The Payments Experts Podcast
Expert payments attorneys discuss the electronic payments industry from a legal perspective.
The Payments Experts Podcast
Compliance-as-a-Feature: How ISOs Keep MIDs (and Sleep) | Website Compliance That Sticks | PEP086
ADA, Chatbots, and Compliance-as-a-Feature: Turning Lawsuit Traps into Portfolio Stickiness (with Michael Williams, Clym (https://www.clym.io/)
Cash is disappearing, card rails rule, and “set it and forget it” legal copy is now a liability. In this fast, no-B.S. episode, James Huber and Jeremy Stock sit down with Michael Williams, co-founder of Clym, to unpack the lawsuit vectors quietly hitting merchant websites: ADA accessibility claims, “chatbot wiretapping” suits, and a maze of state privacy rules that change faster than roadmaps. The punchline for payments pros? Compliance is product—it reduces fines, preserves MIDs, and keeps portfolios from churning.
Why this matters to payments teams
ADA goes digital: Website accessibility claims have exploded—think large volumes with five-figure settlements that crush SMBs and create needless merchant attrition.
Wiretapping via chatbots: In two-party consent states, recording or logging live chat without explicit notice is becoming an easy plaintiff’s layup.
Dynamic, not static: What’s compliant in one state might fail in another. A one-size policy either over-frictions conversion or under-protects risk.
Operational drag: When demand letters hit, support, finance, and legal get pulled off mission—right when merchants need them most.
What we cover (built for ISOs, PayFacs, acquirers, ISVs)
The new lawsuit economy: Why “fines without findings” moved from ramps and bathrooms to menus, receipts, and live chat logs—and how automation lets plaintiffs scan thousands of sites a day.
From GDPR to geofencing: How a CFO’s privacy headache birthed a horizontal, website-level compliance stack—accessibility, privacy, “wiretapping,” and geo-controls—designed to update without re-implementation.
Real-time compliance: Continuous scanning that flags risky changes (new widgets, menu updates, policy drift) before a demand letter arrives.
Friction that fits: Show less friction where law allows, more where it’s required—so marketing converts and legal sleeps at night.
Retention math: Portfolio stickiness improves when an ISO bundles easy, merchant-installed compliance at a partner price—versus losing the account after a suit.
Practical playbook you can deploy this quarter
Website attestation at boarding: Add a one-page checklist: ADA accessibility, privacy notice, cookie behavior, chatbot recording disclosure, and where each appears (entry, checkout, receipts).
Two-party consent guardrails: If you operate in consent states, on-page chat notice plus explicit “continue” intent = safer logs.
Geo-aware policies: Serve state-specific privacy/consent text and feature friction based on visitor location; don’t let the strictest state throttle all traffic.
Evidence kits for defense: Time-stamped screenshots of menus, signs, policy pages, chat notices, and a weekly crawl log. Merchants need this before a letter arrives.
Quarterly scans, monthly deltas: Automate site scans; review deltas with merchants; fix drift (plugins, templates, receipt footers) without re-platforming.
Field signals you’ll recognize
“Register-only” disclosures that fail conspicuous-notice tests.
Live chat that asks name/email without recording-consent language.
Menu PDFs that screen readers can’t parse.
Traffic from restricted states hitting prohibited SKUs.
Demand letters starting high, settling mid-five figures—and repeating.
**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/podcasts/
A payments podcast of Global Legal Law Firm
Like it's funny you make the comment about uh cash, right? I hosted a poker game last week at my house and there were eight people and six of them did not have cash. I'm like, wow guys, what and so they all Ven mode and I uh Ven mode you, yeah, exactly cash and but I was like, what do we and then but that's what you think about like you know, the the movement is away from cash. Yeah, 100%.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. We say it all the time on this podcast. Payments has become the center of the universe, right? Is what Chris Tryden always says. You can't run a business in 2025 unless you're taking credit card payments, pretty much.
SPEAKER_01:And you can't really run it that effectively unless you're thinking about all the things, you know, just going and signing up with whomever out there, that's not the best route because you know, there's a new uh settlement coming down that's came down that says that you know, the the rates are going down, certain cards you can reject giving them. But if you're on a just a regular payment processing thing where you're getting, you know, flat three, four percent, that's not gonna affect you. If you're on the only merchants that are affected by the new settlement is if you're on interchange plus pricing. And in that case, you're going, yeah, I'm not taking rewards cards anymore.
SPEAKER_03:Welcome to the Payments Experts Podcast, a podcast of global legal law firm. We hope you enjoyed this episode.
SPEAKER_01:And it says Michael Williams Esquire. But you're not esquiring right now. What are you doing?
SPEAKER_00:I'm not esquiring. Well, I'm always esquiring, I suppose. But uh it's hard to. I tell people I'm an attorney, I'm an it's really your attorney. Right. But it's uh so I am an attorney by trade. Um, but about six years ago, I started this company, Clime, which is a regulatory software um compliance company. And uh we offer website compliance services for merchants. I am one of the co-founders, I serve as a company CFO, and I'm also I am actually a licensed attorney in California, DC.
SPEAKER_01:Nice. Yeah, we I I ran into um David, who's hiding in the room silently, um at a conference, and he told me about what he did. And I was just like, oh, mother, I fucking hate those guys. Not you. I hate those plaintiffs' attorneys that come do shakedown lawsuits. There was one, there was a big one, it was the ramps, and I think he actually ended up getting disbarred because he was he did like 200,000 of them. Sure. And it's just a shakedown. And you know, the website one is number one, like if you're blind and trying to use my website, like that seems really hard. Um, but anyways, the it's just shakedown. Like, I can't imagine there's actually any legitimate person that was seriously upset because they couldn't read a website because they were partially and were like, I want money from them.
SPEAKER_00:You know, there's there's definitely that big aspect of it. So just to kind of uh expand on your point, so the Americans with Disabilities Acts was started about three decades ago, right? And the first 30 years of its enforcement, it basically allows or is trying to facilitate equal access or reasonable accommodation for those with disabilities to access public goods and services. So, right, the classic example is you're a restaurant, you have a bathroom stall, it's not wide enough to accommodate a wheelchair, right? Right. That's an in-person ADA violation, and a private attorney can actually sue you to enforce that, right? A lot of those are also nuisance lawsuits, like they can provide some good, but it created a challenge for people for merchants in the physical world. Most of that action has moved online in the last five years, right? So last year there was an estimated 250,000 of these online accessibility lawsuits initiated. Right. Average settlement's$20,000. So there's an estimated$5 billion of these nuisance lawsuits filed by shakedown lawsuits, exactly. As we kind of talked off camera, there's a reason why there's a lot of attorney's jokes out there.
SPEAKER_01:So yeah, well, exactly. No, I mean I've always said it, plaintiff's attorneys just scum of the earth. Just awful. Well, my backgrounds is a tax attorney, so it's uh I can appreciate such a lot of people. I knew that, but yeah, I didn't know that, but I just figured that you didn't go from doing that to this. Um I say that because we do we have some class actions, but ours are the we're fighting the good fight. We're not fighting the shakedown fight. I remember with um the TCPA, it was a big thing, and we can't record phone calls because from where we're representing ISOs, they were all recording calls and they're listening in on their customer service people because they're gonna make sure they're not saying crazy shit to people on the phone. So we got it. We picked up a bunch of these, and it's just shakedown, shakedown, shakedown. And Chris and I met up and we're like, hey man, we could we could do these and it probably change our lifestyle quite a bit. And we just go, yeah, but I want to go to bed at night. Like I'm a small business owner, I don't want to be, you know, attacking my own people, you know, my own kind or whatever. So, you know, our class actions are against really bad people.
SPEAKER_00:Well, it's a visa. It's great that you mentioned that, right? Because that now has also moved online, where it used to be the case that that they're basically trying to prosecute those under like state wiretapping laws. Right. If you have a chat bot on your website now, there's a lot of ambulance chasing attorneys that are um suing merchants for recording chatbot conversations. So if you ask for someone's name or you ask for their phone number or their email address, like that can all fall under state wiretapping laws. If you're typing it in? If you're typing it in.
SPEAKER_01:So you're typing it in and you can say, I didn't think anybody would be listening to this. Exactly. And so you're typing it.
SPEAKER_00:You are typing in. I don't expect anybody to respond. So it's, you know, again, not to get in the weeds, it's but it's, you know, as you know, it's like a two-party consent state law. And so if you're in one of those states where there is a requirement to let someone know that you're recording that or that you're documenting that, which all functionally all of those chatbots are, then you're su you could be subject to state wiretaping laws. So that's another thing that you know Climb is here to help resolve. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So your chat bot has to say, oh, by the way, I'm actually listening to you. Exactly. Yeah, that's funny. Um the attorneys are very creative. So yeah. Yeah, they're awful.
SPEAKER_03:I don't want to say this is a world that attorneys created, but you're not wrong.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah. Well, and then the bad attorneys, then you need good attorneys, right? So it's like let the, you know, there's mice loose, you know, unleash the eagle, and then the puma has to eat the eagles and all that. So we're the eagles though. Love it. Yeah. So tell us um So here's the horror story. You're sitting there, you've got a business, you get a draft complaint and a demand letter that says, We're suing you for hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you've never been through this, you have a heart attack, you you know, book your flights to the you know, islands, you convert all your money to Bitcoin, and then you get in touch with an attorney who says, Oh, hey, calm down, you're probably gonna pay these guys, you know. I always start high, you might have to pay them 25,000 bucks, and then you I usually get people out around, you know, seven, twelve K or whatever. But still, even that emotional roller coaster of getting that is just horrible. And you're selling you're running a business, and most people aren't running. I mean, even if you're running a website business, running the website's not your business, running the business is selling selling your stuff or giving your services. So I always, you know, when we when our clients we've the first one of these defended, I go, Oh my gosh, we have to get this service. And so when David talked to me, he's like, hey man, you know, like you should probably get on your website. I was like, I'm pretty sure we have it already. I'm not an idiot. And then he told me I was an idiot. So well, not anymore. Yeah, not anymore. Now, now I'm not. So tell us more uh how does the program work? Because I'm going, this is a no-brainer. Every business should do this. You're reducing what I think is inevitable. Yeah. Because these guys will they're they'll come, they'll find you eventually.
SPEAKER_00:That's right. Um, let me take a step back here and just kind of talk a little bit more broadly about what climb is and what it does, that sort of thing. So 2018, um, you kind of know why it exists, right? So 2018, I was a CFO of a travel management company based in Beverly Hills, right? So even though we're based in California, um, we had customers and we did events in Europe, right? And 2018 is the year that GDPR came online. So for those who don't know, GDPR is the world's first modern data privacy law, right? So it kind of governed how merchants could collect, store, and process personal data. Right. So even though we're based in Beverly Hills, because we had that European connection, we had to get compliant with GDPR. We hired a consulting firm, we paid them$100,000, and the day after a consulting engagement ended, we found ourselves out of compliance. Oh. Right. So that's a challenge. Um, so that's the light bulb moment for climb. We basically said, okay, there's not that many merchants out there that can write a check for$100,000 to comply with one regulation. And if you're out of compliance on day two, why would you ever bother? Sure. So we bet we we set out initially just to build a scalable, flexible, and cost-effective solution around privacy, right? And so we did that for the first few years. But then you're right, the feedback that we got was like, hey, that's great, but what else can you guys do for us?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I've got it something immedi uh immediate because you're, you know, the privacy violations, you're being like, oh, you're compliant with every law in the world. Congratulations. So, but it's it's one of those things is you know, what we always say is like, don't wait to call us. Yeah. You know, in our business, we're going compliance and you know, payments and all of that. We're going, if you like, I'll get it all the time. I was like, oh, even existing clients, like, why didn't you run this by me real quick first? Because now you have to pay me so much money to defend this lawsuit.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So we're trying to take an ounce of prevention rather than the pound of cure that you're talking about approach, right? But that involves, you know, we develop privacy and then all of our customers said, okay, great, but then we either hear of these other lawsuits or these other lawsuits going on. How can you help us? So then we build out the accessibility module that we just talked about. We build out a wiretapping module that we just talked about. You know, if you're a higher risk merchant, we have solutions around, you know, figuring out if people are trying to access your website from states where they can't, right? If you're selling CBD, you know, and someone's using a VPN to try to access your website from a state that doesn't allow that, we have a solution for that.
SPEAKER_01:Which is now all of them coming up that we just Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So we're trying to so basically what we've done is we built um we've taken a horizontal approach to compliance and we've built out an all-in-one online regulatory compliance solution. Yeah, and it's great, and it's mostly set it and forget it, right? Yeah, that's right. So we're the only um, first of all, we're the only um company in the space that's taking that horizontal approach. So we're covering it across multiple regulations, and we're the only one that sets you up kind of out of the box, right? So we have all you know, we are set up on a in the US on a state-by-state basis, globally on a country by country basis, or depending on the particular country on a jurisdiction by jurisdiction basis. So once you implement Climb on your website one time, you're up and ready to go. Right. So then as regulations change, we can push out um the updates to you without having to uh re-implement or uh update your your system at all. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_01:How are you keeping your ear on the track? I mean, one thing that we've wrestled with, we'd get calls of, you know, how do I, you know, set up my dispensary in a compliant way. And this is years ago when they legalized in Oregon, all of our payments clients there decided they all wanted to go be farmers and not a single one of them worked out because it was it's just a nightmare. But I'm going, how am I compliant? And then we we would go like, okay, we can check everything for this location. And then people were like, oh, let's build a tool that any dispensary could use, but you couldn't do it because you had to you'd have to go to every single city council meeting to do it. So how do you guys stay on track of what's happening? Like I know what we do, we've been consulted for stuff like this, not, but like somebody who's um selling, you know, something that has to do with geolocation. What I always do is I go look at Illinois first, because I go go look at the worst. Sure. And then you should be good everywhere else.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. That's a good that's a good point. So the couple points there is so we have an internal team that's constantly monitoring regulations. We also work with outside attorneys on the on the topic, you know, again, is because these regulations change. So, like, for example, California implemented its privacy law in 2020 and then it changed it completely in 2023. That's right. You know, so just gotta they keep you on your toes.
SPEAKER_01:They keep you on your toes. So you have people, what, using AI or you know, just have their ear to the track?
SPEAKER_00:We review every uh, you know, there's announcements that get made by regulatory bodies. We read all of them, we parse through them, you know, we have a ton of information on our website. If anyone's interested in reading about these updates, we kind of provide that in layman's terms. But we have in an internal team and then we work with an external team again to to stay ahead of that because that's what our that's what our merchants rely on us for, right? Now, the other point you make is um you know, you're looking towards somebody like an Illinois where they're gonna have the most restrictive environment. Yeah, I think that's that that's a good approach to keep yourself on the safe side of the law. Now, I'm an attorney, you're an attorney, one of our co-founders is a marketing guy. That restrictive approach does not really work for him.
SPEAKER_01:Doesn't work.
SPEAKER_00:Doesn't work. There's always that natural tension there.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, if you don't sell anything to anybody, you'll have zero liability.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. Um so what we the reason that we've taken this geofence dynamic approach is to say, okay, let's say you're in a state like California, you have to provide a lot of friction, both from an accessibility and from uh privacy and from a wiretapping perspective, right? If you're in Alabama, you can provide a lot less friction on a merchant's website.
SPEAKER_01:That's a really good point. Yeah. Yeah, you don't want to lock people up unnecessarily. Exactly.
SPEAKER_00:Because even if they're not an e-commerchant, the brand engagement that they lose by having a two of much for friction um on their website is significant, right? So you want to make the marketing people happy while also keeping the attorneys happy. So that's that that needle that we're always trying to thread.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's great. Because yeah, I mean, our our approach is when we're pre when we're approached with something like this, is we have to have to go the most restrictive, then I'm going, well, I can do it state by state, but it's gonna cost you a half a million dollars. So no thanks. Yeah, and by the time I get done on state 50, I'm gonna go back because it changed.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. And again, if merchants are not able to keep up with that, and so this is why we sp we're specializing in staying on top of these regulations on merchants' behalf. And again, if those things change, we'll alert our merchants that they've changed and we'll push out the solution. And we're also constantly monitoring the merchant's website. So, like, for example, um, we have this thing that we internally call real-time compliance. So we're we're scanning the merchant's website continuously. So if it changes, um, if they add something that they maybe are not supposed to, that we can we can identify that and we can kind of alert them to like, hey, this is not categorized correctly or this needs to be removed or things like that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I mean, I look at it because the world we live in, we hear about, as far as I'm concerned, anytime two people do business together, it goes horrible because that is 100% of the businesses that come in our door having a dispute. And that's I'm doing a little bit of hyperbole because we also do a lot of compliance work and have people, you know, running copacetic businesses. But we see we hear the worst of it. So it's like, what is it? The the guy who's like the insurance adjuster, he's just like, You're dead. Everybody, you know, if you don't put a seatbelt on, you're toast. But I go kind of like putting a seatbelt on, this is a no-brainer because when these things happen, it can totally fucking ruin your whole business. Yeah, you can go you can be out of business because of this, and it is, it's a you know, what a couple hundred bucks a month or whatever you guys are charging. I'm going, this is a no-brainer. Yeah. Especially even startups, because I'm going, if you start like we see a lot of guys, they they start off an ISO and right out the gates they get sued. Sure. Then it takes them an extra eight, nine months just to get going because of their sales budget, part of it's coming to me.
SPEAKER_00:That's right. And that's again, we're trying to uh implement an ounce of prevention rather than the pound of cure, right? Yeah. The other part about this is the scalability of these plaintiffs' attorneys that are now filing these nuisance lawsuits, right? Like in the physical world, you could walk into a um a restaurant, 50, maybe 50 restaurants a day. Maybe. Maybe you can scan a thousand websites a day if you're an attorney, maybe more.
SPEAKER_01:More. You could probably get a bot to go go scan all of these and to kick out the complaints and to find the emails and send them out.
SPEAKER_00:That's right. And oftentimes, even if you're even with the merchants that are trying to take the approach of being compliant, oftentimes, again, to your point, these laws change so frequently, they have a business to run, right? And so they're not staying on top of the laws and like as much as they need to. And so when they can't do that, you know, we like to be the outsource solution for them. And also, you know, the pricing you mentioned is more of our retail pricing. And we're working in this space. We offer a ton of price compression for both our ISO partners and their merchants. Yeah, um, and so they're even uh able to obtain the solution for much cheaper than retail.
SPEAKER_01:Michael, tell us how you how you got involved in the payment space. It's a good question. Um, so it's a good question because you thought of it, actually, by the way.
SPEAKER_00:It's all good. Um so four. Uh so four years ago, I did not know the payments injuries existed. I, like a lot of other people, probably 95% of Americans.
SPEAKER_01:Way more than that. Oh 99%. Sure. Yeah, I'm being conservative here.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, okay. Uh thought that you would go into a restaurant, swipe your credit card, and Visa takes three percent. Yeah. Right, whatever they take. And then um Dave Landis, uh, who's our chief revenue officer, joined us about four years ago from the company G2, which offers website monitoring services um and has done so for a long time. He joined us and just completely opened, I think they call it red pilling, but like, you know, opened my eyes to like what was from the matrix.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I've never heard that before. Oh, I knew what you're talking about, right? Yeah, that's it.
SPEAKER_00:Uh so basically he opened my eyes to this particular industry, and I think it's uh a fascinating space. But without uh Dave, I wouldn't know it existed.
SPEAKER_01:Well, yeah, I mean it's it's every single business in the world. Yeah. I whether uh I mean, maybe there's still some cash. Uh we went at a bar the other That was cash only, but they had an ATM there. So they're still involved, kind of. But yeah, I mean, that's what you know, we were talking offline of you know, you guys don't have competition. You certainly don't have any competition in the payment space. But we say the same thing is, you know, we don't really have competition. People are always like, oh, aren't you worried about, you know, you guys are just giving information away for free? We're like, give it away. We don't have competitors. Now there's other lawyers, but there's not enough payments lawyers, and they're definitely not as amazing as we are. Yeah. Probably aren't even come close.
SPEAKER_03:James, you've been doing this almost 20 years now.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I was gonna say, yeah, Dave has about 20 years of experience. Well, like it's funny you made the comment about uh cash, right? I hosted a poker game last week at my house, and there were eight people, and six of them did not have cash. I'm like, wow, and so they all Venmo, and I have cash, and but I was like, what do we and then but that's what you think about like you know, the the movement is away from cash. Yeah, 100%. 100%.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. We say it all the time on this podcast. Payments has become the center of the universe, right? Is what Chris Dryden always says. You can't run a business in 2025 unless you're taking credit card payments, pretty much.
SPEAKER_01:And you can't really run it that effectively unless you're thinking about all the things, you know, just going and signing up with whomever out there, that's not the best route because you know, there's a new uh settlement coming down that's came down that says that you know, the the rates are going down, certain cards you can reject giving them. But if you're on a just a regular payment processing thing where you're getting, you know, flat three, four percent, that's not gonna affect you. If you're on the only merchants that are affected by the new settlement is if you're on interchange plus pricing. And in that case, you're going, yeah, I'm not taking rewards cards anymore. Which is hard to do too. I mean, how are they gonna do that? It'd be like, What do you what do you got there? No, put that away. Like if you're at a restaurant, you know, the ones that are hardest hit. Yeah, like, sorry, we're sir, we're not taking your American Express card. And he's gonna be like, What?
SPEAKER_00:Well, also, it may not even like that's I've got my AMX rejected before at restaurants, but now it's like, well, chase sapphire versus something else. It's the same logo, but a different rewards program. I think it's gonna create a lot of chaos. Because again, most consumers have no idea that this all exists.
SPEAKER_01:Right. Yeah, exactly. No, but they love using their rewards card. I mean, we we use our for everything. So yeah, and it's on my phone too. So what if I tap my phone, they're gonna go, nope. So, anyways, like you said, James, just decide no.
SPEAKER_03:Don't lose your cell phone, right, these days. Like the guys you're playing poker with, you know. Exactly. They don't have their cell phone, they don't have their money with them. Most of your clientele, and as we come to the end of this podcast, most of your clientele, Michael, are they on the merchant side or on the more of the enterprise side? What are you guys seeing?
SPEAKER_00:We have a healthy mix. So we have a number, we have different channels, right? So we have um the payments channel, we have a retail channel, um, which is more like enterprise, mid-market enterprise level customers. Uh, and then we have we partner with technology companies as well. So like MSPs and those kind of things, similar kind of reseller model that we have um with the payments companies, but it's it's pretty well diversified at this point. So we handle, you know, we say like Joe's Pizza Shop on the street all the way up to you know Fortune 1000 companies.
SPEAKER_01:The bummer is they're probably not going to be like, oh, thank you for that compliance solution because it saved me all this money because now they're not gonna know how bad it could have been had they actually gotten popped. But it's a really easy, in my opinion, is a really easy sales pitch. But I've seen, you know, at least 20, 30, probably 50 of these things over the you know, oh, of course, time I've been doing this.
SPEAKER_00:A lot of what we do is awareness as well. I think people just scare them.
SPEAKER_01:Well, like too. If you don't buy this, you are ruined.
SPEAKER_00:So there's a carrot and a stick, right? So there's the stick is try to help your merchants avoid getting sued. Right. The carrot is if you have an inaccessible website, there's a study that was done last year that so merchants that are transacting online are missing out on billions of dollars a year. Like then the at the estimate last year was seven billion dollars that merchants are missing out on from having inaccessible websites. Is that real?
SPEAKER_01:That's uh I mean, I don't do the So who's trying to do the the stuff? Who can't access the web?
SPEAKER_00:I think people with vision impairments or if there's a certain it's mostly a vision impairment, but you know, if there's people who get confused by a website, they can also have a challenge with it. No, I think even if you're not an e-comm merchant, let's say someone goes to your restaurant website and they can't see your menu or it's inaccessible in some way. You're that's you're right. You're missing out on the brand engagement as well. So it's for the e-comm merchants or those that are transacting online, you're missing out on the volume potentially. Um, and then for the non-e-com merchants missing out on some brand engagement. So there is a car and it's like for me as an attorney, it's more of the stick in terms of like, hey, what if your merchant gets hit with a$20,000,$25,000 lawsuit and they have to pay an attorney five or$10 or$15,000 or whatever the fees are, right?
SPEAKER_01:Are they gonna go out of business? Are you gonna lose the account? Exactly. Or are they gonna get a call from another ISO that goes, oh, hey, I heard that was bad. We've got this bundled service for you.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. And especially, you know, from a retention standpoint, you know, the because we're offering such a discount off of retail when we're working with a payments partner, there's if they leave, if they a trip from that ISO, hey, they're going to pay retail now. They're not getting the same deal. Right. So that's an additional level of stickiness for our ISO partners.
SPEAKER_03:I got a quick question for you, Michael, if you don't mind. Because as James mentioned, we're a client. Yeah. And I would like you to talk about the process of when you were first introduced to us, and I know I put you in touch with our web team. Yeah. Um, can you talk to us about what happened? Because it seemed like it was just fast and easy. But what what did we not see?
SPEAKER_00:Sure. No, of course. I mean, you pretty much saw the whole thing. It's fast and easy. So I'm an attorney, I'm not a developer, right? So I I when I told when we were were starting the uh to produce the product, we're trying to start to develop it. My mantra was, hey, it's gotta be easy to implement for non-tech people, right? And so all that's required of a merchant is a copy. If you can copy and paste, you can install Clime software. It's you literally fill in your name, your usually like your URL, a couple little pieces of information. You get a piece of code, you copy paste, you put it on your website, and you're done. The whole I think the quickest I've seen it done is like 12 seconds, but the average merchant should be able to do it in five or 10 minutes. You know, it's their first time. Um, we have videos, we have knowledge on our website, we have knowledge based articles, we have um, you know, if you have a Shopify or WordPress or a Magenta, what do you whatever you have for your website? We have everything kind of set up and ready to go. The whole point of this is compliance is never easy, but this time it can be.
SPEAKER_01:Does it have any effect on SEO or anything like that? Great question.
SPEAKER_00:Um, so Google actually, if you have a more accessible website, Google ranks you higher in pages. So um, so that's helpful. It's another carrot. Yep. Um, but also from an SEO perspective, like if you are this kind of goes back to our conversation about being dynamic, right? So if you and I think one of the big parts about this is a lot of the the the reason it's such a challenge is it's not really about where you're based as a merchant, it's where your customers are, where your website visitors are. So, like my backgrounds as a tax attorney. I started my career at Ernst ⁇ Young as a state and local tax attorney on like income and sales tax, right? So if you're based in Texas as a merchant and you're selling to California, you might be liable for California sales and income tax, right? Depending on certain thresholds. Same thing with privacy, same thing with these other kind of accessibility or wiretapping laws. That same base in Texas, but consumer website visitor in California could still apply. So that's why you have to have this dynamic approach. So what we see oftentimes is that the merchants are taking either, if they're taking an approach at all, it's very static and it's the most restrictive approach, but they don't have to do that in every jurisdiction. Right. So that's why you have to be more a little bit more dynamic. And the technology that we have allows us to do so, which is helpful.
SPEAKER_01:Awesome. Yeah. Well, I've learned more. I thought it was just, you know, put a little bell on your website, but it's actually much more robust than that. What uh what do you want our uh listeners or tens of millions of listeners to walk away with knowing about climb or you or of course and will Jeremy will flash up your contact information and hit you up?
SPEAKER_00:Sure. I think maybe the takeaway is there's a lot of risks that the merchants face. The ISOs can be uh a trusted partner and provide a significant value add for their merchants at a super reduced price. The merchants can self-service. You know, one of the things about that our ISO partners appreciate is that there's no technical integration for them, right? So the merchants are self-servicing, but again, they can do it in five minutes or less, and then they're set up and ready to go with an out-of-the-box solution that's constantly updated. Um, so it's it's it's easy. There's minimal technical integration, and it covers both your e-com and non-ecom merchants. It covers your low-risk, your restaurant retail hospitality, as well as your higher risk CBD, nutraceuticals, those kind of things. What we like to tell people is that we have something for everyone, and then we have everything for someone.
SPEAKER_03:There you go. So that's great. Yeah. I'm curious. Sorry, if you don't mind me asking. Climb. Is there what's the name? Explain.
SPEAKER_00:I told you I'm not a marketing guy. Uh it's uh You are now. There you go. Uh originally when we were privacy focused, it was kind of an acronym for consent lifecycle management. So what's the why? Why would you ask? Uh the so you know it's Spanish for and exactly exactly. Because that would be C CLM, and that wouldn't that wouldn't work. So uh so anyway, so but that's that was the original intent. And then again, it's interesting how businesses evolve. Um, and we were iterating and we just said, okay, let's now become this more horizontal, take a more horizontal approach and cover this broad spectrum of services, which made total sense intuitively to me. It's like, hey, one solution, one system to you know learn, or you know, if you want to get really deep in the weeds on climb. The other part about it, you know, climb is super easy out of the box for small merchants and then for enterprise uh merchants, if they want, they can customize it pretty much however they want. So if you know if you have an enterprise level merchant, it also works for them. So that was part of the point, is it's got to be scalable um for enough for SMBs and also for enterprise. Love it.
SPEAKER_01:All right, how do people get in touch with you?
SPEAKER_00:Uh, you can visit our website, www.uhclimb.io. We also have an email address, sales at climb.io. Again, we work uh a lot with our ISO partners to uh to offer basically our reseller program, and uh the ISOs are getting uh it at a super discount rate, and then they can pass that savings along to their merchants.
SPEAKER_03: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 lawfirm.com. Matters discussed are all opinions and do not constitute legal advice. All events or likeness to real people and events is a coincidence.