PayQuicker President Speaks to Authority Magazine On The Future of Money
An Interview With Jason Hartman, Authority Magazine
Treat people well — I believe this point dwarfs every other thing, in business and in life. FinTech/Banking is a small world, and you will run into the same people over and over again. In the last 10 years, I have never taken a job from a formal job listing. All of my work, whether as a member of the Executive Team of 3 companies, or as a consultant, has come from personal relationships where people knew me and the quality of my work and the way that I treated people in roles where I may have been a client (with them as a vendor) or peers.
Charles Rosenblatt, President, PayQuicker
PayQuicker President, Charles Rosenblatt, was featured in an interview with Jason Hartman of Authority Magazine. Rosenblatt shared his views on the future of Payments and Banking, while also sharing some personal anecdotes and his thoughts on leadership.
The way we bank has changed dramatically over the last decade. It was not too long ago when you had to wait in line in a bank to deposit money. Today things are totally different. You can do your banking without ever walking into a bank.
In addition, the whole concept of money has changed. In the recent past, money usually meant bills and coins. But today, the concept of money has expanded to include digital currency and NFTs. What other innovations should we expect to see in banking in the short and medium term?
To address this, we are talking to leaders in the banking, finance, and fintech worlds, to discuss the future of banking and money over the next few years. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Charles Rosenblatt of PayQuicker.
JM: Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started in this industry?
CR: As you know, like every 10-year old in the 1980s, I dreamed about being in credit cards and FinTech (not really!). As with most people that enter this space, I got into the FinTech and Cards business because I found a great mentor that was in this space who worked at Capital One, and eventually decided to join Capital One myself after beginning my career in the hedge fund world. After spending many years with top global banks, such as Chase, I spent time consulting and working for mid-to-small size companies in FinTech to help them grow and create businesses until 2014, when I found this interesting niche in payments termed Payouts. Since then, I have been on Executive Teams at all the leading Global Payout providers, and growing the payouts industry as a whole, including being involved in the Hyperwallet acquisition by PayPal in 2018, and I am excited to grow PayQuicker in that same way.
I really care about two things in a work setting: (1) Surrounding myself with very smart people (2) Freedom and flexibility to do what is most important: spend time with loved ones. I tell my teams that if they are not having fun (in general) coming to work, they spend too much time there and they need to take a break and go somewhere else. I find that the FinTech space has some of the smartest people in the world and while I wind-up being available 24–7 to my clients and team, when I’m not traveling, I get to spend time with my wife and four boys, which is the most important thing.
JM: Ok wonderful. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. Can you tell our readers about the most interesting projects you are working on now?
CR: There are tons of interesting things happening at PayQuicker, but most importantly is our Payouts OS platform, which we launched publicly in September. Payouts OS enables turnkey integration with a single REST API that plugs into multiple banks and global payment rails to intelligently determine and facilitate the quickest and most cost-effective way for clients to send payouts to businesses and consumers globally. Payouts OS meets the needs of the growing global gig economy, estimated around 78 million people, and the underbanked, who cannot access paychecks through traditional bank accounts, by enabling instant payouts through cards, bank transfers, e-Wallets and most modern payment mechanisms.
Since the launch, we’ve seen continued growth of the Payouts OS platform and the network behind it, through our partnerships with the likes of Barclays, Mastercard, Corpay, and more. Each day we are seeing new customers come on and working through new partnerships to expand payouts access across the globe. Today, we are enabling payouts to 200 countries in 40+ currencies through bank and non-bank methods.
JM: How do you think this might change the world?
CR: Payouts-as-a-Service technology, like Payouts OS, has the ability and opportunity to democratize payouts on a global scale. Businesses and their workers are not being held back by high rates that their banks or foreign exchange providers may be charging for cross-border payments. Payees are able to choose their preferred payouts methods, including choice across currency (local currency, digital currency) and method (digital wallets, plastic cards, etc.). Aggregated into a single ‘Expedia-like’ platform, Payors integrated with Payouts OS benefit from intelligent routing, by which a live auction in real-time determines and facilitates the quickest and most cost-effective method for Payors to send payouts globally. Getting people their money faster and in their preferred method has had and will have resounding effects on a massive scale.
JM: What most excites you about the banking or payments industry as it is today? Can you explain what you mean?
CR: There’s a lot of buzz around the industry about cross-border payments and addressing the issues long associated with this part of the industry. For the longest time, the easiest and most sure way to make a cross-border payment was to hop on a plane with a suitcase of cash. Now, global payments are being made locally, which is amazing compared to just years ago. Technology has made it possible for payouts to be made in various currencies across a majority of countries and territories. The continued innovation in the cross-border payments space as a whole and finding new ways to bring people their hard-earned money in their preferred method is what excites me the most.
JM: What most concerns you about the banking or payments industry as it is today? What would you suggest needs to be done to address that?
CR: The biggest concern facing the banking and payments industry today is that of distrust. With FTX and instability around cryptocurrencies, paired with the layoffs across fintech and banks, there is still a perception of mistrust towards the banking and payments industries as a whole. The origin of this concern is that some entities are using people’s money in ways that they shouldn’t, which needs to be monitored carefully.
To address this, organizations need to find ways to create and build trust with customers and be more client-centric, focusing on creating an easy customer experience and providing continued value to customers. At PayQuicker, our motto has always been “happy payees”. While our large clients are all corporations, when push comes to shove, we are focused on providing a better payouts experience for their client base — ultimately, the everyday consumer.
