he invited me to dinner after I wrote an article and it didn't talk about Iris and it talked about a CRM company. And he invited me to dinner saying, Hey, come out to dinner, lots of clients you get to meet, it's gonna be great. It was just him. And he goes, Nobody knows who you were talking about in that. This is years and years and years ago. He goes, didn't appreciate that article. And but then we, you know, laughed it up, and it was anything, and it was, you know, nothing high stakes. Um but what I've always liked about Iris is one, they were the first to really go, hey, here's a tool that everybody can use. And it has always been choose your own adventure with Iris. It was never in a box. And so when I saw it was selling, I was going, you know, great, congratulations to the former owner. Um, but that it was being sold to you guys in particular, because if FiServe had bought Iris, which they probably should have, um, it's a whole different story. But when you're selling to a company like NMI, who, like you said, is behind the scenes and we're having this is just a suite of tools, it really elevated that company because there's competition out there. There's prior priorities MX system is fabulous. Everybody loves it, but you're married to priority. When you go to NMI's tools, it's you get to do, like you said, still choose your own adventure. You guys aren't tied to the processor, to the bank, to anything like that. And you're also not competing with them. You know, I know a lot of ISOs and agents out there, they're going, why am I gonna work for you? You know, you're if you get a hack or even because you guys are competing, you're gonna take my stuff, but that's not NMI's game, right? I mean, you have a suite of tools and everything, but you're not in competition with your customers. Yeah, our RVU is we are Switzerland.
SPEAKER_01:Right. We don't pick sides, we offer tools that our partners can use, you know, kind of however they want. But yeah, when it comes to Merchant Central, we're continuing to add processors that we support on that. And, you know, our view is exactly what exactly the way you said it. Choose your own adventure, you figure out what the best way to use it is for you, and then you know, kind of go from there. But we're there to help you along. And I'd say the other thing that we do uh do as a company is we're very much into problem solving and working with our partners on problem solving. And that's something that actually has become, I'd say in 2025, a much bigger thing, actually. Right. Where we have customers coming to us saying, hey, I have this specific technical problem with a merchant I'm trying to onboard. And that can be, you know, the number of transactions, it could be, you know, I'm trying to solve this acceptance issue, it could be anything like that. And so a lot of what we offer is not only that tech, but we offer, we have a the largest part of my organization is not sales, actually, it's actually support.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_01:We have more support people, far more than than we have in sales, and that's a big part of our value prop is the opportunity to work with them as well.
SPEAKER_02:Right. You create the pro, if you build it, they will come and it's there. And it was actually interesting to start seeing NMI at the trade shows with a presence because I'm going, oh wow, like you guys are actually out soliciting because people don't, they don't really get it, you know, of that this is actually, you know, something that I should be out looking for. Because most, you know, agents, they go to the ISO, they have a solution, but even a small ISO, you know, 10, 15 deals a month would benefit.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I mean, look, we sign up, you know, hundreds of new partners a year. And a lot of those partners are very new organizations that are just getting going. And they're like, hey, we wanna we wanna get started here. We're, you know, we're an ISO, or maybe we're a software company that's focused on kind of some vertical specific application. We offer them the chance to get going. A lot of times people start relatively small with us, and then over time we'll see that grow. Generally, what we find uh for Merchant Central and for customers that take advantage of something like that is once they get to usually 500 mids, I would say is kind of the bottom there, maybe up to a thousand. Anything above that, definitely they'll they'll benefit. Yes. Um, but that's usually the kind of size where we start to say, okay, now let's talk about a bigger solution and how do we how do we get that for you guys?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. I mean, look, if you have a couple hundred mids, you're you're probably not direct with the processor processor. And we just did a podcast on why you should go to one of the bigger guys. But yeah, even if the bigger guys have their own system, this this allows you to double check what's going on. And, you know, merchants, not really applicable, but for the salespeople, getting this to double check, you know, there's people. Um, I think James Shepard started something where he, I actually know he did, where he will audit your residuals and make sure you're getting paid. But okay, you audited them, gotcha. No, do it every month. And it would be something. And then you guys, I know that you guys will plug into basically anything. So you can feed it through and you can board through here. Um, and then you also keep your super ISO or your smaller ISO in check, and you might show them, hey, I'm actually savvy. I've partnered with these guys. And then guess what? Now they're giving it a look and they're going, oh, great. Hey, thanks, sales agent, for showing us how smart you are.
SPEAKER_00:Hey, James, I got a question. Can I on what you guys just talked about? Maybe it could be helpful for a conversation. For someone who doesn't know, you were mentioning how NMI, maybe as opposed to you mentioned priority. You guys are open to all these other platforms and and work with other uh your priority too as well.
SPEAKER_02:But they have this uh a comparable system as far as I'm saying with residual reporting and onboarding.
SPEAKER_00:So how is it? Is NMI just better? Have they just invested more in the technology? Why are other why are your competitors not doing this?
SPEAKER_01:I think our view is it nobody really has the scale that we've developed at this point. And what we're we're we're in a position now where we're actually able to start accelerating what we can do for customers just given the scope and scale of the company. So if you look at how many myths you have coming through NMI through one platform or the other, it's definitely over half a million. I think it's substantially larger than that, actually, if you count up all the different things that we touch. So, you know, our view is if you work with us, you will be future-proofed in terms of where the market's going. We're gonna continue to follow trends in the industry, how things are unfolding. And a lot of people know, you know, like that, that they know that they can work with us. And it's interesting because we work with a lot of privately held companies that are thinking, okay, we're we're gonna we're trying to get to an exit at some point. And so when you're building a software company, especially one that is has an exit on its mind, being modular creates a lot more value for your potential buyer than somebody who says, Okay, I gotta buy this thing. I'm now hardwired into one way or the other, and I have to work with you know this group, or I have tremendo uh you know a tremendous amount of technical debt if I want to onboard it, that kind of a thing. So I think what we're finding is a lot of customers will will use us because they're um, they want to preserve that optionality because they don't know where their business is going. And preserving that is really important for them.
SPEAKER_02:I think that's a great segue because nobody in the payment space knows where the business is going.
SPEAKER_00:All right. Thank you for listening this long to the Payments Experts Podcast, a podcast of Global Legal Law Firm we've had in studio today joining us, Rob Hoblet, Chief Revenue Officer over at NMI. You can find Rob at nmi.com. And as always, James, thank you for being here. Gentlemen, great conversation. See you guys on the next one.
SPEAKER_02:You always say this long. So at the end, they're gonna be like, I wasted this much time.
SPEAKER_00:No, I'm telling you, it's it's a thing of it's a way of thanking those people who do listen all the way through, which is like about 43% of the actual audience goes to the very end, but you're rewarding them for doing so.
SPEAKER_01:You've done it.
SPEAKER_00:Great job. Thanks, guys. Rob, thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks for coming now. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Payments Experts Podcast, a podcast of Global Legal Law Firm. Visit us online today at global legal law firm dot com. Matters discussed are all opinions and do not constitute legal advice. All events or likeness to real people, and events is a coincidence.