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Leaders In Payments
Leaders In Payments
Afshin Yazdian, CEO of Kurv | Episode 459
Payments shouldn’t feel like a maze. We sit down with Kurv’s CEO, Afshin Yazdian, to unpack how a legacy “lifestyle business” evolved into a modern payments platform by stripping out friction, investing in human-centered service, and doubling down on tools that make small businesses stronger. From tap-to-pay on everyday smartphones to faster access to funds, the strategy centers on clarity and speed so owners can focus on sales, staff, and customers - not statements and support tickets.
Afshin walks us through his unconventional path from law to leading roles at iPayment, Priority, and Paysafe before acquiring and rebranding EMS as Kurv. He shares what it took to rebuild operations, unify a new leadership team, and scale applications and activations nearly 10x in 18 months. We explore why transparent pricing, intuitive onboarding, and self-service matter just as much as getting a live expert on the phone, and how that blend becomes a moat in a commoditized market.
We also dig into the high-stakes frontier of AI and fraud. With more digital leads and synthetic identities hitting underwriting queues, Kurv deploys machine learning to protect onboarding and e-commerce merchants while preserving approval rates. Add in real-time payments for better cash flow and a truly omnichannel approach - retail, field services, and online and you’ve got a playbook for SMB payments that is powerful without being complicated. Along the way, Afshin makes a strong case for culture as strategy: communicate clearly, care for people, and let that pride carry through every interaction.
If you’re building, selling, or relying on payments, this conversation will leave you with practical ideas for simplifying workflows, reducing risk, and earning loyalty.
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 topic.
SPEAKER_02:Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Leaders in Payments Podcast. I'm your host, Greg Myers, and today's special guest is Apshin Yazdian, the CEO of Curve. So, Apshin, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the show.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you, Greg. Appreciate you having me.
SPEAKER_02:So, Aption, you were on the show, believe it or not, in November of 2020. So you were at Paysafe at that time. It was episode 46, and we're now on episode 455. So it's kind of been a while. We've had some conversations since then, but I'm so glad we're reconnecting today.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. I can't believe it's been that long. And you remember those COVID time frames.
SPEAKER_02:So Yep. Crazy. Crazy. All right. Well, before we dive into your career and about the company, can you give us a quick snapshot of your personal background, maybe where you grew up, where you call home today, a few things like that?
SPEAKER_01:Sure. So I'm based in Nashville, Tennessee. You know, I've been here for about 25 years, spent a lot of my childhood here as well, as well as bouncing around. We immigrated to the United States when I was a young child and sort of like lived in a lot of different places. But for the last 25 years, my wife and myself have lived here. I've got two boys who we're what they call empty nesters now. So we've got both kids out of the house. And uh I've had a great time raising my boys, I think is what I would say.
SPEAKER_02:Well, do you mind walking us through your professional journey, maybe, and then how you got to curve?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that'd be great. So very bizarre entry, but I think anyone that gets into payments has like a, you know, no one goes to school to be a payments expert, right? So just like everyone else through a very weird channel. I, like many kids, graduating college and business school, didn't know what I wanted to do next, decided to go to law school. That pushed me into a large law firm. We started to do work for a company that would eventually become Elivan, back, you know, back in the day, you know, Nova was the name back then in the late 90s. Decided after about 18, 19 months of practicing law that I was more business minded. I wanted to sort of utilize my business school skills and left. And you'll appreciate early 2000s, decided to start an incubator to focus on the dot-com channels. And we were out raising money and investing in a series of those types of organizations. Like many of those companies, it didn't work. As I'll reference later, maybe today, it was one of the best mistakes, uh, learning mistakes I've ever made in my life. And thankfully I got to do it very early. From there, worked with a group of folks. We started a company here in Nashville, literally in a living room called iPayment. We did everything from friends and family raise. We eventually had some private equity come in, took that company public and then back private. So spent about 11 years there, you know, wearing many, many hats. Everything from, you know, obviously being general counsel with my legal background, working on the MA side, eventually got into operations and so forth. From there, I was lucky to be named the CEO of a company called Synergy Data. Synergy had just been acquired out of bankruptcy. This is in the mid-2014 time frame, a little bit earlier. And a private equity firm called Convest asked me to come in and help sort of like turn that business around. They were, they were in their minds, you know, they didn't know what they were buying, as I'm sure you've heard many times on this podcast. And so my job was to come in and see if we could salvage that. We would eventually merge with priority payments. We changed our name to priority. So I stayed there for about six, seven years and really sort of honed my concept of like turning around a business and sort of like figuring out not only how to build a business, but to sort of like, you know, integrate acquisitions and sort of like, you know, establish what would be more like a recurring revenue model in that regard. From there, got a um phone call from somebody I had met many years prior to become the CEO of Paysafe. Paysafe at the time was backed by Blackstone and CBC. Two, as you if you go back to your episode 46, as you mentioned, I'm sure I did a better job explaining it then. But Paysafe had two parts of the business. One was a wallet business, the other was a merchant business. My task was to come in and basically turn around the merchant business. They had over the years done a lot of acquisitions. They hadn't fully integrated them, they were struggling a little bit. So came in and was able to turn that business around. We would eventually take that company public in 2021, had a great run there. And just when I thought I was gonna retire, I'm sure we've all had that dream. I tried through both just sheer boredom and a lot of nudging for my wife, who was like, you need to go do something else, you're gonna drive me crazy. Set out on a search, kind of like my own version of a search fund, was able to identify a company that was based in Cleveland. It used to be called EMS. EMS had been a long established business. I was able to connect with the owner there. And after a lot of back and forth, kind of established them, and I and I love to tell the story this way, Greg. I said to him, I'd love to buy your company. And his comment was like, Great. Do you have any money? I said, I don't, but I know a lot of people that do. So give me a minute. And uh so we we structured a deal. I was able to go raise private equity support, and uh we had closed on that deal in August of 24, so about 18 months ago. And I'm happy to talk a little bit more about that, but that's sort of how I got here. So we were able to buy EMS and I was able to have a great company called Barcap, it was a relatively new private equity firm that sort of backed me uh on this venture.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, and then you've rebranded the company to Curve. So that's sort of the the brand today. So maybe you could talk about that, but maybe tell us, tell the audience what Curve does and maybe a little bit about the rebranding if that's an important part of the company.
SPEAKER_01:It is, and I think I'll actually start with that. So part of the thesis here was that you know you have a lot of great organizations, we call them super ISOs, payment processors, you know, that some of them have their own niche, some of them have, you know, uh no niche, and they're sort of a little bit more of a a little bit of everything to everyone. EMS at the time was a you know relatively small organization, but it had all the infrastructure necessary to be much bigger than it was. So you're looking at a company that, you know, you've heard the term lifestyle business. This was the classic lifestyle business. The owner was basically operating this in a very good way. You know, he had an incredible lifestyle, but he was, you know, he was ready to sell. He had tried to go through the process of exiting a few times. And I think what was lacking there was how would somebody come in and acquire this and sort of take it to the next level and move, you know, morph it from being what it was as a lifestyle business to something that was scalable, all the buzzwords that you know the private equity guys always talk about. So for me, the challenge really was to do exactly that. And we used to, you know, it's a you could call it turnaround, you could call modernization and whatever. So we came in completely new management team. We basically had a lot of folks part of part of the older organization that were ready to retire to move on, brought in an entirely new team, went through almost like uh slicing up a loaf of bread, like literally section by section, department by department, and started this whole process of modernizing the business, changing the format of everything from how underwriting worked, but utilizing a lot of the infrastructure that was there. And you know, from uh I'm happy to share a few bit of numbers with you, but you know, we went from basically in over 18 months, we've almost 10x the number of like applications that we get, new merchants that were adding, all those kinds of things. And to do that, we had to really invest heavily in modernizing the business from both people, technology, processes, et cetera. So for us, the name change really represented sort of what the new company was all about. And people say, where did you come up with curve? I had a list of names, send them to a much smarter group of uh you know, brand companies out there, and they came back and that was the name that we chose. And you know, the theory is we're ahead of the curve on many fronts. We'll talk about that a little bit as well. But the name change really represented not just changing the name because, you know, for for the sake of changing the name, but it was really this is a completely different organization. So we took pieces of that company, a couple of other acquisitions that we've done, and curve sort of represents where we're going.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. And you mentioned there or some companies are very niche focused, some are more broad. So where do you kind of fit in that spectrum?
SPEAKER_01:A little bit of both. So we have three different sales channels now that we've established. We have half of our businesses through a W-2 channel. So we have both an inside sales and a direct sales channel. Our direct sales focuses mostly on retail. So think of you know the average strip center that you go into that's got you know the restaurant, the mechanic, things like that. So we do a lot of retail on that front. The other part of our inside sales group today, well, you know, starting to focus as much on retail, but initially focused more on e-commerce, SMB business. And then we've built out over the last year an incredible ISO agent channel that is fairly broad. So, you know, we'll talk a little bit about sort of our competitive strength, but we're not industry focused per se, but we are focused on the SMB channels.
SPEAKER_02:Well, what's the biggest challenge that your company is solving for your customers?
SPEAKER_01:I know that sounds weird, but simplicity. I grew up in a small business. My wife used to have a restaurant. So I, you know, I I very much appreciate what it's like to run a business. And today it's even harder than I think it's ever been between there's always something being thrown at a small business. You know, today it's tariffs and inflation, and you know, there's always something. And so I think for whatever reason, and I'm joking about this, but I've been doing this now for 20 plus years, payment processing when it should have been getting easier and less complex, has created a lot more complexity. And a lot of businesses are still trying to figure out, you know, what exactly, what POS system do I need, or how do I do this, and how do they manage? And the truth is, if you're a small business, you need to run your business. Like we should be a utility, we should be very simple to work with. A lot of the reason, honestly, we've had the success that we've had and been able to grow at the speed we've had is focused on this concept of simplicity. Working with us is very simple and it's easy. It's a great customer experience. So when you're a small business and you're contemplating changing to another platform, working with us is very quick. The applications are easy. We don't run you through a lot of processes, we get you set up quickly, our pricing is very clear and simple and easy to understand. And then once you're in that what we call the customer journey, that experience is great. We've invested heavily on things like self-service. If you own a restaurant in Los Angeles and it's 2 a.m. on the East Coast and you want to go fix something or you need some information, a lot of that now is available to you online through your app. You know, so we're investing in that kind of like new modern way of doing business. But the simplicity, the idea that we're easy, that this is like it's not as complicated as a lot of people make it sound, has been a big part of that.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. And what would you say differentiates curve from your competitors?
SPEAKER_01:When we started this process of you know, curve and the modernization, two mantras, we talked about simplicity. And then the second was customer experience. Every single thing that we did was focused on how to make sure that our merchants, our agents, employees, and vendors had an incredible experience anytime they worked with us. So every decision that we made, every action that we took, every investment dollar that we made was really focused on are we doing something to enhance and create a better overall experience? And you know, people are like, why do you include employees and vendors? And because they're customers of ours, right? My employees, like culture is a big part of what we drive here. I want to make sure that our employees have a great experience when they work with us. We want our vendors to feel like they're partners with us and that they're part of that experience. Obviously, merchants are a critical component of that. As we've built out our agent program, that's a critical component of that. But in everything, you know, we talk about self-service, but we also invest heavily in our customer service. So if you do have an issue and you do want to talk to somebody, there's a live person that you can talk to as well. So, you know, we're utilizing AI, we're doing all the things you're supposed to do, you know, from a scale perspective, but we're we're just constantly focused on how great is the experience for our customer base. I think it has been, you know, the combination of simplicity and that customer journey focus has really been what's driving us to succeed. And, you know, I hate to use this word, but payments is somewhat of a commoditized industry. And so we've identified those two as the biggest differentiators that that sort of separate us from most of our competition.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. I mean, I feel like just from my experience having these conversations, if a company can get those two things right today, they can be successful. I mean, it's it's easy to say, it's hard to do. So if you can execute on that, and it sounds like you guys are doing a great job of that. I mean, I think it's it is a differentiator. And and you know, I think a lot of people say, hey, people can just go online and do this, do that. But a lot of business owners, I mean, you know this as well as as anybody. I mean, these small business owners are so busy and you know, sometimes they just want to pick up the phone and talk to somebody and you know get the answer and move on with their day. And if you're providing that level of, you know, service, I mean, I think that's definitely a a differentiator in this industry.
SPEAKER_01:Trevor Burrus, Jr. And and part of it, Greg, you can appreciate is like making sure that everything from like the merchant statements that they look at online like is is easy to understand. You know, we're not trying to like play a game of like hiding a lot of things. So we really focused on those kinds of things too. And so that, yeah, to your point, you know, the ideal scenario for our business is nobody ever calls us because everything is great, they're happy, everything's working fine. But in those scenarios, and as you highlighted, especially when you're running a small business and you've got a hundred other things that should be more important to how you drive revenue managing your my joke with my wife was the the most important person at her restaurant was the dishwasher. Because if the dishwasher doesn't show up, the whole place shuts down, you know, that kind of thing. But that's what a business owner should focus on. And so I couldn't have said it any better. I mean, that is our whole mantra of what we're trying to do.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. Well, let's talk about the future a little bit. Where do you see the biggest growth opportunities for your business?
SPEAKER_01:So a couple of things that we've really invested in heavily. So, you know, this concept of omnichannel has been around for a long time. We're not the first ones to sort of focus on that. You know, that's everything from you think about field services, they may have somebody in an office that is accepting payments, but then you've got a field rep that also wants to be able to accept payments, coffee shop that wants to go to a farmer's market on the weekends, that kind of thing. Obviously, stores, you know, retail stores that are also shipping online. So we continue to see a big expansion there. Sort of this concept of like retail and online sort of have continued to meld together more and more. You know, retail is still a big component, obviously, for a lot of these businesses, but having the ability to accept payments anywhere through different channels is there. So for us, we've invested heavily. It's in the App Store now, what we call our Curve Pay app. This is a true tap-to-pay. So I go back to my example in field services. If you've got a company that also wants to allow its field reps to be able to accept payments, they don't have to bring a lot of you know equipment with them. They can literally log in, use their, you know, the Android or Apple phone, and the consumer can tap to pay with their credit card and it works. So we're very bullish on that, not only because it goes after that sort of like sector, but I think even in the retail establishments, it's it's a huge component of that on our side. So that that right now is like one of our bigger differentiators. That's an area that we're really, really focused on as well. I think real-time payments is a big component as well. So we're continuing to invest there. You know, merchants need their money faster than they ever have. You know, small businesses are competing to hire employees, they want to keep their employees. Employees are putting a lot of pressure on their employers because, you know, like you see companies paying people on a daily basis, getting, you know, speed of revenue, getting speed and dollars into their coffers as quickly as possible continues to be a big part of that. And fraud. If we think about some of the trends that are going on right now in the space, AI has been a massive boom for us. We're we utilize AI throughout our entire organization. You know, we sort of made a declaration last year when we were going through our modernization process. Like, how can we utilize AI? We've embraced it as much as we can in simple tasks as well as more complicated tasks. We're using it in obviously things like underwriting and fraud. The bad news is the bad guys doing that as well, right? Right. So we've invested a lot in sort of that fraud detection elements and especially the businesses that we're in, especially in our inside sales, where we're having a lot of leads that are generated through things like Google AdWords and search engine optimization. A lot of AI tools are being used to generate fake merchants, fake IDs, things like that. So a lot of things that we're doing right now, we're really focused on protecting our customers and including ourselves in that regard too.
SPEAKER_02:Well, what does success look like for curves, say maybe over the next three to five years?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, you know, that's a great question. I know this is gonna sound very corny, but wait, when I was going through the process of raising capital, and everyone's like, you know, what do you, what is that? That's the question every private equity firm is gonna ask. Like, how do you define success? What is your goal here? And without sounding like a uh cornball, you know, I really just wanted to build a great company. That was it. And so what I what I mean by that, obviously you want to be profitable, you want to have growth, those are critical. You know, we're a for-profit organization. I have investors, I've got responsibilities there, I've got employees, things like that. So the idea of being a fast growing, profitable organization was from the get-go very, very critical. So, of course, you have to focus on those kinds of things. But it's also important to me that you know, we have a kind of organization that has a great reputation. I'm a big sports guy. I always think about, you know, you feel proud to wear the logo on your chest. I'm doing that today, obviously. So those kinds of things. So for me, if we could sort of hit on those two fronts, like really focus on driving recurrable revenue, recurring revenue, really focus on growth, and then also make it a great place, be the kind of organization that people really want to either work with or work for, that's a sign of success for us. And so far, you know, we're we're less than two years into this, but so far, really continuing to focus on those two things has come has hit home. And, you know, for us, continuing to grow at the level that we're growing, it gets harder as the company gets bigger and bigger, as you can appreciate, but just continuing to grow, making sure that you know we're one of the first companies that an SMB thinks about when they're looking for new payment processing and then making sure we retain our accounts as best as we can. So retention is a big component of that too, is my definition of a successful organization.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. Well, when you step back and look at the payments industry as a whole, what are some of the biggest trends that you're seeing that are really reshaping the industry?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I'll go back to the comment I made about fraud and AI in particular. I think, and again, we're talking about small and medium businesses, you know, where we focus. So we're not, as you can appreciate, we're not handling these large accounts that have a CFO. A lot of our leads are coming from startup organizations as well. And so managing not only on the onboarding side or making sure these accounts are real, you know, sort of combating the use of AI and all the new technology from a fraud perspective, protecting ourselves, and then also protecting our merchants. We have a lot of merchants that are e-commerce only. They sell their services and goods, you know, through the web. And so making sure that they're also being protected. So providing them the tools, you know, that's to me, it goes back to that customer experience. Like we're there as their partner, so making sure we protect them from fraudulent, even if it's friendly fraud, things like that. But that I think is already a really, really big issue. I think that becomes a bigger component of what a lot of companies are going to have to deal with. So while AI, as I mentioned, is a great tool for us and we're taking advantage of it in every way that we can, it's also something that creates some havoc for us that we have to address as well. Regulatory changes, you know, it's kind of an interesting time if you think about it. We've kind of gone through this uh almost like a seesaw, if you will, uh, you know, roller coaster ride. We've gone through periods of high, heightened regulation. You know, with CFPB and organizations like that, and you know, everything from like you know, crypto was not really well embraced in the last administration. It's heavily embraced here. You know, all these stable coins now have become like the talk. You know, so how that regulatory impact sort of drives where some of the payment trends are going, I think is critical. And so in a perfect world, it's it's sort of a linear line, but you know, we've seen a lot of zigzag. And so we'll continue to watch all those kinds of things and make sure that we're on the forefront there. I mentioned tap to pay. I think that's gonna really become much, much bigger. It doesn't mean the terminals are gonna go away, but this concept of you can pay anybody anywhere, anytime, I think becomes even more critical. You've seen elements of that over the last 10 years with embedded payments. People don't like to fill out all their information to pay for something. It's, you know, think about how easy it is to order off Amazon or to get an Uber. You're not entering your credit card information every single time. They have your history there, it's there. I think we start to see that more and more in a lot of areas as sort of like the tap-to-pay of receiving payments. And then from a consumer perspective, using their phones more and more in terms of tap-to-pay to purchase things, continue to be a driver for that. So I'd like to say we're on the forefront on both of those. And you know, we'll continue to see that grow. And I think you're seeing it more on the larger merchants. I think it's starting to trickle down now on the SMB side as well.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I agree. I think you're spot on with all those trends. Definitely what I hear in conversation, stablecoins, AI, fraud. It's kind of funny with the whole fraud thing, like it never went away, but it kind of seemed to get pushed to the back until AI came around. And then it's it's in every conversation now. You always connect the dots between AI and fraud, but that's that's sort of the way the industry works. But a couple of final questions. If you could go back and give yourself advice at the start of your career, what would that be?
SPEAKER_01:I'll look at it from two perspectives. One, hopefully we got a chuckle out of you. Do more yoga. You know, as we get older, like the stiffness, and you know, I wish I was a lot stretchier than I have been. So I tell my boys all the time, I'm like, start yoga on that. But the real answer, I think, is patience. Be patient. You know, it is a marathon. You're gonna have ups and downs, you're gonna have moments that you know, you celebrate the wins. And then when when you have scenarios where things didn't go as you planned, you know, be patient, learn from it, be patient with your team, be patient with yourself. You know, things don't happen as fast as we want. Now, I say all this, Greg, because I'm probably the most impatient person you'll ever meet in your life. Uh my team will address that with you if you want. But I have zero patience. But I do wish that I I'd sort of like told myself this. If I could go back, as you said, 25 years ago, that patience is a virtue. And and having, and by the way, it's patience not only with yourself, but with everyone around you as well. I'd love to go back and tell myself that a little bit.
SPEAKER_02:So, what's the the one thing that payments list leaders that maybe are listening today, what should they really be thinking about right now?
SPEAKER_01:Well, we talked a lot about the trends that are going on and things like that. But you know, I go back to what's important to me and and sort of like as as I sort of went through this this concept of like, you know, acquiring a company, raising the money, and and you know, why, why are you building an organization, all those kinds of things? Like, I have put culture at the forefront of everything that we do, right? Culture drives success, success drives culture. They sort of feed off of each other. So everything we talked about in terms of you know how we treat our customers and everything that we're doing in that regard to ensure that we have a great customer experience. We spend a lot of time with our employees. We, you know, I've come in sort of like you know, the Tasmanian devil. We've gone through and we made all these changes, and there's a lot of nervousness. You know, people that have been with this company for years and years see these changes. Of course, their initial reaction is, what does this mean for me? There's always this concept of like, what does all this change mean for me? And if you don't address that immediately, and our industry is famous for a lot of acquisitions, there's always transitions, there's always somebody coming in like me that's going through like a modernization or turnaround or whatever. But addressing that, communicating and sort of like let your culture drive your business because it does help translate into success. And so we've been very lucky so far in that we've started with how we treat people, communication, making sure people understand not only their roles, but what their functions are as time goes on. It's paid great dividends for us. We've got great employees, we've got great partners. We've done things like lower our attrition significantly because when one of our employees answers the phone, you could kind of feel that through the phone, that they care about the company. They actually care about the merchant. And to me, that all begins and ends with culture.
SPEAKER_02:Any final comments or thoughts that you'd like to leave the audience about curve?
SPEAKER_01:Check us out. You know, we're we're kind of a new organization, you know, in a world where I think, like as we talked about, there's a lot of competition out there. You know, our approach is simplicity, our approach is customer journey. Come check us out a little bit. We we're excited about what we're doing. We really, you know, I started this thing, Greg. My hashtag was the next great story in fintech. That was kind of when I was recruiting. I was like, you know, that's what we're trying to build here. We want to be a great story. We want to sort of be like, you know, where do these guys come from? And what an amazing journey that we're on right now. And come check us out. And if you want to be part of the journey, we'd love to have you. We got plenty of room.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, great. Well, Ashton, thank you so much for being on the show today. I know your time is very valuable, so I really appreciate you being here.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. Thank you. And I love what you're doing. This is uh this is such a great thing. I love listening to your podcast, and I'm humbled and honored to be uh back on here with you.
SPEAKER_02:Well, I appreciate it. Well, we'll have to connect again maybe towards the end of the year and get an update on Curve and hear all the great things you guys are doing if you're willing to do that.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. Always happy to help you out. Thank you so much. Okay.
SPEAKER_02:And to all you listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well. And until the next story.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments Podcast. Make sure you visit our website at leadersinpayments.com, 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.