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Leaders In Payments
Leaders In Payments
AI in Payments Series: Featuring Payarc VP of ISV, Zac Schneiderman
Zac Schneiderman shares a deeply personal journey from political science student to VP of ISV at Payarc, where he's become a driving force behind the company's innovative approach to payment integration for software platforms.
What does it take to build successful partnerships in the fast-evolving payments ecosystem? For Schneiderman, it begins with understanding what software companies truly need: feature-rich payment solutions that deliver reliability, flexible pricing models, and exceptional support. "Speed to revenue is the name of the game," he explains, detailing how Payarc's approach combines cutting-edge technology with human expertise to activate partners quickly.
The conversation reveals fascinating insights into the integration process – often the make-or-break moment for ISV partnerships. Schneiderman estimates a third of signed contracts fall apart during integration, which is why Payarc invests heavily in dedicated sales engineers, weekly check-ins, and robust sandbox environments. Their proprietary AI tool, PIE AI, represents the next frontier, helping debug code and streamline developer experiences.
Looking toward the future, Schneiderman predicts a significant "decoupling of SaaS and payments" as technology evolves at breakneck speed. Software companies will increasingly rely on specialized payment partners rather than building in-house payment departments. Meanwhile, AI applications continue expanding beyond integration support to include lead generation, external developer tools, and merchant conversion campaigns.
Thank you. Scale their businesses one payment at a time. At Payark, ai is more than a buzzword. It is integrated into everything they do, from predicting merchant churn to risk assessments, to self-service tools. Join us for this special series on AI in Payments.
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, zachary Schneiderman, who is the VP of ISV at PayArk. So, before we get started, I do want to mention that we've had several people from PayArk on the show, as we've kind of gone through this discussion about AI and ISVs and we've had on Dustin Siner, who, of course, is the Chief Revenue Officer, john Minitaglio, who is the CTO, jared Ronski, the co-founder and president, and I think about a year, maybe a little more, we had Zach Martinez, the CEO, on the show. So we've had a lot of great discussions with the folks at PayArk. We're going to continue that today. So I want to welcome Zach as our special guest. So, Zach, thank you so much for being here today. Thanks for having me, greg. So, if you don't mind, can you start out telling maybe a little bit about yourself, maybe where you're born, where you grew up, where you currently live, a few things like that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. My name is Zach Schneiderman. As Greg mentioned, I'm the VP of ISV here at Payark. I've been in the payment space for about 10 years and a little more than 10 years and I'll get to that in just a moment. But a little bit about me personally. I'm born and raised in Montreal. I've lived pretty much my whole life there and continue to live there today. I'm married with two beautiful daughters. My oldest is named Ro, she's four and a half, and my youngest is named Via, who's two and a half. So a proud girl dad over here.
Speaker 3:As I mentioned, I've lived in Montreal for my whole life. I went to McGill University, which is the largest university in Montreal. I actually studied political science and history, so nothing to do with technology or business. I thought I wanted to be a lawyer until I realized what my day-to-day would look like. No offense to any lawyers out there, but I think, like a lot of us in this fintech or payment space, kind of stumbled my way into it After trying my hand at politics and law for a little bit and realizing it wasn't the path for me. I was hired by Optimal Payments, which later rebranded as PaySafe For those of you who are familiar, which was a payments company founded in Montreal. I was hired as a junior relationship manager on the ISV team, which I think has served me really well in my career, as the way I learned the business was in supporting our partners first and foremost. So I kind of learned the business from the ground up, so to speak, and understanding what went on behind the curtain and what was important to our partners in order to ensure success of a relationship. From there I graduated, if you will, into some sales roles and some management roles and have found myself a pair almost a decade later.
Speaker 3:Maybe I'll start with just a bit of a lighthearted anecdote about my first few moments in payments. As I mentioned, I was hired by Optimal Payments in about 2015 as that junior relationship manager. I mentioned that they rebranded as PaySafe. That's pretty crucial to my story here, which is on my first day of work.
Speaker 3:I think the first email I ever received, first foray into the corporate world, first foray into payments, was from our CEO at the time, whose name was Jolie and Off, and I was thinking to myself, you know, as a 24-year-old kid, getting an email from the CEO on the first day. This is interesting, but not what I expected and the email was actually an invitation to a call later that day, a company-wide all-hands call with an important update. So I joined that call and what was shared with us on that call was that Optimal Payments had purchased the Skrill Group, for I believe the purchase price was 1.2 billion pounds, which was the largest digital wallet in Europe at the time, after PayPal, of course and as part of that acquisition they bought a product called PaySafeCard, which they liked the name, which led to the rebrand of the company.
Speaker 3:But all that to say, first day ever in payments, I get broke in the news by our CEO that the company has just doubled in size and made over a billion dollar purchase. So it was an exciting way to start my career. And here I am, 10 years later, and haven't looked back Great.
Speaker 2:Well, we have a few things in common. I'm a girl dad, I've got three girls, so we'll have that in common. Mine are much older, but you'll get there and then we have. Another thing in common is that we both kind of fell into payments right. For me it was like 20 years ago, but it's one of those industries that once you're in it's kind of hard to get out. But if you don't mind for the audience just to kind of level set, do you mind giving kind of a brief overview of Payark and what the company does?
Speaker 3:Absolutely Brief history of Payark. Founded in 2016 by Jared Ronski and Zach Martinez who, as you mentioned, Greg, have both been guests on your podcast previously. I believe our first transaction was processed in 2017. And I came on board about two and a half years ago following a major fundraise from private equity. That was done at the time where myself and some other industry leaders, if you will, or experienced payments professionals, were able to come over and fuel the.
Speaker 3:We're a technology company. Yes, we do payments, but we're a tech first company, and what was very important to both Jared and Zach in founding the company was owning our technology stack. So we own and operate and maintain our own payments gateway, which is at the crux of everything we do here at PayArk. To maybe define ourselves in another way that's relevant for this payment space, I think we're a super ISO as well, in that we own our own technology, but also maintain and manage multiple sponsor banking relationships. We have four at the moment and we offer both traditional and payback platforms here at Payark. I'd say we're probably a partner-driven business first and foremost, and our technology, as well as service and support mentality that drives everything we do, I think, is what has led to our success thus far.
Speaker 2:That drives everything we do, I think is what has led to our success thus far. Great so you've helped play a key role in PayArc's expansion during a very innovative part of the industry, so maybe can you walk us through that journey, especially how you focused on ISV partnerships and the development of Pi AI and how that's kind of reshaped or shaped the company today.
Speaker 3:Absolutely.
Speaker 3:And first of all, I appreciate the kind words, so thank you for saying that and mentioning that I've helped play a role in getting Payark to where it was, or where we are today, for that matter. But it's certainly a team effort and I think, at the end of the day, what's most important to us here at Payark is the people and the talent that we're able to work with, and it's really due to the larger team that we've been able to achieve this level of success. But focusing on ISV specifically, as well as PyAI, as you mentioned.
Speaker 3:I think it was a couple of years ago, maybe more like three years ago, where the organization decided, or the leadership of our organization decided that a focus on ISV was crucial if we were going to achieve the level of success that we were looking for in this next chapter of Payark.
Speaker 3:So I was fortunate enough to be brought on board to help run that channel alongside a very talented sales professional named Rob Thayer, who's our senior vice president of ISV, and we work hand in hand in helping to run and develop this channel together. And just to focus on the people for just a moment again, I think that Rob and I have been able to have success together because of our complementary skill sets and the way that we've been able to form a partnership, working together on a day-to-day basis and staying in our lanes, if you will. As I mentioned, rob is as talented of a sales professional as I've come across in this business. He is really strong at focusing on driving the top of the sales funnel. I've found some success in focusing on the operational side of sales and the technical execution of an ISV partnership, which we'll get into a little bit more later.
Speaker 3:But those are absolutely crucial elements in order to activate these partnerships together. So, in working with Rob and having these complementary skill sets, and him driving sales, and I can focus on execution. I think the team we've been able to form together has just worked. And to talk a little bit more about PyAI and how that has helped us right. You know AI, of course, is all the rage these days and we're still at the infancy in terms of this AI craze, so to speak. You know we've dove in headfirst, so to speak, where we determined as an organization that AI is going to be a part of our strategy moving forward.
Speaker 3:But I think that journey is constantly evolving. We're learning more day by day in terms of what the best use cases for AI really are in order to help drive success of the channel. But where we've seen the most tangible benefits from the development of PyAI, which is essentially our own GPT here at Payark thus far, has been in helping to streamline the integration experience and in leveraging AI to help debug code. And, having trained that GPT on our documentation, we are able to complement the human element of support that we offer here at Payark with some AI tools that just further streamline that experience and, at the end of the day, speed to revenue is the name of the game here. Right, we are looking to activate our partners and get them live with our payment solution as quickly as possible, and if we can use AI tools, such as Pi AI our proprietary one in order to speed up that effort, then that's a win-win for us both.
Speaker 2:Let's talk a little bit about your approach to building and sustaining these ISV partnerships that you've been talking about. What are SaaS companies or ISVs? What are they really looking for in a payment provider right now? And sort of how does PayArk deliver that long-term value and support differently than some of the other folks out there?
Speaker 3:Those are great questions. So I think, first and foremost, feature fit and reliability of the solution are going to be paramount. Right and probably the most important consideration for every ISV. So ensuring that the payment gateway is up to par and can accommodate all of the complex payment flows that an ISV may need I think that's box number one to check, so to speak. And of course, reliability of the solution and ensuring uptime of the gateway goes hand in hand with that. You can't roll out a solution where there are outage concerns time.
Speaker 3:Maybe a decade ago I think what was offered certainly in terms of the card not present payment experience for an integrated payment solution was a bit clunky, so to speak. Right, you know, redirects and taking clients and cardholders those are out of the ISV's platform in order to finalize the payment. All of that led to abandonment of transactions and not converting as many sales as software platforms probably would have liked. So we're pleased here at Payark to be able to offer a payment solution, an integrated payment solution, that allows a software platform to take as much control over the payments experience as they'd like, while also keeping PCIs go up to a minimum, so really bringing that payment experience in-house into their own platform in an embedded and clean way I think is crucial and super important to these platforms. Yeah, and, as I mentioned, I think PayRx Gateway is well positioned to be able to offer that kind of solution.
Speaker 3:Next, where I would go from there price is always important and we say in sales we don't want to sell on price, but price is, of course, an important part of the conversation. It will be a consideration for any ISV that's looking to strike a new payments partnership. When I say pricing flexibility, I really mean that in two ways A on the payment monetization front, right. Revenue shares, of course, are an important part of any partnership that may be struck. But I also mean it on the merchant side of things. Right, and ISVs may have different strategies when it relates to pricing their merchants.
Speaker 3:For some, it may be important to maximize the payment monetization aspect of a partnership with a group like myself and they may say I want to charge my clients as much as I can in order to maximize those margins and you can share more of those margins back with me. On the flip side, some ISVs well, the payments revenue may still be an important part of their revenue stream and they're not looking to sacrifice that. It may also be important for them to provide cost savings to their clients in terms of merchant processing. So the way we've structured our program here at Payark is to give full control to our partners over what that merchant pricing looks like. So we understand that these are your clients, mr ISV. You understand what your market can bear in terms of pricing, whether that be low end of the market or high end of the market, and you tell us what makes the most sense for your client base and we'll support you in that. To keep going from there, there's just two more points I wanted to touch on. One is, to use a cliche term, an old school service and support model. I think really does set us apart as well and I think I mentioned this earlier when talking about Payark's DNA as a company where service and support is crucial to us and this, of course translates to the ISV channel as well.
Speaker 3:I think that the dedicated relationship management we provide and the dedicated integration support really does set us apart.
Speaker 3:And AI is great, as I mentioned before, and has allowed us to streamline the developer experience a little bit better in providing these code debugging tools.
Speaker 3:But I think that self-serve tools only get you so far and there's a certain point where a human touch needs to complement a self-serve tool, whether that be AI or something else. And I think the service and support model that we put in place here at Payark really allows us to differentiate against a lot of our competitors, other partnership models with scale. Here at Payark we understand there's no one size fits all for an ISV. It may make sense for them to start as a referral partner, it may make sense for them to start as a PayFac Lite type of program, but they may eventually want to get to a full register PayFac or move from a referral to a reseller type model. So here at Payark, flexibility, as I mentioned earlier, is the name of the game and we would be able to support partners through every stage of their journey, regardless of what they're thinking and what makes the most sense in terms of go-to-market at that point.
Speaker 2:All that stuff you said is amazing what you guys do and how you do it. But I think a key aspect of all of this is the integration right, so integrating payments into these software companies, and a lot of times that's where things either thrive or they fall apart. So what is sort of your philosophy? How do you make sure that that process is smooth with your clients and your partners and how do you make sure that you set them up for success, both on the technical side and kind of on the strategy side?
Speaker 3:Again, a great question and I think you hit the nail on the head where integration is the crucial phase in executing. On one of these ISV deals, and in my experience working in the ISV space for a little over a decade, I would venture to say that as much as a third of all signed contracts you know end up falling off in the integration phase, and it just is the name of the game in working with ISVs. That said, we have done a lot of work here at Payark in order to make that integration process go as smoothly as possible, so I'll speak to that a little bit. For us, streamlining the integration really starts during the sales process. What I mean by that is we make it a focus to set high-level expectations around integration functionality and timeline very early on in the prospecting phase or sales conversations Again a small tangent or anecdote.
Speaker 3:I had a boss early on in my career at PaySafe who stressed the importance of operational and technical knowledge for salespeople within the ISV payment space, and that's something that I've kept close to my heart in all my time working here in the payment space. It's a philosophy that I try to pass on to my team as well, where I don't need my salespeople to be developers, but we do need them to understand APIs at a high enough level so that they can speak intelligently about those in the sales process. So, again, those expectations can be set early. So that's kind of step one.
Speaker 3:Step two is once the contract is signed and we want to kick off the integration. Like I was saying earlier, self-serve only gets you so far, so we really try to project manage every implementation here at Payark with as much human support as we possibly can. So for us, an integration kicks off with a dedicated sales engineer who will be the ISV's technical resource for the lifecycle of the integration with Payark. As a takeaway from that initial kickoff or discovery call where we're getting that implementation going, we'll schedule weekly check-ins and the way we structure these is office hours type of structure, so to speak. So we'll put an hour on the calendar for the ISV's development team to come in and check in with us every week. Right, bring code questions. Are you blocked? Do you need something debugged? Is some payment flow not making sense? But those hours are there if you need them and we can cancel if they're not needed in a given week.
Speaker 3:But the name of the game for us is availability, right, communicating early and often and making sure we are available to answer any questions as quickly as they come up so that there's no delays in rolling up integration. I think, more than that, some other things that are crucial to making sure this integration goes well is a robust sandbox to ensure that testing can happen in a way that makes the ISV's development team feel comfortable, and polished API documentation. So just ensuring that the docs are absolutely crystal clear again can just make the effort easier on the development team integrating to us. Last thing we've done here at Payark is, while we have APIs that are available for our robust payment gateway, we also have released SDKs in five languages, which can tremendously lighten the lift on an ISV integrating to us should there be some language compatibility. So that was long winded, but those are all of the things we are thinking about as we look to make this implementation experience as smooth as possible.
Speaker 2:Well, let's move from sort of the implementation or integration to support. So premium support is something that a lot of companies claim but very few actually deliver that. Payarc has something called your white glove support. So maybe walk through what that looks like for an ISV and, if you don't mind, kind of do like you did before, like walk us through the lifecycle of that support, kind of from the beginning to the ongoing growth aspect.
Speaker 3:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:And happy to do that.
Speaker 3:So if I were to walk through the typical sales cycle from prospecting all the way to go live with us, how it would start is probably an initial conversation with a sales rep on our side, right, you know, we made contact with an ISV and there's mutual interest in working together.
Speaker 3:From there, another call would be scheduled and at that point senior management has brought it on our site. So, whether that be myself or my SVP, Rob Thayer, we're speaking with prospects as soon as the second sales call and we don't go away we're open about this with our prospects, that we want to be involved in these conversations early and we are there as the DEF CON one button, so to speak, where the front facing team members are, of course, the first line of contact for any ISV, but Rob and I are always there in the background to support. So that's kind of call number two that I've gotten us to thus far. From there, you know, I think we're going to get to a point where the contract is negotiated and then signed and we're looking to kick off the integration.
Speaker 3:So to touch on a little bit of what I did in answering your previous question. At that point we would kick off the integration. So that is a formal kickoff call with the lead engineer from the ISV as well as the assigned sales engineer from our side, so that everybody can get on the phone together and spend 30 minutes an hour, an hour and a half, however long it takes to fully understand the scope of the integration here. What is the platform that the ISV is looking to?
Speaker 2:integrate to us.
Speaker 3:Make sure we have a full understanding of that, what are the requirements, what are the payment flows that they're looking to build, and we will leave that call with a full project plan and understanding of what that implementation will look like in terms of ongoing support during the implementation. I know I touched on this before, but I'll reiterate that we'll set up weekly office hours for check-ins for the ISV's development team to check in with our sales engineers and get unblocked and debug, code and do all that fun stuff should those issues come up. And as the integration is nearing completion, we'll move to a certification process where we'll look to certify that integration and run some tests on our side to ensure that all is working in the way that we hope before ever processing a live transaction. But we'll assign a relationship manager at that point who will serve as the day-to-day operational and business contact for the ISV moving forward. So one throat to choke, if you will, for the ISV here at Payark, someone who can solve the good, the bad, the ugly.
Speaker 3:We work in technology at the end of the day, right, and it would be great if there was 100% uptime and issues never popped up. But unfortunately we all know that issues will come up, whether that be merchants who can't process, or an application that got declined, that needs to be shuttled through, and that relationship manager is really there to solve all of those day-to-day problems or challenges that may come up. The final line of defense, if you will, is our merchant support team. We've got an unbelievable merchant and technical support team here at Payark. They are available 24-7, 365 days a year and they are trained to support both merchants directly as well as our partners. So if the relationship manager is in another meeting and an ISV has a question that needs an answer right away, they can always call into our support team and that support team knows how to answer partner facing questions as well.
Speaker 2:Very robust support sounds like for sure. Well looking ahead. So where do you see payments headed in this kind of ISV and embedded payment space? That's kind of part one where payments are headed? What are some of the trends that you guys are preparing for that's coming up, and how is PayArk and its partners being set up to kind of lead in this space moving forward? What?
Speaker 3:I'd say is that the speed of innovation within technology more broadly, but really even more specifically within payments technology that I've kind of referenced, has been happening over the last decade. That's just going to accelerate even more, especially with AI and everything else that has come about of late. What that tells me is, I think we'll see actually a further decoupling of SaaS and payments in the next little while, where, because both technology more broadly and payments technology is innovating so quickly, I think it's going to become increasingly difficult for software companies to fully control the payments experience in the form of registering as PayFac or becoming wholesale ISOs or things of that nature. Where I see this going is groups like PayArk and other payments companies who are supporting ISVs as their payments partner are going to become even more important in the equation. As SaaS companies are going to have to spend the time focusing on their core technology. Because of all the reasons I mentioned the speed of innovation and such it's going to be important for them to pick a payments partner that they can rely on to take the payments burden off of their plate and ensure that the solution will work in the way that they need and allow them to participate in the revenue and with payment monetization and all that fun stuff.
Speaker 3:But I think the days of software companies building out payments departments themselves, I think that's trending the other way, so I've kind of seen the pendulum swinging the other way, so to speak. As it relates to AI, I think that, like I mentioned earlier, we're still learning every day and because, again, ai is innovating at such a rapid pace, every day we're learning something new and we're finding new ways that we can leverage AI to help accelerate sales efforts or streamline integrations and all that. So more to come there, but it's absolutely a work in progress and a continued learning experience.
Speaker 2:Well, a lot of the guests we've had on from PayArc we've talked about Pi, ai and kind of PayArc's dedication to AI. Curious your view on sort of how AI can help the partners, specifically in the ISV space. Where do you see AI really benefiting them?
Speaker 3:It's a good question and my mind goes to three places and I'll outline those chronologically for you. So the first would be lead gen for ISV prospecting efforts. I think we're already doing an element of this today, where we are using artificial intelligence to allow us to get more targeted from a vertical standpoint. Right, I think we've done a pretty good job of defining our ICP here at PayArc on the ISV team and what verticals we are well positioned to support from a payments perspective, and AI is allowing us to get more targeted from a prospecting perspective at scale. I think that's number one and we've seen some tangible benefits on the prospecting side.
Speaker 3:The second and I know I talked a little bit about this earlier when we talked about the integration is AI supporting the implementation effort, right? So at the moment, our PI AI is an internal tool that we can use to debug code, so we're talking about making that an external facing tool, right? Can we expose this GPT to the developers integrating to us so that, instead of having to reach out to a human at Payark and have them plug it into the AI, can we make that exposed externally? So that's something we're thinking about and tinkering with at the moment, but conceptually, I think AI absolutely helps in solving code issues on the fly and preventing delays in the implementation phase. And the third is I would say we still work with a lot of ISVs who deliberately come to us with a referral model in mind hey, help me close merchant sales for merchants who want to process through my platform. Or I have a back book on another provider and I want to work with Payark, but I need help. I need sales resources, if you will, or marketing resources to help manage a campaign to help convert this back book over to Payark.
Speaker 3:So I think what we're thinking about today is how can we use AI to help with those conversion campaigns, whether that be, you know, AI email blasts or AI agents helping with outbound messaging to these clients in order to get them interested in the new integrated payment solution. Those are the elements of AI that we're thinking about from a sales perspective at the moment, so tinkering with those ideas and hope to roll them out in short order here with a few new partnerships.
Speaker 2:Great. Well, Zach, this has been a great discussion. Just wanted to see if there's anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up the show.
Speaker 3:Not at this time. I just want to thank you, greg, for the opportunity to come on here and talk about ISV, and thank you to your listeners as well for listening to me and giving me your time. I hope you all found it insightful and certainly appreciate you listening.
Speaker 2:Zach, thank you so much for being on the show. I know your time is very valuable, so again, thank you for being here today. Thanks again, greg.
Speaker 1:And to all your listeners out there. I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story. Thank you for joining us today as we discussed how Payark is leveraging AI.