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Leaders In Payments
Leaders In Payments
Mary Kay Bowman, EVP & GM of Payments & Financial Services at BILL | Episode 390
Mary Kay Bowman takes us behind the scenes of BILL's mission to transform financial operations for small businesses through an expertly crafted blend of software and financial services. As EVP and GM of Payments and Financial Services, she brings decades of experience from pioneering roles at Amazon, Square, and Visa to tackle the challenges that interrupt the daily flow of small business finance.
The conversation reveals how BILL serves as both operational software provider and financial partner to thousands of small businesses across every industry vertical. Working alongside 8,000 accounting firm partners, the platform handles everything from accounts payable and receivable to employee expense management, while supporting transactions across 130 currencies. What truly sets BILL apart is their seamless integration of workflow management with money movement – creating a system that doesn't just process payments but optimizes cash flow at every step.
Looking toward the future of payments, Bowman offers a refreshing perspective on the balance between frictionless technology and necessary visibility. While consumer payments often aim to disappear into the background, B2B transactions require strategic visibility at critical moments. This nuanced understanding comes from Bowman's remarkable journey through the evolution of digital payments, beginning at the dawn of internet commerce when she volunteered to tackle the "bumpy intersection" between money movement and technology.
Ready to transform your business's financial operations? Discover how BILL's intelligent platform can help your small business thrive by automating the noise and complexity of everyday finance, letting you focus on what truly matters.
Welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast, where we talk to C-level leaders from across the payments landscape. We'll be discussing the products and services that impact the payment space today, as well as trends and predictions for the future of payments. We will also hear stories from our guests about their journeys to the top.
Speaker 2:Hello everyone and welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast. I'm your host, greg Myers, and on today's show we have a very special guest, mary Kay Bowman, the EVP and GM of Payments and Financial Services at Bill. So, mary Kay, thank you for being here and welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Hey, thanks, greg, I'm really happy to be here.
Speaker 2:Great, so why don't we start out by having you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Speaker 3:maybe where you grew up, where you went to school, where you currently live, a few things like that. Well, I grew up in the Midwest. I'm a big champion for the Midwest. I grew up in a small town in Iowa called Marshalltown, near the middle of the state, near the middle of the country. So I kind of grew up in that Midwestern ethic where Main Street and small towns were the most important things, and came from a family of teachers and farmers and some entrepreneurs as well. So that's how I grew up. I went to school in Minnesota and I now live in Seattle. So, a little different than the center of the country, I'm enjoying the very upper left corner of the country.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Well, let's talk about Bill. So I think most of our audience will know who Bill is, but maybe tell our audience, for those that may not know what Bill does.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So Bill is a financial operations platform for small and mid-sized businesses and what we try to do is take some of the heavyweight financial practices accounts, payable, accounts, receivable, employee expense management so basically how they're managing their customers, their vendors and their employee expenses, which can get very noisy.
Speaker 3:It has a lot of transactions, a lot of ins and outs, affects cash flow greatly. And we do this not only directly but through our partnerships with more than 8,000 accounting firms who are the partners for those small businesses all across the country. So in financial operations that means we have both financial operations software to manage accounts, payable, accounts, receivable, employee expense management but we also have the financial services for both the money movement, payments and also for working capital. So we also provide loans and expedited settlements to optimize working capital and we also do international payments and foreign exchange management, so kind of all of the things that ride along with all of those loud, noisy transactions that interrupt the day of all of our small businesses. And then we also help them settle it, which means we can also bring it together and help them reconcile it, really get a good picture of their financial position.
Speaker 2:Okay, are there certain verticals that you focus on more than others?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we are really focused on small business and, as you know, small business SMBs reach every vertical. So we have everything from light manufacturing to heavy manufacturing, restaurants to professional services like accountants and legal professionals, creative services we have just about everything under the sun.
Speaker 2:And you're based in the US. Do you do business internationally?
Speaker 3:We're based in the US and we, from a payments and financial services perspective, we have eight different payment products and we transact in 130 currencies.
Speaker 2:So primarily for US-based businesses and their subsidiaries outside of the US for now, and also some in Canada, okay, so, on the payments side specifically, is it a lot of B2B payments or is it also just your typical card payments by consumers?
Speaker 3:So it is B2B typically, but we also have card payments as well, but primarily card payments from other businesses. So we help small businesses pay with their preferred payment methods, which may be cards, may be another payment method. We also help those businesses and larger businesses accept payments in their customers' preferred method. So that means we're doing everything from checks, ACH, sometimes wire transfers and all of the cards.
Speaker 2:Okay okay, and you mentioned that you have a lot of partnerships, working through accounting firms. Is that the main way to get business, or do you have a sales team? Or maybe talk about the go-to-market a little bit?
Speaker 3:Yeah, we do it. We really respect our accounting partners because they add so much value and in some cases they are the outsourced accounting and finance team for our small businesses. So it just really makes sense to work with them and we work very deeply with them. The software that we provide them is actually the software they use to serve their customers and to operate on their behalf. But we also work directly with small businesses that may have their own internal finance organizations. We have our own sales team. We have, obviously, our own direct channels through our website as well, but we have our own sales team. And then we work with channel partners, including some banks and other financial services companies who are looking to enhance their services, and software companies that are looking to embed payment and financial services and some of the financial operations into their software.
Speaker 2:Okay, okay. And what would you say differentiates Bill from your competitors out there?
Speaker 3:I think one of the things that differentiates us is that we can do the software side of almost all of those financial operations. So, as I said earlier, we really focus on the things that take up the majority of a small business's day from a financial operations perspective. That is, accounts payable management so getting the funds from their customers, getting all of the documents needed to put out their work to their customers and being able to receive payments back. Also accounts receivable, accounts payable, and then employee expense management as well. And then we have. I think one of the things that differentiates us on all levels is that we have our financial services matching to each of those. So we're not thinking about just recording or automating or managing the workflow of the software, but we're also pairing it with the right money movement and optimizing the cash flow for our customers.
Speaker 2:Well, let's talk about the future a little bit. In your view of things, where do you see the payments industry headed, say, maybe the next three to five years?
Speaker 3:Oh, that's a question how much time do you have, greg? No, I think that there are some things that are pretty typical and will continue within financial services and payments for B2B or B2C. I think some of those things are being very trusted. You know, people are entrusting us with their lifeblood, which is the cash flow of their business, and so trust, I think, is always going to be there. Convenience is always going to be there.
Speaker 3:People like to pay with the way that they want to pay, not to have to pick a vendor and then kind of reform the way they do things for the vendor's sake, I think. So trust and security, convenience, and then cost optimizing your cost and then optimizing the value of your workflow I think those are going to be, if I were going to say, persistent. I've never known anyone who would like a transaction to be slower or less predictable. I've never known anyone who wants like a transaction to be slower or less predictable. I've never known anyone who wants it to be more expensive than it needs to be, and I think those are the kinds of things that, at Bill, we really focus on, because we feel like the trusted partner for all of those small businesses who may not have their own security team, may not have their own fraud team.
Speaker 3:But then we look ahead to the future Is pairing all of that with more advanced technologies like AI, more intelligent systems, least cost, routing, the ability to maybe sure that we're doing it responsibly and that we have the right humans in the middle of all of this technology? It's hard to say that AI is not going to be a big part of the future, for whether it's managing fraud, whether it's optimizing cash flow, whether it's optimizing workflow, which is some of the things that people think payments are slow, but sometimes hard to pinpoint what's slow about it? It might be the connection, it might be the fraud mitigation or it might be the workflow of all of the approvals that have to happen, and so I think AI will be a great partner for us and for our customers in that.
Speaker 2:Okay, are you hearing anything about crypto or anything that typically comes up in a lot of these conversations?
Speaker 3:It's a great question. I come from more of a technology background. I came to payments and financial services from a tech perspective before. Fintech was the phrase that everyone used. I was probably doing fintech a few years before that, and I always start to a certain degree with the technology, just understanding it, what it can do for all of the functions.
Speaker 3:And when I think about digital currencies, I really start with blockchain, and I think that's another persistent capability in financial services because it helps us solve so many problems. So if you take blockchain and apply it to ledgers, if you apply it to contracts, there can be better distribution, better coherence, more data traveling through a transaction, and so those are all things that I think are great, and I think blockchain will continue to influence how systems are developed behind the scenes. And then when you think about the digital currency side, as you said, I think we're open to all of the things that our customers need. So stable coins and digital currencies digital fiat currencies are something that we focus on a lot. I think not all of the digital currencies are built the same. Some still operate more as a commodity rather than transaction currency, and so we keep an eye on all of it, but we try to include as much as we can that is relevant to our customers' needs today.
Speaker 2:Is there any insights on, maybe, the future of the RTP in the faster payments world?
Speaker 3:Yes, I think, straight through processing, real-time processing, account-to-account processing are all parts of those payment choices that our customers have and our payments needs that our customers have. So of course we're there. We absolutely use the best route for the transaction, for the type of transaction, for the need from the customer and from the preference of the customer or from their preference of their vendor or their customer on the other side of the transaction. So when you think about it like that, including the real-time payments and account-to-account as they become more available, we are definitely tied into them and as they become more available or more commonly used, we'll use them more. I do think that it's interesting.
Speaker 3:Everybody was thinking about real-time payments as kind of the solves-all for a few years. As it turns out, we still have to do the work of trust as it relates to any of the new technologies that we bring on for our platform, for our customers, because trust never goes away. What happened with faster payments is a lot of great things happened faster, but then also a lot of the bad things that happen in a payment system also happened faster, and so when the fraudsters find a new window into a transaction or the fraud vectors or the risk vectors change, you really have to learn that system and then apply not only the new technologies that are available but the experience that you have from seeing payment systems evolve over time and being able to kind of pick the right tool for the right job at the right time. That's where I think about real-time payments, and it'll be exciting to see where some of these things go as payment systems develop.
Speaker 2:Okay, curious what you think about. You know, on the consumer side, and a lot of payments companies that are not B2B are thinking about how do you make it frictionless, how do you make the payment disappear? That's a value prop that a lot of people are using and I'm just curious what are your thoughts on the B2B side of that? Do we get to the point where it's so frictionless that the payment actually disappears, so to speak?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think that when you zoom out and add the software that we use to manage the financial operations, the financial automation, the financial workflow, there's parts of the transaction that I absolutely agree. If you could make it completely frictionless and fade into the background. I've worked pretty much 25 years in trying to make the things that don't have to matter recede into the background. But in a B2B setting, sometimes you need certain parts of the payment experience or the payment capability very visible.
Speaker 3:It shouldn't necessarily come to the background because a vendor may be holding an order for shipment that the small business needs based on that notification or that trigger, and so until everything that surrounds a payment is also frictionless and is receded into the background, then I can think that the payments could be completely frictionless. We can make all of the hard parts of the payments way more frictionless. So, application for payments, applications for credit, there's many things we can do to make it easier. Authentication can be easier and fade more into the background. Certainly, fraud management capabilities should be receding into the background whenever possible, but the important thing is to know when the customer needs to know about the money flow, and I think that's when they come back into the fore and we kind of bring payments back into the relevance and then it can go back into the background when it needs to be, so it doesn't clog up the rest of commerce.
Speaker 2:Right, right, that makes sense. So let's switch gears a little bit and talk about you. Maybe talk about your professional journey, kind of how you got started in payments and financial services and where you've been and how you got to Bill.
Speaker 3:I'm sure this is going to be somewhat similar to a few people that you've talked to. I know that a lot of people that I work with and have worked with over the years in payments kind of will describe it as I somehow accidentally got into it.
Speaker 2:Fell in and can't get out.
Speaker 3:And now I'm here, no, so I would follow that pattern. So I started in 99 and 2000 in what they called the internet startups of the world in Minneapolis and was really learning about how software. I had worked in software companies on-prem large implementation software companies prior and I was really fascinated about how the software could move to the cloud and not only could that help the company but it could help all of their different trading partners. So I was already interested in how there's a web of trading partners and entities around each business and the thought of connecting that through this radical technology. At the time the internet was really interesting to me and one of the things that I found at that company and then mergers and acquisitions I ended up at a platform company called Digital River and one of the things that was common in my experiences early was that where the intersection of where money moved and where technology played, it was a very where the intersection of where money moved and where technology played, it was a very, very bumpy intersection. It had lots of potholes. It kind of wasn't fit for purpose at the time. So at that time in my career, and probably still now, whenever there's a traffic jam or a collision to or a knot to unbundle. I volunteer for that tour of duty. And so nobody really raised their hand to say, yeah, I'll go fix this chasm between traditional financial services and banks and acquiring institutions at the time and the marketplaces that were being built. And I did, and what I found was just so much possibility. It's so critical to making many of these platforms work. But there was like a translation problem on both sides. You know, one side was talking internet and technology and changing business functions and the other side was, you know, talking about risk management, fraud capabilities and credit underwriting, and you know those things were not translating, especially at that time.
Speaker 3:I moved from Minneapolis. I was recruited by Amazon to work on in 2004, working on their financial that seam. That is very important. One of the places that I think payments disappeared first are on platforms like Amazon, where one-click checkout and the speed of fulfillment really became part of the customer promise of buying online. So I also laugh.
Speaker 3:I went there, didn't really know much about the West Coast, didn't know if I was going to stay in Seattle, but I thought it would be a fun adventure. So I committed to going to Amazon for two years and I stayed for almost 12. And then I stayed in Seattle for a lot longer than that. So I'm almost 20 now. So, yeah, that's a little bit about my journey. I can't even tell you how many things we built, changed and evolved during my time at Amazon, because Amazon built and changed and evolved so much and the moving of money had to match the innovation on the rest of the business and technology side. So it was never a dull moment, I can say that.
Speaker 3:And then from there I joined Square as the head of their payments function for Square for small businesses, and small businesses have always been. I've always had a soft spot for small businesses, probably because I came from a small town and small businesses really were the lifeblood of the community. You know they sponsored the little league teams and the t-ball teams and things like that. So, and then I spent a little bit of time about four years at Visa, working on the global platform and helping to do some transformation there, but also really focused on making the payment system really expansive and friendly for not just the banks and the traditional processors that had always been a part of the payment system but for fintechs as well. Maybe I also had a belief that I might be back at a fintech someday, so I thought it was a good match and then I joined Bill about six months ago to lead payments and financial services to pair with our software business, and I'm really excited to be back in the saddle serving small businesses again.
Speaker 2:Well, what was it about Bill that attracted you?
Speaker 3:I've worked for several founder-led companies and Rene is a multi I think four-time entrepreneur and he has a real passion for helping small businesses thrive and do what they are meant to do. So I loved working with Rene. I also, as I said, have a soft spot for small businesses and I think that just because you are a small or mid-tier business and you don't necessarily have the largest IT department, you don't have proprietary software that you necessarily can write. I don't think that technology should be a blocker for that, and I don't think financial services should be. And in both ways, small businesses are somewhat still it's shocking to me, but somewhat still underserved in financial services and in technology services, and so making both more accessible was also a big driver for me. And then there are just great people at Bill we just you know who all share the vision and really are focused on making a difference in customers' lives.
Speaker 2:Okay, okay. Well, what are some things you're passionate about?
Speaker 3:Maybe one work-related passion and one personal passion under the I'll put it under the umbrella of agile or small A agile where you're bringing lots of the people together from technology, maybe from legal, maybe from compliance, if you work in financial services and actually getting people to work better together on that mission to do things. So I tend to focus on that. I love kind of the nerd bits of technology, like really figuring out as we're exploring we're on our second generation of embedding intelligent systems and AI into our applications. I love to be at the coalface of that. I like to, in my free time, also take a Python class or to start thinking about how to learn to program agents in the AI space. They're not good so I wouldn't recommend any.
Speaker 3:We're not launching any of those at Beryl. Those are just on my spare time on the side of my desk. And then I just really love to see how technology can be a change agent for customers, but also for customers beyond the transactional aspects of it, which is funny because I work in financial services side of the business. But when transactions connect at that intersection of technology and financial services, it can change the nature of the relationship between those two sides in the commerce transaction Things that maybe the business didn't think were possible are now possible. I really love geeking out on all of those things, so I would say those are kind of some of my bigger passions at work. Okay, what about?
Speaker 2:personal passions.
Speaker 3:Personal passions, it's going to sound a little bit similar. I'm a bit of a dabbler in sports and scuba diving and hiking and some of those things. Personally, I like watching sports as well. Right now it is March, so it would be unfair of me not to mention March Madness. I am a big NCAA women's basketball fan. I come from Iowa. There's a big focus on women's basketball in Iowa, so I'm running into March Madness right now with a high passion for how far the University of Iowa women's basketball team is going to take it.
Speaker 2:Okay, okay, that's great. Well, good luck. Hopefully they do well. So if someone comes to you, mary Kay, and they say, hey, maybe they're right out of school, maybe they just graduated from Iowa, and they say, hey, I'm looking at building a career in financial services or payments, what kind of advice would you give them to be successful?
Speaker 3:Well, one thing I will say about my journey in the past is relatively few people will come and ask you about a career in payments because it's not one of the things that is necessarily seen before you get into that. But if they came for technology or fintech, what I would say is just be an explorer. One of the reasons that I even got into this industry and was able to build my way into great companies like Digital River and Amazon and Square and Visa is because I had the experience from sitting in the seats that I said yes to Some of them. I questioned at the time why I said yes to them, because I have done everything from building a transactional foreign exchange engine. As somebody who didn't come out of foreign exchange trading, that was a bit of a learning curve.
Speaker 3:But you sit in the middle of things and if you learn a little bit of everything that's on every side of it by saying yes to exploring, I think you find what you're really interested in.
Speaker 3:I love these connections, I love that intersection and I have repeated that in multiple parts of my career. I also have an affinity for two-sided markets. I found that through exploring in some of these spaces and the economics behind it, the behavioral economics of money, and so what I would encourage them from themselves is to be an explorer. And then the other thing that I would say is to work for people that you get energy from, that you admire. Even if you're wrong, even if that particular job or opportunity isn't right, you're going to make real connections with people that might last your whole career. So those would be the two things one on the personal side and then one on the never say no side and always be learning. I guess my mom was a teacher, so I think that is just. It's so deeply like buried inside of me that, and I think technology today almost requires you to always be learning.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's all great advice, so I appreciate you sharing that. So, as we sort of come to the end of the show, is there anything you'd like to discuss, anything else that we haven't hit on yet that you want to talk about or mention to the audience?
Speaker 3:I think that I don't think I have any other big pieces of insight or advice, but I really have enjoyed the conversation. I think it's super important for us to think about how you apply technology, how it impacts real customers, real business and life, and not just technology for technology's sake. So I think Bill does a great job of thinking on behalf and ahead of our customers on what technology could really serve their needs and bringing out something that is easy for them to discover, it's the right fit for the right time, and that they can immediately see impacts to their business, which is part of the shift of technology. It used to be you implemented software and then you trained people on that software for many moons, and now people can really experience the benefits of capabilities from technology immediately, and that's one of the things that we're really excited about at Bill.
Speaker 2:Okay, great. I think that's a great way to wrap up the show. So, mary Kay, thank you so much for being on today. I know your time is very valuable. So thank you so much for being on today.
Speaker 3:I know your time is very valuable, so thank you so much for being here today.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much, greg, I appreciate it and to all your listeners out there. I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments podcast. Make sure you visit our website at leadersinpaymentscom, where you can subscribe to the show and where you'll find our show notes. If you enjoyed listening, please share on your social channels as well.