Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Jeremy Almond, CEO of PayStand (Part 1)

The B2B digital payment space is changing. Listen to Jeremy discuss the developments.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as PayStand.

Jeremy Almond: I’m the Founder and CEO of a company called PayStand. PayStand is a B2B digital payment network. What Venmo does for consumers, we do for commercial transactions. We believe that there is a huge transformation that’s going on in the commercial side of financial services. We’re bringing about change in three clear ways. We call it no paper, no fees, and no monopoly.

Sramana Mitra: When you say B2B payment, could you elaborate on how you’ve gone to market. What segments have you gone in through? Where are you seeing adoption?

Jeremy Almond: This is true globally too. Over half of the commercial payments are still done through paper. One of the reasons why is things like credit card and other payment networks are not designed for commercial payment. When you have large transactions between insurance companies, real estate, or wholesale manufacturing, you’re not going to pay a $50,000 invoice on a credit card, because credit cards have fees.

Generally, those fees are between 1% and 3%. We work with companies with fairly high volume in industries that have generally large transaction sizes and fairly mature industries. This could be insurance, real estate, or manufacturing. We have a cohort of businesses that use our network for customers of their own.

Sramana Mitra: In a lot of these cases, it’s either payment by check or payment by wire transfer. You’re trying to bring in some sort of a digital payment system into that.

Jeremy Almond: That’s right. We will bring an entirely digital, modern network. We speed up time to cash instead of waiting for a manual process. We help automate the process. We use something called smart contracts. That means we can drive automation where they might otherwise manually do things like reconcile with their financial system. We reduce fees dramatically. Our model is a flat fee model, which is very different from the rest of the payment industry.

Sramana Mitra: How is the adoption? In our business, we have two sides. One is B2C although it’s not exactly B2C because these are entrepreneurs who are subscribing to our system online. That’s usually credit card-based.

Then we have corporate business where larger companies use our Incubator-in-a-box platform to run their incubation programs. There, we get paid either by direct deposit or by check but mostly by direct deposit actually. It seems like your technology has not reached these kinds of companies. What is your penetration?

Jeremy Almond: There is around $8 trillion in commercial payments. We have a long way to go. We have about 50,000 businesses on our payment network at this point. We’re one of the fastest-growing commercial payment networks today.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Jeremy Almond, CEO of PayStand
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