2024 Is Going To Be Insane! Here's Our Predictions! | B2B Vault - The Biz To Biz Podcast

Yo, what's up everybody? It's Justin live from B2B Vault, the biz to biz podcast sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems, hosted by this guy, the Zach Galifianakis of payment processing himself, Allen Kopelman. And in today's podcast, we'll be talking about, uh, some payment processing predictions for 2024, uh, going over his predictions from, uh, this year, 2023, and, uh Yeah, man, just touching base on some other things as well in general. How you doing, Sarah? How was the holidays?

Doing good. Holiday was good. It was like a long weekend. There was a lot of sports on TV. And, uh, so that was cool.

Lots of sports.

Yeah, football. The Dolphins won. The Heat won. Sorry about that. But can't win them all. I know.

And, uh, they playing the Bucks?

Yeah. Oh, that's right, they did play the Bucks this weekend. I played the Bucks. That was—

what was that, Christmas Eve?

Yeah, last— no, last night. Christmas Day night.

Oh, Christmas night. That was last night.

Yeah, last night they played the Bucks.

I watched all 3 Bourne— well, the first 3 Bourne movies with me and my wife. We sat and just watched Bourne movies yesterday.

You know, it's funny, one of my friends He's like, oh, it's not Christmas Eve until the guy Hans whatever goes flying off of the top of— I agree, 1,000%— Nakatomi Towers.

If you don't watch Die Hard on Christmas Eve, what are you doing?

Yeah, Christmas as Bruce Willis, that was crazy.

I love that movie.

That was an insane movie.

It's a great movie. Yippee-ki-yay!

Exactly.

Yeah, the Twinkies.

Yeah, he did all— he did what, 2 or 3 of those? Every one of them was on Christmas.

2 or 3?

Die Hard?

7 Die Hards.

Really?

I don't know. They— yeah, bro, it kind of— the one, the very last one, it, you know, because Bruce Willis— hey man, you know, I know he's not doing so well, right? You know, but, uh, yeah, the last one looked like it was all CGI and not even him. It was really— it was messed up.

I don't know, I couldn't really get— I don't remember all of them.

They're so Get Free or Die Hard.

The one at the airport was crazy.

That's part 2.

Yeah, part 2, that was nuts.

Part 3 was okay.

Yeah.

Oh wait, yeah, yeah, part 3 was with Samuel L. Jackson in there in New York, right?

Oh yeah, that one was good, the one with Samuel L. Jackson. I don't remember any other ones. I have to look them up now, dude.

Yeah, you know, it's insane.

I, uh, the Bourne movies is another series I like too.

Yeah, there's the 3 are really good. The 4th one with the guy from Avengers, Hawkeye, I can't remember his name?

Jeremy Rainer.

I just know he got ran over by his ATV. He's doing okay. Hopefully he's not—

he's a good actor. He was good in that.

Yeah, he was good. I didn't really like that movie though. Um, and then the fifth one is when like Jason Bourne makes a comeback. I don't remember that movie at all. My wife said we went to go see it. I don't remember it.

That's a good movie. I love the Bourne series.

Yeah, so the kids had a decent holiday, I guess. You know, of course, you know, they don't get what they all want. I mean, the one, the one, the youngest one, like red bottom, you know, Balenciagas and Balmain and Hugo watch, bro. Like, I mean, you know, like you got the wrong Santa. No, yeah, you got the wrong dad.

Rocky, Rocky didn't ask for anything. I got him a bone. And he got a new harness and a new leash.

I did see the new leash. I like the leash. It matches the harness.

Yeah, so he got a new set swagged up. He got a new setup now.

I got nothing.

I didn't get it. I got weird— I got this hat.

Allen, come on, you don't celebrate the holidays.

No, but I'm saying someone sent me a hat.

Well, yeah, shout out to GoDaddy for sending Allen— Allen and not Justin— a hat as well, you know. I know There is two people on this podcast, so you guys, to you. And this Carhartt is one of my favorite brands, so you guys suck majorly. I would have been plugging you harder, but I'm not gonna do that. All right, I'm hating, I'm hating, I'm hating, hardcore hating. All right, man, so first off, let's talk about the payment predictions from this year. Did they come true? Did they bust? Did they explode, or did nothing happen?

So the ones that I made, I said real-time payments was going to become a big thing. It's talked about a lot, but the FedNow did definitely— is not making as quick of inroads as RTP, which is real-time payments. And FedNow also had like a hiccup So that's kind of—

I think I predicted the hiccup.

It's kind of moving along very slowly, and it's not what everybody thought it was going to be, where you're just going to walk around paying with FedNow everywhere. Has nothing to do with that. And they need more banks to become members of it. So that's moving slowly. But real-time payments, you know, that kind of pushed people to get more interested in real-time payments, and real-time payments started growing faster. And I think we're going to see more things involving real-time payments in the coming year. Okay. The next thing was mobile payments. I think mobile payments is gonna continue to grow. It grew a lot. We saw Pay at the Table explode in 2023. We're gonna continue to see that explode in 2024. I think we're gonna see more different types of mobile payments besides paying on the phone. Like now you can tap on the phone. I still think consumers, I think that's a little shady. So I think that's going to take another year or two to catch on.

Yeah.

You know, where people are just using the phone with no device. I think that's going to take time. But I think for, for the consumer to adapt to the consumer to say, okay, that's acceptable and not think it's scammy.

I think there's a usage case for that. I don't know if it's like if I'm going into a restaurant and I'm going to tap with somebody's phone.

I don't know. I think the usage case for it is obviously smaller smaller businesses. Yeah, I just think that it's going to take a little bit more time.

Art markets, art, you know, art— what are those, like arts and crafts?

Right, but they already have stuff, like those people have stuff, so things gotta—

like, you're using PayPal anyway, right?

So mobile payments, mobile payments is going to continue. I think it's going to continue to grow. Contactless payments, I think, is pretty much— I think we're going to see, you know, obviously Apple and Google are getting sued every— all—

I mean, you call it contactless is getting more popular. I mean, you can pay with your palm at Amazon, I mean, at Whole Foods.

Yeah, I'm not doing that.

So I'm just saying that's— No, that's all I would say. That was— you were correct.

Yeah, it exploded.

You were correct with mobile payments in a sense. It got— it grew. Real-time payments did not do what it was going to do. And digital currencies.

Yeah, I said crypto was going to have a problem and it did. It had the worst year ever. And I think that Now, like a lot of the, like Coinbase is trying to get people to do like micro investing with it. And I think that's what's been spurring some of the growth, you know, that people are like micro investing in. And also Robinhood started that too.

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, for me, when BlackRock invested like half a gazillion dollars into some crypto, just, not too long ago, right? Kind of was a bit of an indicator that it's going to come back.

And a lot of people thought that we would see, you know, central digital currency in the US. I don't think that's happening anytime soon.

What do you mean?

Where, where we don't have money anymore and it's just central digital currency. Not happening. Open banking. I said there's no way that was going to work in the United States. And the United States Congress and whoever is gonna rule that, the banks never let that get off the ground.

What's open banking?

Where you could go to any bank and just deposit your money and then it goes to your bank. Like I could walk into Truist and my account's at Chase and they take my deposit.

Where can you do that?

In Europe they have it.

And that's okay?

Yeah.

How does the bank make— the bank makes money off that?

Yeah, I guess they may. I guess there's some kind of fees involved in doing that, but they have it in Europe. But they have less banks.

I was about to say, there's not that many banks, right?

They have a lot less banks than we do, so that's going to take a while.

E-commerce, cool though. I don't see— that's not— I mean, it seems like a win-win for everyone. Like, if you are in a pinch and you got paid that day and you're like, "Oh man, I really can't make it to the bank," you know?

Yeah, well, I think pay is, payroll's gonna change. We'll talk about that. And then e-commerce, I said, was gonna blow up and it did. I think Shopify and Wix, Wix did, especially Wix. Wix came out with that thing, make a website, you know? Thing that they did. I don't like it. It's not— I don't, I don't want to say that it's good for business. I think people need to be careful with these platforms and make sure that whatever you're selling, that they can support it before you start making the website.

Yeah, there's a lot of people that are investing into building out projects on these platforms and then quickly realizing that they can't sell their products there.

Right, and that sucks. And that's happening a lot, so that's—

Yeah, especially like with whoever's selling—

Like things that—

Shopify's for sale, right?

No, not yet, and Shopify's not for sale.

No, Stripe's for sale.

Stripe is for sale.

But in Stripe—

Yeah, they started, Stripe started really, and they work with Wix too, but they really started cracking down on merchant types.

Right.

So because they started cracking down on merchant types, You know, all of a sudden, oh, you can't process for CBD, hemp, etc., this thing, that thing.

So yeah, man, I think you're, you know, e-commerce definitely. I mean, I've been building websites for over a decade, so e-commerce has kind of always been looking like this.

Any business, it's 2024. If you're not figuring out, you don't even need a website today to sell online. You can get tools where you can just sell one. You could put one product on your website, you know, and sell that.

No, no, you need a website if you're selling something, if it's a physical product, downloadable product, etc., etc., you know, whatever it is you're selling, a service, you need a website.

Yes, you need a website. And the other thing that started exploding in 2023, which I think is going to continue in 2024, is digital products. But one thing that the banks are starting to get very sour on and especially Stripe too, is on all this fulfillment house stuff coming out of China and Indonesia, and it takes 6 to 8 weeks to ship all this stuff to the US. Uh, the credit card processors are starting not to like those clients anymore.

I mean, buy local, man.

Yeah, exactly. But I'm saying like, that, that is, that is a business. So let's get into 2024 predictions.

I, I, let me, I'm gonna start. I just have one. I think that crypto is going to make a huge comeback. That's all I got.

Okay. Um, I think for crypto we'll have to see what Bitcoin 2024 looks like, and that the convention, and that will be the big telltale sign if how many companies show up. What, so here's some predictions. Payroll, So this is tied to my next— this is a thing where I think being able to offer your workers daily pay or earned pay so that they can get it in their bank account faster is going to become a thing, whether it's going to blow up in 2024. But I think in 2024, with real-time payments and FedNow, it's going to spur companies to create products so that especially like restaurants, bars don't have to go running to the bank every day to go get tip money to give the waiters cash and that type of industry. And I think it's going to spur into other industries that want to— like the wait— if the waiters are getting paid their money, the cooks might want, hey, on Wednesday I want to get part of my paycheck and not wait 2 weeks to get paid. I think we're just gonna see payroll's gonna have to speed up. I'm always a proponent of weekly payroll. A lot of businesses do biweekly, and I think with the economy the way it is, people, that's a way to adjust and get your workers paid. Work at home or work in the office? This seems to be a huge discussion going on, like on LinkedIn it's blowing up, over the weekend, work at home or work. They say people are like— I mean, you see all these companies, Facebook, Google, uh, tons of companies fired tons of people that— so many people working at home, they didn't know what they were doing.

And now they're bringing them back to the office, right?

So they're telling them to come back.

Do you know why they're bringing them back to the office?

Why?

Well, I mean, they're, they're paying huge. They had to pay their rent and their leases, right? And they're empty, right? So they got all these in, you know, these companies end up buying the building, building and making money from it from people. So not having nobody in these offices is causing a real bad situations for the real estate market right now.

Definitely. There's a lot of empty office space around, especially around here where we are. We're in a business district.

New York's going through it, California's going through it. All the major cities who have like the big, you know, hubs and the corporate offices and the Google headquarters and all that other stuff, they're really going through it, right?

And a lot of companies are having people like do hybrid. So, okay, so you're going to be in the office 2 days this week and 3 days at home, and the next week 3 days in the office. I think that's kind of a ruse to get people back in the office eventually.

I mean, Would I be opposed to working home once a week? I would love it, you know, just to not have to deal with traffic. But yeah, I mean, other than that, I don't know. I mean, if the gas prices get higher, we'll have to talk about that. I don't know, man. I mean, it's weird, you know, people for like, I guess for like creatives in general, we don't really give a shit. Unless they're not self-starters, right? Or they need to be governed.

But sometimes if you're working on projects together, that makes it harder.

Well, working on projects together, if you don't have a procedure in place, yes, it's gonna be a nightmare.

Yeah, so if you're gonna have people working at home, you gotta figure out how you're gonna do that, control it, monitor it, et cetera, et cetera. This one kills me, restaurants, right? I started in the restaurant industry, so I spent almost 20 years in the restaurant industry. I love restaurants.

Talk a lot about restaurants, but we don't deal with a lot of restaurants.

We deal with some, we deal with more nightclub type places because there's like less point of sale available that's geared specifically towards— Less friction. Towards bars. So, you know, restaurants, there's so many companies offering restaurant software, but when somebody has heavy alcohol, using a lot, you know, serving a lot of alcohol. You know, we have a system that's geared a lot more towards that, right, than it is— it's geared for food too, but it's geared heavily towards—

so what are you predicting that'll happen in restaurants?

Well, one thing is we're going to see a lot of restaurants close up. We're already seeing it now. We're seeing rents that are going to laugh, but damn, we're seeing rents going through the roof. People can't afford the rent, they can't afford the insurance. They can't afford to pay their employees. And restaurant, if you own a restaurant, you gotta start thinking about how can I adjust in my restaurant, right? How can I make an adjustment? So you know what restaurants I see killing it? These places that literally have like either no seats inside, they have like 1 or 2 tables, maybe some tables outside, literally it's all takeout. Okay, man, there's this Indian place near my house. They're just killing it, killing it. All takeout. There's nowhere to eat in the place. Have like 2 or 3 tables outside.

I mean, to me that's like New York style, right?

But I'm just saying, like, In-N-Out, man. I think that— I think people need— I think restaurant owners need to, need to really start thinking about, like, if they're not doing well Like, oh, how can I adjust my concept? Maybe I need to move out of this.

Is the sit-down dinner thing, is that kind of lost? I think the gen— like my generation, specifically my age group, 40 plus, we still enjoy, like me and my wife, we went out and had some Mexican food this weekend.

I love going to a restaurant and sitting down and getting served.

But not often.

No, I probably used to do it more, but now with the prices are like double, triple, It's disheartening when I go there and I go, man, I just spent like $100 or—

Yeah, it costs $126.

And I go, man, that was like crazy. I could have bought a lot of food in the store for that.

I had one beer.

No, but it's— Great food though. But the thing is, is I think restaurants need— And the other thing is, okay, I know these news stations and the newspapers, man, Dirty Dining. I get sick when I read these Dirty Dining stories, right? And I get it on my phone, I see it on social media. And used to be, maybe a couple years ago, you'd see 1 or 2 restaurants on there.

Yeah, when you seen it, that was major.

And now you see like 10, 20 restaurants listed and bad stuff going on. It's just not— and then they don't have enough employees. That's what I'm saying, you got to re- You gotta, I mean, you see, I see by my house.

So what are you predicting? Let's get to B-10.

I predict that restaurants are gonna have, are gonna figure some shit out. You're gonna fit, they're gonna get robots, self-ordering kiosks, okay?

Kiosk.

If you, and if you, you're gonna have to do that because you gotta look at what you're spending on labor and you gotta figure out like how to retool a restaurant. That's it, you're gonna retool. I don't know how you're gonna retool, but everybody's gonna have to They're gonna have to come up with some creative thing.

I could see more smaller shops benefiting from kids.

Yeah, I think smaller places are gonna have an easier time. I think bigger places are gonna have to really, really get creative because these corporate places like a Cheesecake Factory, right? They can pay all the waiters and pay all the stuff and, you know, They might take 'em a while, but you know, then, but you know, I go into places and I don't even see those places filled up. But the other thing that I think also hurts the restaurant business is tipflation, right? We talked about it a while, a long time ago when it was first coming up on a podcast, almost probably a year ago. And now I see articles about it all the time. I mean, I was telling somebody, telling, Telling somebody, used to go to a restaurant, you would see on the— when they hand you the tablet or on the bottom of the bill, the tip suggestion, it would say 15%, 18%, 20%. Now you go in places and you see 20%, 25%, and 28% or 30%. That's like, that's tipflation. And I think you might see restaurants go to a thing where like, okay, well, we're just going to put a service charge on the bill. We're paying all the wait staff a certain amount, $20, $25 an hour. Yeah, that's it.

I think that's a smart way of going on.

I mean, I think restaurants need to sit down and get creative because you need to get in line.

You got to think of it more of as a business and not just whatever. I don't know, like, you got to think of it how you— operation, right? Like, it's how is this business operating? Yeah, I think let's get, let's get this list knocked out.

Okay, e-commerce, I think we're gonna still see that. Blowing up, and I think we're going to continue to see that.

E-commerce is going to keep continuing, it's going to continue to grow because you're going to see more businesses. I mean, I just found out one of the places that I buy my tea from is closing, and they're going to only be online. It was terrible. I hated it.

I hated hearing that, right?

I didn't like hearing that, you know.

But I think we're going to see that a lot.

It's smart, it's economical. Yeah, I think what's up, what's next?

Embedded finance, that's where you're going to be able to go into apps and get loans and things like that. I get these loan companies, they won't leave me alone. They want to do, they want us to offer loans to our clients. We don't want to do that because they tie in what's called merchant cash advance. I'm not a believer in merchant cash advance. If you are a merchant, you have a business, do not get a merchant cash advance. Get money on your credit card, take a home equity loan, go to Kabbage, go to OnDeck. Don't get a merchant cash advance. Cannabis. Is the government gonna wake up and do something and let— collect tax on cannabis, let cannabis businesses pay with credit card? I think we're gonna have to get rid of all these old farts in Congress, okay?

I agree.

And in order for that to happen, so Think about that when you go to the voting booth. Government regulation on payment companies. I mean, all we hear— I mean, they cracked the heart, they cracked heads on Zelle and Venmo and all that. And I think we're gonna, you know, and they're being wishy-washy with the IRS stuff. I think they're gonna make a decision, you know, make a firm rule on this stuff this year. And they're also after these buy now pay later And a lot of these, they need to figure that out. Yeah, that's got to get reeled in. This buy now, pay later has got to get reeled in because there should—

there has to be a way that they're calculating some sort of limit or something. Because, you know, I asked my daughter, I don't, you know, I don't want to get too personal, but whatever. And, you know, she's got a lot going on with that.

Yeah. People are finding themselves in trouble with it, and that's a problem. And these companies are losing money, which I don't get it. And then it was like 2 big payment companies for sale, and Shift4, which is a behemoth, which is publicly traded. It was private, now it's public. There's rumors that it's gonna get sold. SpotOn sold off part of their company to Shift4. Somebody, I heard, they might be looking for a buyer. And then Stripe is for sale.

The Stripe thing is really weird to me. I just don't know. I don't know. It's just, I don't understand.

Well, they built the business up and, you know, now they want to exit. The other—

why though?

Not— it's probably, you know, they're probably running into trouble with regulatory issues, compliance issues, and things like that.

Or they just don't want to pay those.

I don't know. I don't know what the deal is. It's obviously something's going on there. Chargebacks. We're gonna just keep—

what's chargeback for those chargebacks?

When somebody disputes that they were in the business. Oh, I didn't go to that bar. I didn't go to that restaurant when they know they did. Or I didn't order that from that website.

No, you got them 5 lap dances, man. You was there.

You know you got 10 beers. It wasn't one.

And them 10 shots of What's the azul tequila, man? You was there, bro, stop frontin'.

And the other thing that's just talked about nonstop is cybersecurity. Nobody has developed a cybersecurity product for small businesses, and until you do, small businesses are not gonna adapt these cybersecurity products. The next thing is, my last one, which I didn't put on the paper, a company called Early Warning, which is who made Zelle, has a product called Paze, P-A-Z-E. Hope they're supposed to launch— they were supposed to launch in 2023. It didn't happen. They're supposed to launch it in 2024. And that's going to help e-commerce businesses big time. We're already getting ready to sign up with them so we can start offering that to our clients.

How is it going to help?

Because you're gonna have to check out by getting a text message and putting a code in. So that's gonna make it much harder to do chargebacks. So that's gonna cut down on a lot of friendly fraud.

I like it.

So it's gonna, 'cause the banks that are—

So aimed at like stopping the bots from buying stuff too?

That's gonna stop bots, that's gonna stop like the stop card testing, 'cause you're not gonna be able to check out without putting codes in. They already have some of the biggest banks in the United States signed up to offer it, so that's going to cover, you know, a high percentage of credit cards.

I mean, yeah, that's, that's going to help a lot of people.

Yeah, and I'm surprised Visa and MasterCard didn't invent it first. So hands up to Pays. That could be the product of the year.

Who owns Pays?

Early Warning, which is the same company.

Who owns Early Warning?

No, Zelle. They made Zelle. Early Warning made Zelle.

So Early Warning is the umbrella.

Umbrella, yeah.

And then you got Zelle and Pays.

Pays, yeah.

And I'm sure some other stuff.

Well, it's pretty cool. What's it called?

Pays, P-A-Y-S-E. No, the name of the company.

Early Warning.

Early Warning.

Yeah, that could be the product of the year. That can help a lot of businesses in 2024 to get that pays.

All your predictions, that sounds like the winner.

Listen, I'm looking forward to it. I see a ton of e-commerce merchants that we deal with have all kinds of problems with chargebacks. That could pretty much probably crush most of it. That could cut everybody's problems in half.

Well, well, Allen, thank you for your wisdom, for your predictions of the payment processing industry coming up in 2024. We appreciate your, uh, wisdom and knowledge, sir.

Yeah, and what's crazy, I got two beanies for the holidays. Yeah, we live in Florida. Hey man, but you know, we get down to 50 once in a while, so I can put this on when I walk Rocky and keep my ears warm.

Joe, man, thanks for listening. We appreciate you guys. Make sure you tune in every Wednesday and Friday, 6 PM. Subscribe, like this Comment. Peace out.

Carpe diem.

Boom.