Merchants Can Get Paid Instantly While Cutting Fraud with CEO, Marshall Greenwald, IoniaPay | Episode 496

A “successful” card payment can still leave merchants waiting days to actually access their money, paying layers of fees along the way, and carrying fraud risk that never truly goes away. That gap between authorization and settlement is where cash flow gets squeezed, reconciliation gets messy, and margins get quietly taxed, especially as more commerce shifts to e-commerce and other card-not-present channels.

We sit down with Marshall Greenwald, Founder and CEO of IoniaPay, to talk about changing the infrastructure behind merchant payments. Marshall walks us through how IoniaPay moves funds from a consumer’s card to a merchant’s bank account in real time, why that matters more than ever, and how collapsing a fragmented chain of 6 to 10 parties can reduce cost and complexity. He also explains the fraud angle: instead of relying on tools that “guess,” merchants want stronger certainty that a transaction is truly authorized by the cardholder.

We also get practical about where this fits best right now. Marshall shares why iGaming, travel, and healthcare see outsized value, how instant settlement can unlock meaningful working capital that would otherwise sit in float, and how the company goes to market through a mix of direct enterprise relationships and a broad reseller network. From there, we zoom out to the future of payments: multi-channel commerce, orchestration, interoperability challenges across a massive US ecosystem, and the broader shift from top-layer UX innovation to foundational payment infrastructure.

If you care about real-time payments, merchant cash flow, fraud prevention, and what “modern rails” should actually look like for everyday commerce, this conversation will give you a few sharp questions to bring back to your team. 

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Leaders in Payments Podcast, where we talk to sea 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_02 0:18

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Leaders in Payments Podcast. I'm your host, Greg Myers, and today's special guest is Marshall Greenwald, the founder and CEO of Ionia Pay. So, Marshall, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Greg. I'm excited. Great.

From Texas To Payments Founder

SPEAKER_02 0:32

So before we dive into your career and talk 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 0:40

Yeah, I actually grew up north of Dallas in Plano, Texas. Really loved it there. But my family moved to Arizona where they're from, where my parents are from, right as I was graduating from high school. So I left and I always joke that they tried to hide from me, but I tracked them down back to their home state of Arizona and got married and had kids and just have been here ever since. So grew up playing sports, wrestling in particular, but really loving the kind of competitive nature of sports and music and other things like that. And I think that really kind of led to the entrepreneurial endeavors.

SPEAKER_02 1:12

Okay, great. So can you walk us through your professional journey and how and why you started the

Building An ISO Then Going Deeper

SPEAKER_02 1:17

company? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:17

So I started my payments career working for a bank in the 90s and did not really anticipate that I would do anything in finance long term as kind of a work through college kind of job, you know, doing sales and the credit card side. But I really saw a lot of things I thought were kind of fundamentally broken about the process and things that they were doing. And so I ended up leaving there in 99 and started a payment processing company in ISO in 99. And, you know, really just fell in love with solving challenging payment problems for merchants. And that over the years led to, you know, I had some growth in that company, sold it, got to about 6,000 merchants, about 6 billion in volume, sold it, and then used that capital to start Ionia Pay to really solve, I guess what you'd say, the systemic problems and payments, not the layer that I was always playing in as an ISO where I could add value to the software and the service, but really fundamentally changing the infrastructure and underlying a

What Ionia Pay Actually Does

SPEAKER_01 2:11

payment.

SPEAKER_02 2:11

Okay, well, let's dive in and talk about the company. So tell our audience what IoniaPay does.

SPEAKER_01 2:15

Yeah, in short, we provide better, faster, cheaper payments for merchants. When you kind of break that down a little bit, what we're doing is we're moving money from a consumer's card to a merchant's bank account in real time rather than waiting the typical ACH cycle that comes out to about three to four days with weekends and holidays in there. We're doing it at a lower cost typically, and then we're also eliminating the fraud risk inherent in card acceptance. So safer payments, especially for e-commerce, is really relevant today. And then of course, everybody wants to get their money faster. And if they can save some money in the process, then it's kind of a no-brainer for merchants.

Best-Fit Verticals And Sales Strategy

SPEAKER_02 2:50

Okay. Well, are there certain segments of the markets that you're in or just kind of any small business?

SPEAKER_01 2:55

Yeah, you know, it's funny because we definitely see more demand in certain verticals, but everybody wants their money faster. Everybody wants to save a dollar. And then, you know, if you're selling online, which by the way, Greg, is now pretty much par for the course for every business model. I mean, post 2020, something like 50 to 60 percent of restaurants' activity is not in store, right? It's no longer a face-to-face transaction, whether it's a mobile app, an ordering service, or their website. And we're seeing that trend across most industries. And so we're finding that e-commerce is where we have the best value proposition because we can add the fraud elimination element with very little friction. So that's really critical for merchants today. But I'd say, you know, everything from eye gaming to restaurants to dentists and kind of everything in between. So pretty generic as far as who's attracted to our solution. I'd say eye gaming, travel, and healthcare tend to be kind of the three biggest categories for us, mostly because there's some very, very large merchants that we have in those categories, but also there's just a lot of a lot of issues they face that are kind of compounded by the nature of their business. And so if you, for example, can eliminate the risk on the money in for a gaming company, it actually eliminates the risk on the money going out. And so there's a compounding effect there for the value that we bring to them.

SPEAKER_02 4:13

Okay. And are you based basically in the US or are you moving outside the US?

SPEAKER_01 4:18

Yeah, we are, I'd say, mostly focused here in the US as far as our solutioning. We are going to be expanding globally. And then as far as the team, we're pretty diverse. We are based in Arizona. We have about 40 people on the team roughly. And I'd say most of us are in the US. We have one in Canada, one in Mexico, and like seven engineers in India. So Okay.

SPEAKER_02 4:38

And maybe talk a little bit about your go-to-market strategy. You have a direct sales force to go through partners, both. Talk about that if you don't mind.

SPEAKER_01 4:45

You are talking to 50% of the sales team right now. So my chief operating officer and myself handle the sales, but our sales are kind of in two categories. One is enterprise merchants that come to us. So household name merchants, you know, anyone a billion plus in volume, we kind of handle that directly. And then the other effort is reseller network. So we don't go direct to merchants, and that's why we can have a very small team and be very efficient. But our partners are anywhere from a small ISO one-man shop up to some of the biggest payment companies on the planet. And so we lead the sales effort with those resellers, and then we support them when they bring unique opportunities or very large opportunities.

SPEAKER_02 5:24

Okay.

Fixing Fragmentation, Fraud, And Float

SPEAKER_02 5:25

What would you say is the biggest challenge that your company is solving for your customers right now?

SPEAKER_01 5:30

There's really three areas that we're focused. And I'd say one merchant might be much more focused on one than another. But I think it all stems from the same thing that the current payment systems are very fragmented. And in a typical transaction between a consumer and a merchant, there are what six to ten parties involved, right? Just depending on the transaction and who's being used. And we collapse that down and we do the payment directly from the consumer to the merchant. And that allows us to kind of solve multiple problems. So the fraud elimination element, where instead of just trying to guess whether something is fraud or not, we can tell the merchant with certainty whether this is a legitimate transaction authorized by the actual cardholder. And then secondarily, well, I don't know if it's secondarily, but as important but a different angle is to be able to move that money faster. I'll give you an example. There's a very large merchant we're talking to right now. They're about 20 billion in annual payment volume. They do have some fraud. It's a very small percentage, but it's still tens of millions of dollars in impact to them. But unlocking the cash that would otherwise be in a perpetual float means that the day that they finish their implementation with us, or the next day, they'll have another $200 million in the bank. And that's not a drop in the bucket for any business, right? $200 million is very meaningful for expanding operations, acquiring other companies, or even just reducing the amount that they have to borrow, right? Or raise or whatever their strategy is for capitalization today. So a $200 million boon to the bottom line on day one, plus tens of millions in fraud savings, plus ongoing savings from the lower cost structure means that it's kind of just a natural fit for them. And so they're looking at this as kind of multifaceted, like maybe we layer in the fraud element first, right? And stop the bleeding that's happening here, kind of slowly trickling out millions of dollars here and there on fraudulent payouts, and then layer in the money movement to reduce their cost and get that float unlocked as well.

How Instant Direct Payments Work

SPEAKER_02 7:27

Okay. You mentioned earlier, and I want to double-click on it, is the merchants getting paid faster. I mean, everything today, whether whether it's related to payments or not, is faster, faster, faster, right? And you're doing it a little differently. Not a lot of companies in payments are able to do what you're doing. So maybe talk about like how you do that and why you chose that as a way to differentiate and kind of dig deeper into that.

SPEAKER_01 7:48

Yeah, absolutely. So I'll start with the why. So there are two top 10 banks on the planet that in my kind of current relationship with them years and years ago, they had kind of proposed this challenge. Let's say they're the issuer of the card and they're also the acquirer for the merchant. When that transaction occurs through the networks today, they're still settling via ACH. They're literally ACH'ing money from one bank back to the same bank again. It's silly, right? It's like we have the money, it could just move on our ledger. There's also a lot of parties involved. Now, it's a no-brainer that Visa MasterCard would be involved because they're the network that connects this and makes this all work. But why an issuer processor? Why an acquire processor? Why an acquire? Why are sponsor bank? Why do all those parties need to be involved when it's the same bank on both sides? Right? That system makes sense when you're thinking about it as far as global scale and banks that don't have a relationship or anything like that. What we've been able to do a little bit differently is we've partnered with Visa MasterCard. They do effectively you could think of it like them doing the authorization on the cards for us. So there's still that connectivity level, we still pay them a fee. But then instead of settling through the traditional ACH method, we actually settle on the what we call instant direct payments rails or IDP for short. And IDP is exactly what it entails. Instant, meaning the money moves instantly, and direct, meaning it goes from the consumer to the merchant. It doesn't go through all these other parties. It's effectively what those banks had envisioned as a solution for when they're both the sender and the receiver of the funds. We're able to do this across 99.7% of banks, so it doesn't actually have to be the same bank, but effectively that's what we're doing. It's money in and money out, and it's done instantly. I think in market, there's really kind of two flavors of solution today. There's the standard merchant account where the funds settle via ACH and it takes several days. Like I said, on average, it's about four days when you count weekends and holidays in the US. The other flavor is like an advance. They're like, hey, we know this money's coming from the network. We're gonna go ahead and use our balance sheet to charge you a fee and send you the money faster. That is a viable solution for getting the money faster, but it has a cost associated with it for everybody involved. What we've done is fundamentally built a new infrastructure where the money just moves faster. It's not that we're advancing it, we don't have a balance sheet that could actually advance billions of dollars in volume. We're actually just moving the money faster. So if you think of the modern payment rails, you think of like RTP, FedNow, those are push payments, right? They're not designed for merchant transactions. They're not designed for pulling money from a consumer to a merchant, but they do work in reverse, right? If you had money and you need to send it to somebody, you can do that with those platforms. There is the RFP request for proposal within the RTP network. It's not very well supported and it's a little clunky, in my opinion. But fundamentally, you're starting those journeys from the bank account of the consumer. So they have to be logged into some sort of journey if they want to participate, similar to like a wire. What we're doing differently is we're still doing a poll like a traditional merchant transaction, all the kind of compatibility with the merchant systems and all those things that they need for reporting and reconciliation. But we're moving it in a modern way. And so you could kind of think of us as like the Zelle for merchants, I guess, if you want to use that analogy, where we're moving that money instantly, it's bank to bank without all the intermediaries, but we're doing it in a manner that the consumer behavior really doesn't have to change.

SPEAKER_02 11:05

Okay. Well, and thanks for explaining that in more detail. I appreciate it.

Multi-Channel Growth And Orchestration

SPEAKER_02 11:09

So let's talk a little bit about the future. Where do you see the biggest growth opportunity in your segment of payments?

SPEAKER_01 11:14

You know, there's so much happening at once right now. We have everything kind of pushing to multi-channel, traditional retail. You know, there are people now checking out on a mobile app while inside a physical store. Right? It's just the nature of how consumers interact with merchants has changed fundamentally. I think there's a lot to be said for being able to support multi-channel and multi-provider solutions. And so, you know, let's just say that a merchant has retail stores, they have their e-commerce channels, they have a mobile app, they're probably gonna have multiple software vendors to make that work for them, probably different hardware across different stores and different locations, geographies. And then they'll probably have to have multiple providers to support like a global business model, which is kind of where everything's trending towards, at least that's for the scaled businesses. And so I think being able to be the one point of interface for merchants that provides them more value than others in market, but also connects you to the others in the market, I think that's really becoming more and more important right now. And you're seeing a lot of orchestration kind of approaches to market where it's less about we're the gateway, we own the transaction, we send it, you know, one-to-one from one merchant to one gateway to one PSP, to like, hey, one merchant, but multiple channels, multiple connection types, and multiple vendors that they send the payment to, but then consolidated reporting, consolidated development effort. I think that area needs to happen because one of the biggest problems we have in the US market at least is the fragmentation. You know, 14,000 different financial institutions, depending on what you consider an FI. Then you've got, I don't even know how many acquires, processors, gateways, point of sale systems. I mean, tens of thousands, right? It's it's a very, very large ecosystem. And as a payment company, one of the biggest challenges you'll ever run into is that you get somebody who wants to use your service and you are not compatible with their system. And it's just so frustrating because you've now got to either talk them into changing systems, go fight the battle with the software or hardware vendor and see if they'll even have, you know, it's a closed environment like a walled garden, or do they let others participate? What does that cost? What does it take? Or you just walk away from the deal. I envision a world where everything's interoperable, everything's compatible with each other, but we've got a long ways to go from where we're at today to something like that.

SPEAKER_02 13:28

Okay, well, what does success look like for your company over the next, say, three to five years?

SPEAKER_01 13:32

You know, we have a couple of major milestones we need to hit. We need to reach certain scale that we have objectives for reaching. We're driving internally for 25 million in revenue. I think we'll surpass that early next year. We're then, you know, from there going to continue to scale. We need to enhance our connectivity, which I just mentioned, you know, we need to be compatible with as much of the ecosystem as possible to get the scale that we're after and to serve the demand that we have today. And then I think, you know, expansion globally, you know, our vision is not just to have some small impact on individual merchants or payment processors that partner with us, but really to change fundamentally how payments are viewed and used globally. We envision a world where merchants don't have any card risk and they, you know, get their money instantly. And so for that to be global scale, we've got a lot that we need to do on our side to do that and a lot of partnerships that we need to develop to enable us to do that. You know, I could picture us being acquired by somebody who's global already to accelerate that envision, or we, you know, kind of do it the old-fashioned way and just grow off of our balance sheet and our revenue.

SPEAKER_02 14:36

Okay.

Infrastructure Trends Reshaping Payments

SPEAKER_02 14:37

Well, you've been in the industry for quite a while. When you step back and look at the industry as a whole, what are some of the biggest trends that are going on right now that you think are really reshaping the industry?

SPEAKER_01 14:47

That was the nicest way anyone's ever called me old before. No, I am a grandfather and I have been in this for gosh, 27, 28 years, something like that now. Yeah, I mean, this is an exciting time. There's a lot of things happening right now that are fundamental. Not just, I'd say for like 20 years, Greg, the innovation happened on the top layer. The merchant interfaces, the integrations, the seamless transactions, the faster payment processing for the authorizations. I mean, I remember the day that all my merchants were on dial-up and I sold my first merchant with a high-speed connection and all the hoops we had to jump through to even get connectivity, make it work properly. And now I think I have one merchant remaining out of 6,000 at my other business that actually is still on dial-up. And they're in a pretty remote area that doesn't have the infrastructure and they just didn't want to pay to bring it to their like individual store. That's a huge shift, but it's not foundational, right? It's that top layer of how does the merchant access these things. And so while that's all exciting, there's a lot of opportunity there, seeing companies like Square and Stripe really monetize on those types of changes. I think what's happening now is we're seeing a shift to the infrastructure that's available. And I think stable coins are an exciting part of that, but they're just one part of it. There's a lot more going on. The card networks themselves have been incredibly forward-thinking and very innovative in what they're doing and how they see payments going forward. And so there's a lot to be said for the moment that we're in together in payments, which is a real pivotal moment where payments are shifting. The underlying kind of assumptions about business are being challenged when it comes to the payment industry. And I think this will enable all of us to add more value. And those that are quick to adopt these newer technologies are going to lead from the front. Eventually, we'll see the tail end pull in behind, and we'll see that same thing where maybe you got one straggler still doing things the old way and everyone else is doing it the new way. But I think it's probably a 20-year transition. That's what I've seen, at least in my career, is it takes about 20 years in the US market for that to happen. Although I'm hopeful I've seen acceleration in adoption, and I am hopeful that we'll see a faster adoption cycle for this kind of current momentum of changes to the payment infrastructure.

Career Advice And Leadership Priorities

SPEAKER_02 16:58

Okay. Well, 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 17:04

Oh my goodness. So I think there were really three things that I don't know if I'd say regret, but look back at my career and go, man, if I'd just done this differently, things would have been so much better. So, number one, I would have taken more time to find the right partners. Finding a partner is great. You know, it lets you get started, especially in the 90s when, you know, it the internet was just kind of a newer thing for finding this kind of information. It wasn't like very robust. But we had things like the green sheet and other stuff like that that I could have used to find the right partners. I did partner with a company that ended up going out of business because they were doing some things that were not right and the FTC shut them down. I had nothing to do with that, but I lost my residual stream. So I effectively started over a while into business. And as a teenager or a 20-year-old, I think when it happened, that was pretty painful for my family to start over. So finding the right partners who have the forward-looking mentality that are investing into technologies, investing into solutions and integrations would have allowed me not to turn down all these opportunities where I wasn't an option, right? Where I wasn't integrated. I'd say the second thing would be to stick with it. There were innovations I had early, early on that were way ahead of their time. And, you know, very, very challenging to be on that bleeding edge. But eventually I knew those technologies would eventually catch on, and they have now. And yet I wasn't part of them because I let it go. And so a great example is in, I think it was 99 or 2000, I developed a kiosk that could be used for self-ordering at restaurants. Now, you see that in a lot of different ways today, and you see it on even like on little Android devices, they probably paid 50 bucks a pop for that hardware. Whereas back then I was investing in thousands of dollars worth of hardware just to get a device that had a touch screen, had a computer, was small enough to use at a restaurant, things of that nature, but it's just very, very expensive. But had I stuck with it, that adoption curve is the same with all technologies. Eventually the cost of the technology falls below what somebody's willing to pay for it. So I should have stuck with it and had that as part of whatever I was leading from the front, would have had a lot of opportunities there. And then I think the third thing is just surround yourself with the right people, right? I sold my company multiple times or sold my book of business multiple times. And that kind of made me aligned with people. And some of them are really good people and helped me grow in the future, and some of them not so much, right? And so I think, you know, finding the right partners is similar, but also just in general, whether it's your employees, whether it's your resellers, whether it's uh software companies, you just aligning with the right people that have the same business ethics and objectives and mindset is really critical in this industry. It feels like a really big industry, but we all run into each other, right? It is much smaller than it feels like at times. And it's a lot of the people that I worked with 20 years ago I still work with today. And so building those relationships has been incredibly valuable, even if on day one you don't know what you're gonna do together, just finding the right people and you know, sharing that connection, helping each other and finding opportunities together.

SPEAKER_02 19:58

Okay. Well, what's the one thing that payment leaders that might be listening to the show today, what should they be thinking about right now?

SPEAKER_01 20:05

I think the number one piece is how do you differentiate? Let's say I get an email from Acquire ABC about a new solution, software program, gift and loyalty, whatever it is, right? Within two weeks, I'll probably see the same email with somebody else's logo on it. Like we are all kind of selling the same things. And so it used to be enough, in my opinion, to say I provide better service. You can call my cell phone, I can be there for you. Or if you're a scaled business, we have better systems, we have whatever. I think technology has brought us to a point where everyone can provide good service and the merchants need our service much less. And so, you know, the question is how do you really differentiate today? And I think it comes down to product. There are obviously verticals where people focus and they've had a lot of success going, hey, we're integrated with XYZ system and we're one of only two, and so we get a huge market share there. I think that will continue to commoditize as well, where there'll be more and more vendors who can offer something there. And so I think it really comes down to the product. What is the underlying product? How does it actually provide value to the merchant? And let's stop fighting over the penny or the basis point and let's find ways to provide value so we can actually generate significant margin again, but have the customer happy with that as well.

SPEAKER_02 21:18

Okay.

How To Contact Ionia Pay

SPEAKER_02 21:19

Well, before we go, if you don't mind, maybe kind of summarizing what you do and how people can get in touch with you.

SPEAKER_01 21:24

Yeah, the best way to reach us is through our website at ioniapay.com. You can also shoot an email over to sales at ioniapay.com, which as I said comes to Gordon, our COO, and myself. And we manage that either by referring you to the right person or handling it ourselves. And just kind of to recap what we do, we've built a payment rail that moves money instantly and eliminates the fraud risk inherent in card acceptance. And this is uh, I think a foundational change to how payments are run on the back end without much impact to the consumer journey or the merchant implementation.

SPEAKER_02 21:55

Okay. Well, Marshall, 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 22:00

Thank you. I really enjoyed talking with you about the industry and what I see going forward.

Closing And Listener Requests

SPEAKER_02 22:05

All right. And to all you listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well. And until the next story.

SPEAKER_00 22:10

Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments Podcast. Make sure you visit our website at leaders in payments.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.