How On-Demand Payroll Can Upgrade Your Business

Welcome back to CFO Weekly, where we're talking with financial leaders about how to build efficiency in their teams, create time for strategy, and ultimately get results. With your host, Megan Lees, let's jump right in.

Megan - 00:00:18: Today my guest is Brian Radin. Brian is the president of Comdata Prepaid. In his career, he has proven success with market leaders and startups across software, business services, human capital management, and finance industries. He also has an impeccable record of maximizing the strategic business model, optimizing business processes, and creating innovative initiatives that facilitate sustainable growth and generate traction in competitive markets. Brian has been recognized for identifying and securing key partners and sales channels, raising capital, building strategic C-level relationships with the investment community, and developing highly engaged leadership teams that increased revenue, profitability, and customer satisfaction. Brian, thank you very much for joining me on today's episode.

Brian - 00:01:19: You're welcome. I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Megan - 00:01:22: Yes, they will be discussing emerging trends in payroll as well as how finance and HR can work together to solve some of today's biggest challenges regarding attracting and retaining good talent. I'm really looking forward to learning from you, so let's get started.

Brian - 00:01:39: Sure.

Megan - 00:01:39: So, as always, let's start with you and your journey as to how it is that you got to where you are today.

Brian - 00:01:47: It's not a straight line, let me start there. And it's taking me to a lot of different places and including places that we've intersected in the past. And it really the common theme in the various roles that have had have all been about how do you take an organization, create a business and the products associated with that using great technology and great people to deliver. Highly satisfying solutions for your clients, whether they're B2B or in our case, B2B2C, with an employee or consumer ultimately using our product. And that began years ago after I got into business school at Wharton and worked as a consultant and then in the cable industry and working for Comcast and building out cable services. At the time when cable was a real technology that was out of the game, as opposed to today, which it's certainly not. And at some point, I got interested in working in businesses and with businesses and focusing on human capital. And that led me to work in strategy and acquisitions at ADP and really started to like this intersection of how people get paid and how organizations manage their workforce. And one manifestation of that was I started ADP's PEO business and then I left to start my own and did that for quite some time and really learn quite a bit about how you not only look at technology and solutions and products for the small business market but then how do you deliver those and also how do you sell them? Even more importantly, I did that for quite some time and sold my half of the company and went on to continue to follow up the path that led me to Global Payroll which is another really interesting space, and was the president of Cloud Pay, a global payroll software solution. And did that for several years and again was continuing to look for other opportunities where I could help scale and grow a business. And was recruited to come to Fleet Corps. And Fleet Core is a public company trading on the New York Stock Exchange for about 14 billion. Market cap is down a little bit like everybody else these days, but a very successful company that really started in the fuel card business but has expanded into corporate payments and lodging networks and had a business in the prepaid space that was primarily a pay card. And that business was sitting within our corporate payments division when the CEO here, who I knew from ADP, had recruited me to come in and say, hey, can we make this into a more valuable business and grow it? In a way that we can deliver not only basic paid card solutions but enhance that product. And also look at other ways in which we can use our application to sell to our customer base or provide to our customer base and then have a way to manage all of those people on the other end who get a card from us to help them understand how to use that product more effectively. And so I came here in 2018 as the president of our prepaid division and I have been here building that business ever since.

Megan - 00:05:25: And so you're going on five years now. Can you talk to us about what your proudest achievements are since joining Leadcorp?

Brian - 00:05:33: Yeah, I think that's an interesting question because in some ways there are some answers that feel good. Hey, we've grown the business, we're bigger despite COVID. We've hired some really great people to help build the business. Whether it's sales, marketing, operations, or a lot of people stuff. We have a much better mobile application and technology than we did when I got here. Built a whole brand called Pintwist, which I know we'll talk about. I think for me, it's really, though, being much more customer-centric and focusing in on why people actually want to use our solution, why employers want to offer it to their employees and then being able to evolve in. The world is moving at a very fast pace, both from technology and the environment in which we live in a way that we can continue to meet those demands and we can continue to achieve the kind of success that we had when I got here. And I think the measure for me would be our Net Promoter Score for customer satisfaction. When I got here, the business had an NPS of four, which anybody who runs a company does any customer sat knows it's not very good.

Megan - 00:06:55: Yeah.

Brian - 00:06:57: Meanwhile, when I went to the global payroll company when I got there originally, it was a -15, so not used to it. And then at the end of last year, our NPS was about 40. Wow. I think that really speaks to the quality of our services, the level of satisfaction on the customer side. And to do all of that, you've got to have great people, better technology, and you've got to stay attuned to what's happening in the market. And I think in a unique way during COVID you have to deliver what I'll say is more hand-holding for a lot of companies, that we're facing some very difficult decisions around people and operations. And I think we came out of that feeling pretty good and our customers feeling pretty good about us. So while there are a lot of things that I think we've accomplished as a team within Fleet Core in this business, I think that one probably stands out to me because I think it's a reflection of the progress we've made as a business. And it also, I think, has helped us retain many, many customers. And while they're smaller than they were due to COVID they're still working with us. They're still in our role, so to speak, and we're still delivering services to them.

Megan - 00:08:11: Congratulations. Those are some amazing achievements. It seems like historically payroll has been an area that's slow to innovate. So what initially drew you to this space and what keeps you excited about it?

Brian - 00:08:27: I get that asked a lot of, let's say some of my friends from Wharton or in business, and they say, wait, do you like dealing with people's stuff around payroll and taxes and making sure that it's accurate and how they get paid? That seems really mundane and also regulated at the state levels and in some cases through the CFPB. That just doesn't seem very exciting and interesting. And so maybe in some ways, I'm a little nutty. But to me what I like about it is that it really strips away that its payroll or any business. And I've worked in everything from companies that created Lady Swimwear to PEO services to cable services to supermarkets in a variety of roles that I did mention in that jagged career path. But this is interesting because it really touches on what I like about the business, which is kind of the intersection of technology and service. And yes, the payroll community, which sits probably about 60% of the time within your constituency CFOs, although many of them will forget that the payroll departments are down in the basement. And it's very different than the things that they think are important sometimes, is the fact that it can be innovative and it has and it touches everything that really matters in an organization, in my opinion, unless you're purely making a widget. So maybe the product is, but it's the people. And if you don't manage those people, remunerate those people, compensate those people, provide benefits for those people in a way that is satisfying, simple, and meets their needs that they have. Whatever job they have, it's going to disrupt your workforce. And certainly the last few years, we've seen that from an external stimulus with COVID But it was happening, and it's been happening for years. So for me, it's this intersection of people. But then how do you use technology with people to drive greater customer satisfaction? And one of those places where I like to do that is in kind of payroll HCM and payments because it really does utilize all of those elements. And sure, could I go sell SAT supply chain software or Oracle or whatever a lot of large companies use, or go sell workday or success factors or whatever? Sure, those are parallels, but most of that is SAS software. And I also am a bit of a masochist because I like to work with organizations like ours, where while we use technology to enable, we use technology to satisfy, we use people to retain. And I've always looked at having strong service teams. Having strong organizations is really a way you can differentiate yourself from your competitors, assuming that your competitors are also using people to support their business. And so this element of technology and services, this intersection, is really a place that I enjoy. And payroll is a place that is absolutely critical and important.

Megan - 00:12:03: And let's talk about Fintwist solutions. So what exactly is Fintwist?

Brian - 00:12:09: It's a figment of my imagination. Again, I made it up by sitting in a conference room in Nashville. Now, we actually spent a lot of time developing a brand. Before, we had been Twist, which really is the brand for all of the prepaid programs and our mobile and our earn wage access program, Pinterest on Demand. We had a payment card. In fact, comedy invented pay cards about 37 years ago. And even in my PEO, I remember using them. And very typically back then, it was because we had a lot of people and some of these small businesses didn't have a bank account that couldn't get paid. And then people were still using a lot of checks, but businesses were getting smarter. They didn't want to keep pushing paper out. And payroll companies were charging them more money for checks than they were for electronic pay. And so pay cards came into being. Income data invented them. When I got here, our product was functional, but not very good, frankly. And we realized that it's evolved. The whole industry evolved, and the products evolved. And we needed to create a brand new Veneer, and we needed to create new attributes. And then we had to do the hard part, which was then changing and building out new technology to put in the hands of our clients and their employees. And so to do that as like, the common Data pay card over the common Data program really didn't feel very fulfilling to me. And so we spent some time looking at different ways to go to market different branding techniques and kind of different brands themselves. And we started with Fintwist. So we rebranded all of our generic materials. But more importantly, we embarked upon a path to create this technology, which was a change, to change what we did from when we did it, to take the history that we had, which I think is important because we know the space. But then twist it around and use it in a way that's more consistent and current with what's going on in the market. And that's really where the brand came from. And it represents everything. We do not just pay cards, but other programs that we provide to our clients as well.

Megan - 00:14:31: Give us an overview of what a Paycard is and how it's more financially inclusive.

Brian - 00:14:37: Yeah, so basically, as I said, pay card. And in some ways, it still has a lot of the same attributes that it had when I signed up with the company and went very well with income data. I just don't remember so long ago that essentially their clients needed a product that would give their employees a methodology to get paid that wasn't a check and didn't need a bank. It was very basic. And so essentially they started with this debit card that would take a load or payment your payroll instead of it going to your direct deposit account or check and you'd have a payment card and it really allows you to get your money at an ATM and that was really what the original pay cards did. But over time, as the world changed and companies moved away from checks so today, about 20% of Americans or workers get paid summer part-time, summer full-time, let's just call them W-2s get paid on a pay card, which some people go, wow. I'll tell people that, and they go, what? I didn't even know what it was. And it seems like a lot of people, other people will say, Gee, that's not very many. But the relative firm would be the balance. About 70% get direct deposit and around 8% to 10% are still getting checks and that number continues to decline until it reaches some number, probably 5%, where somebody will always want to check. And whether it's dictated by a union or a government entity or some other type of employer who just doesn't want to bend to the will of the electronic world, they'll throw some checks out. But for the most part, it's DDA. And then pay cards. And what happened was more people started to see the benefit of using that product, but not just getting a debit card with my payout. And so the product began to evolve. But what's interesting is still there are about 24 million people that are underbanked and minorities make up a much higher percentage of the people that are underbanked. And so for them, if your company suddenly doesn't want to provide a check and in multiple states now you can dictate electronic pay, how am I going to get paid? I don't want a bank account. The average bank account, a very recent study, it's about three dollars and ninety cents a week is what it would cost to have a bank account. Whether it's minimum fees or other fees associated with an account to provide a product that individuals who are unbanked or under the bank, particularly minorities, that would give you the ability to make sure everybody got paid. On top of that, the product itself moved and evolved from a debit card is a credit card. It's a debit. You can use it for your Venmo or your P2P type payments. You can do bill pay out of it. You can use it at an ATM, you can go to a Mastercard Bank or one of our partner banks, and use the card for free to get payments, to get your cash, or to get money at the teller. And so it becomes very inclusive because you can use it. And while there are some nominal fees on the program, there's literally a way that's very easy to get charged nothing. And we have a large percentage of our users in the multiple hundreds of thousands that pay nothing for the card. And in terms of the employer, the employer receives the pay card program for free, so there's no cost to them. It's a pretty simple implementation process. And once they're up and running, they're not paying anything. And a percentage of their employees are paying nothing and the others are using it in some ways sometimes as a convenience so, you know, CitiBank. Let's say I have a Citibank card and there's a CitiBank on Fifth Avenue and I live on First Avenue but there's a Chase Bank on First Avenue. I may decide because I'm lazy. Don't want to walk to CitiBank. I'll just go to Chase and Chase will charge me $3.50. So it's convenient. So there are convenience fees, but there are alternatives where there are no fees. Therefore, somebody who doesn't want to pay a fee and needs to get paid for this product allows them to do it.

Megan - 00:19:00: Just curious, how do you guys make money off this product?

Brian - 00:19:04: There are two places. One is on the people that do have a convenience fee. There's a piece of that. And then because we obviously have to pay Mastercard for all of the transactions, but there is some small percentage of interchange that is shared back with Mastercard to the company that provides the Paycard. And that's primarily on credit transactions versus debit transactions. Much a very low percentage, for example, but different, let's say that a corporate banks program, which is a very part of our business, our corporate business, or others, like Amex or Capital One of the banks, when you're getting a company to move all of their AP payments to a virtual card program or even a plastic program. Still, the split with Mastercard is better because a lot of that money goes back from, let's say, comedy or corporate back to the employer. So a lot of clients can fund their whole AP function or elements of the CFO's office to rev share by getting their clients to start using our case Mastercard, and that share comes back to them. That's a bigger program, that's a bigger dollar piece than it would be on a pay card program.

Megan - 00:20:25: And the concept of on-demand pay, that's pretty new to me. Has that been around for a long time?

Brian - 00:20:33: You're just not paying attention, Megan. No, I'm kidding. It's not been around for a long time. It's been around as an idea for many years. Even I go back at least eight or nine years when I was president of Cloud Pay. I knew this stuff was going on, but there were a lot of questions about how it worked and what it worked and how is it regulated, and all the kinds of stuff that you wouldn't think about when you're talking about something that affects an employee's pay. And so it really began to take off, I would say about three to four years ago. You started to see people talking about this idea of why would I have to get paid every other week or once a week. Because a lot of people need their money now. And obviously, that has changed even more so. You've got about 40% of Americans who couldn't even cover an expense of $400 out of their account, whatever that account might be. We estimate, based on research, that about 80% of Americans are living check to check. Well, even check to check doesn't mean living biweekly or semi-monthly, or even weekly. It means living day to day. And so the concept of, hey, can I get money faster, assuming I've worked because it's owed to me anyway. It's not like, hey, I'm fronting you money. It's not a payday loan. It's not a regular loan. It's not a cash advance even or a buy now, pay later scheme. It's literally, I work. It's your limitations, employer, or the way in which you want to pay me, which also leads to cash flow and some other things are interest in those huge volumes. They just don't want to pay me, or they don't want to pay me, but every week or every other week. So this concept of, hey, why don't we pay people on demand or you'll hear or earned wage became more and more interesting. And like a lot of the fintech that's gone on over the last 10, 15 years, a bunch of smart people started creating technology that I'll just say, for lack of a better term, bypasses payroll in a way where the employer doesn't really get impacted. And they then use this software platform to calculate, based on feeds from payroll and time systems, what Megan has earned. And I'll let her take on-demand what she's earned now. Oh, and by the way, where a big evolution has occurred in this and there's something like, I think I've seen something, $50 billion last year of EWA transaction, something like that, really huge is I'll put the money out for the company. So not only if it's your company and you don't want to change the way you pay payroll, I have a weekly system and that's it. I don't want to do it any differently. That's okay, you don't have to. And two, when people want their money, we'll put the money out for them, and then when they get paid on payday, we'll take out what's owed to us and we'll pass back the rest of it to their Paycard. And so it became then much easier because the original models were very intrusive. It was kind of like when you would run a payroll every day. It would be like you're living in California and someone's quitting every day. You got to keep running payrolls because they got to pay them that day. And that was interfering with the payroll departments and people didn't like that model. And that was really the original model. It became much more popular and really started to take off when you could essentially float that money. Now the risk there obviously is who's floating the money, what's the nature of that organization? There are by our last 50 of these platforms floating around and only a handful in my opinion, including ours, obviously has the financial wherewithal to be comfortable in floating literally millions of dollars of payroll in advance of somebody's pay. Because the risk is that pay, even if you're getting feeds, is impacted by garnishments or other elements or the employer goes away. And obviously the farther down market, just the math tells you the smaller the business, the higher life of that business would not survive or will not survive. And therefore you're stuck because you've paid out that money and you really have no recourse. Because to be a provider and to be accepted, at least in the current world of the CFPB, you can't debit money from a credit card. If for some reason you don't get your money back, you can't go to look at credit reports to decide whether you're going to do it. This is literally an administrative service and as part of that service, you're funding money. Otherwise, you could then be a lender. You have to be registered in every state and there are still a lot of questions with the state payroll rules and the CFPB with some of these models as to whether they're really service providers or whether they're really lending money and how they should be regulated and whether they should be regulated. I think you'll see quite a bit of shakeout in the next couple of years with these models, and providers I should say, but the core model is pretty much here to stay. And whether the payroll companies just evolved and some already have that capability but don't want to offer it directly, or some may obviously it's a component of payroll to some degree. I think that may change. It will evolve. Some companies will never be able to front the kind of capital they need to, and some of them will get regulated away. But the pure concept of paying somebody as they earn it, that's here to stay.

Megan - 00:26:33: Yeah, it's a really interesting concept, and I'm sure it's exploded in the last two-plus years.

Brian - 00:26:40: Absolutely. That's what I was saying. The model, I mean, I think I saw $50 billion worth of EWA-related transactions, and this just as, you know, when people see entrepreneurs and investors see opportunity in the space and they see other companies growing, there's always the next team that wants to jump in, and we've seen that. As I said, we see. I've counted more than 50 domestic, but around the world, I have a list of over 100 total providers. I mean, it's the same way they could be unique to India or the UK, or the Philippines. It's really interesting how the basic idea of I worked, Amy now has become a kind of a core mantra. And frankly, here, especially with larger enterprises, which is where most of the providers have been feasting, because it's lower risk and a lot more people who would have interest, it's become a core element of how they recruit, how they retain employees. And I think you've got to be careful as an employer in offering to send you, for example, in our case, to your point about inclusion and financial wellness, which I take very seriously, we don't allow employees we use our product to take more than 50% of their wages every time they use the service. Now, we could offer them more. A lot of people, a lot of these companies will say, you can take everything. One, the type of person using it is more of the lower income. I don't want to say, click--people without income. In fact, a lot of people use our cards or make decent money, but they're scrapped. They're really strapped, I should say. They're for cash, and they're strapped to make their bills. This living check to check. So the idea would be, look, but we also don't want it to be every day I want to go in to pay my rent. It's a great reason to pay my car payments. Going to the store and buying cigarettes or buying something that you could probably wait on starts to get into a habit I don't want to be the one who's driving the habit. And one way to do that is to manage the amount of money they can take on demand. And that's just one element. Others will tell you, well, let the consumer decide what they want. They want to take 100% of their pay. Take 1% of their pay every single day. I work a shift, I take a pay. I work a shift, I take a pay. To me, that creates, I think, bad financial habits and is in contrast to our objective of trying to create better, smarter users of our product so that in the long term they can have more financial freedom than they have today.

Megan - 00:29:29: And let's talk about the current labor market. So we all know that labor is very scarce these days, but how can things like Fintwist and On Demand pay address some of these hiring and retention concerns?

Brian - 00:29:46: Look, I'm not going to say I've talked about this a lot. This is a component of it. I've been advocating a higher minimum wage. I've been advocating broader access to health care and other related benefits. I've been advocating long before COVID, more flexibility in how people work, particularly in the industries where we're prevalent. So if I was to tell you that 80% of the people that use our product are working in retail staffing, hospitality, and manufacturing, that would be maybe even low. So these are people that are typically hourly. There's kind of a barbell effect. You got some older people, like the ones who work in manufacturing lines and may have working second jobs in the retail staffing side. And you got a lot of gen z new people in the workforce, people working in restaurants and hotels and places like that who are younger, who frankly never had a bank account, never will you talk to somebody under the age of 30. I'll bet you nine out of ten don't even have a checkbook. Don't even have a check. They don't even know where to write a check. So you got a different type of human being that's using the product in different ways and come from different places. You have some people that come from places of struggle, needing a way to get paid, wanting something that they can use at an ATM or get cash. And they have others who are really using it to pay their pals because they all went out, had drinks and they have to then mow everybody or use it to pay something through debit or credit. Occasionally they might get cash if their dad bothers them and they got a reimbursement. So maybe go get some cash. So it's not one kind of person who uses it within our community, but the community is a lot of those kinds of those individuals. And as you all know, when we talk about what's happening in the labor markets, the kinds of companies that we deal with have changed and have changed forever. There's absolutely no doubt about it in my mind. And they were starting to change a little bit before they were getting a little technologically smarter. There's much more software that has been developed in this market around the integration of POS and integration of payroll ATM into financial applications. I think what accelerated that when COVID hit was look, I have to be cheaper, I have to be leaner because demand became nonexistent for a period of time. And as they started to. Come back because they have to lay off a lot of these people. People weren't coming back because I can't work remotely in my apartment if I've got to be cleaning a room at a Marriott or serving a table or working in the kitchen or standing on a manufacturing line. And so what ended up happening, you had this whole displacement of the labor market, which is pretty well documented, but significantly in our space. And so even today, the whole hospitality space, while maybe half of it's come back, there's still some number. I saw there are, like, 1.5 million open jobs at any point in time. And so what's happened is that company that, let's say, that Marriott Hotel, that had, let's say, eight maids working in the hotel cleaning rooms, that went down to two during COVID, and now they're running it at four. How could they do that? How can they deliver services? Well, because you are the consumer. You don't even have the expectation that your room gets cleaned every day anymore. You don't even expect it because you didn't think Covid. And so, consequently, I can operate that with four maids. And so those four people are all I need. But I still can only recruit three because the market is so tight. So many people disappeared, still working the money they got from the Biden and trump payments, or they're deciding they don't want to work in that environment, and they're working from home. Others have shifted jobs that give them more flexibility, better pay, and some of the benefits that I think people need to have a better work-life balance. And so what do I do? Well, I've got to start recruiting. And a lot of companies are having to recruit. I'm not talking about a single hotel. I'm talking about volumes of people. And most employers maybe you've seen this and the things you've done over the years, they're just not great at recruiting, and they're not great at hiring lots of people. It's one thing to hire a few. It's another thing to hire the many, especially an incredibly competitive market, even with what's happening, with inflation. So what do they do? A lot of times they start with money, because that's the most painful, but it's also the easiest. It's not just money. How do I deliver a better solution or better work environment for my employee? And part of it is what we do. It's people who need money when they want it. So while it used to be remote, in the old days, my family had a business, and if somebody needed some money, my uncle would give them $20 for COVID. I mean, in some ways, that concept of helping people make it from here to there went away because of the way we evolved in terms of how we pay people and the way in which you want to manage your whole financial applications. But the idea of I needs $20 today never went away. And it's pronounced probably even more so with people that are working because of inflation. So being able to pay them when they need to get paid, giving them a product that gives them the flexibility to use it in any way they want without having to go to a bank or having a bank account and having some controls around it which help them start to think about, how do I budget? How do I plan? We have a lot of, probably a third or more of our cardholders have a bank account, but they use our product budget, put money aside, and used it for only certain types of payments. And so consequently, that helps in becoming more financially astute. And I think that's important when you have a scarcity of income coming in, even if it's higher than it was. And as an employer, if I don't have more kinds of quivers that I can use so that our arrows that I can actually get people, I'm just at a disadvantage. And so that's why our products help, I think, in positioning an employer as an employer of choice, but it's by no means the only thing. There are a lot of components to it and I think employers are still struggling with what that magic combination would be for their particular business.

Megan - 00:36:42: And as you look inward at Fintwist and Comdata, where do you see, where do you see yourself headed and where are the biggest opportunities for you guys in the future?

Brian - 00:36:53: Well, I think it's, I think we're headed in the right direction.

Megan - 00:36:58: It sounds like it definitely sounds.

Brian - 00:37:00: The last couple of years have been incredibly challenging. Not just for us, but for the people that we do. There are a lot of big companies that provide services that we meet with, our partners with. And I think the whole concept of work, how do you work, how do people work, how do I get people to work, to do the work? How do I maintain productivity, how do I give people flexibility, particularly in jobs where I have to stand somewhere or be somewhere, whether it's an office or a restaurant or a hotel or a clean room? Those are challenging questions. There's a lot of technology that's come out to help companies understand better analytics, to help companies understand how to put all that together. There's been a lot of people's opinions on how I structure the right programs and benefits as we talked about. So I think it's a really from a pure philosophical sit around and chatted up kind of thing, I think it's a very unique and interesting time, at least in my career, of working. I think it's challenging but interesting, I think for us as a business how do we continue to participate in that chain? How do we continue to either add products to our core Fintwist pay card solutions that can help employers with this hiring and retaining challenge, or opportunities for them to provide more benefits to their employees or help educate their employees to be better at managing what they do get and continue to push and encourage a little bit that they'll give them a little bit more because that is important? But job satisfaction, I'm sure you've seen these studies. I mean, pay is important, but oftentimes it's not even the top two or three. Having an environment that they work in that creates satisfaction, whether that's some work-life balance, whether that's the kind of job that they have, whether it's the ability to be promoted, whether that's the supervision that gives them a sense that they're accomplished. And even in the last couple of years, particularly with Gen Z, a lot of them will tell you one of the most important things is what does my employer do? Are they good citizens? Do they give money to people? Do they support charities and causes? Do they let us participate in that? It's become something that I remember working at ADP many years ago. We had a giant United Way program and everybody contributed. And maybe there was one event and that was it. That was all about giving and giving back. But nobody, if you ask one employee if that was important to them, whether they work there or not, would tell you probably no. For most people, it was a nice thing to do, but it wasn't part of the work environment. Now we talk to people who are in their 20s and they'll say, hey, they know more about what their employer does in that area than they do about the core business. That a lot of times their employers, even in well, the world has changed and so part of it is for us to be able to deliver more solutions. I think the idea of how do you take this on-demand product, how do you engage it with employees in a way that they're smart. They use it when they need it, and they use it in a way that helps them in their life, I think, will continue to evolve and be capable of responding to changes at the federal regulation and state payroll regulation level, which is going to happen because there are always questions about how people do things. And in this industry, I don't even want to call them bad actors. I would say there are people that are working on the periphery or are extending some of these regulations to fit their model in a way that I don't know if that will continue and I think it will change and what will that look like. And make sure that we're always ahead of that. We're a big public company. I like to think that my business is really important, and it is. But we got a lot of other businesses and so we're not going to do things. We're going to be conservative and we're going to do things in a way that we think is the most consistent with what the people that regulate us think we should do. Some other people, if you're backed by a venture firm or private equity firm and you got to grow really quickly, maybe you have a different view of how you grow and maybe deal with some of the consequences later. So I think that's another part. The last thing would be we do more than just pay cards we provide other programs to clients. We do a whole bunch of corporate disbursement programs which would be more akin to the types of programs that would probably fall more under someone who's doing product. But also we deal with a lot of CFOs and a lot of controllers around these types of programs. For example, we have a very large blood plasma company that provides donation services and we handle all their payments to their consumers. And so for our business, the way I always think about it, relative, let's say, to our corporate payments business is in the end it's a human being that's using our product. Whether it's someone who donated blood, whether that's a W-2, whether that's 1099 who's working on a variety of jobs, whether that's a gig worker, they're holding a product in their hand that says been to us, whether they're using our mobile application, whether using the card, whether going to our web application. We are dealing with people in our business which is a bit different than most of the other businesses within FLEETCOR because we're more of an enterprise-type solution, a B2B kind of business. We're B2B2C. And frankly, the consumers, what drives satisfaction to consumers, how we make any money. And the consumers are who we ultimately deal with pretty much on a day-to-day basis. Because once we set the programs up, it's the consumers calling us, it's calling our call center, it's using our product. It's very rarely conversations with employers unless we're adding more or changing something. So building out more of those kinds of solutions, being able to provide those, whether it's domestically or even looking at some international applications, I think it's probably the next step for us as we continue to grow the business.

Megan - 00:43:01: And the last question, if our listeners remember just one thing from this conversation, what would you want it to be?

Brian - 00:43:09: Besides you being a wonderful host?

Megan - 00:43:12: Well, thank you.

Brian - 00:43:13: I think it's really that the world is changing how people work, how employers. And when I say employers, obviously we work for a company. It's an entity, it's just a legal, it's the people. In our case, it's usually heads of HR, senior HR people, and business owners. On the financial side, it's usually the controller level who ultimately is the straight line to the head of the payroll, particularly the larger enterprises that we deal with. Those people understand the world, changing, understanding how the workforce is changing in a way that they need to respond and I believe that we are committed at Fintwist. We have ways in which we can help them meet changing needs of their business and their workforce. But also we have a lot of people that are dealing with these same problems across, as I said, primarily or quite a bit in the industries where our product is mostly used and we have a lot of lessons learned. We have a lot of knowledge that is not specific to a company per se, but how people are doing things well, and best practices. And when you're dealing with change, which is super scary, whether it's personal, like, hey, my son graduated from college, and now what's he gonna do? Hey, I've got 100 ma's I got to hire in 20 locations, or I'm conceptually going to lose some business or drive down customer satisfaction. I think we have ways in which we can help people do that. We can give them best practices as well as provide the technology and service that goes along with the Fintwist business itself. I think that the most important thing is that we can help. We have products that can help, we have people that can help, and that in general, the world is changing and you have to stay out of it or suddenly you're going to be dying.

Megan - 00:45:14: Yeah, change is definitely not going away and it seems like it's coming at us faster and faster every year.

Brian - 00:45:20: Absolutely, I totally agree. As I said, it's a little scary. Halloween is coming up anyway, so you're getting ready for twelve days. Get your pumpkins and your candy.

Megan - 00:45:33: Yeah. And change. Just a chance for an opportunity to emerge.

Brian - 00:45:39: Absolutely.

Megan - 00:45:41: Brian, thank you so much for being my guest today.

Brian - 00:45:44: Thank you so much for having us. And people are interested to learn more about what we do. The best place to go would be www.fintwistsolutions.com. That's Fintwist solutions, all word one word.com. And there's a lot of information about our solutions, what we do, and how we do it. And it's a good place to start and learn about whether this might be some things we could provide some of your listeners. And it's been great catching up, and I hope people were able to take something beneficial from our conversation.

Megan - 00:46:19: Yes, I appreciate you taking the time to be here with us today and I wish you and Fintwist Solutions all the best. Sounds like you're both doing amazing things. And to all of our listeners, please tune in next week, and until then, take care.

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