FinTech Friday's | The latest Trends In Financial Technology | B2B Vault - The Payment Technology Podcast

Hey, what's up everybody? It's Justin live from B2B Vault, the payment technology podcast with your host Allen Kopelman, and we'll be providing you educational information about business payments, fintech, decentralized finance, and the technology businesses use in today's world. And in today's episode, it's, uh, welcome to FinTech Fridays, ladies and gentlemen. Have some fun. We'll have fun on FinTech Fridays.

Fun Tech FinTech.

I don't know, whatever. Yeah, so today we'll talk about, uh, some of the blockchain fraud that's going on, inflation strategies, blockchain stuff in the news.

B2B, uh, what is it? Strategies to fight inflation for small businesses and B2B companies. All right, and then we'll talk about the demand for kiosks, and then what's going on, where are people opening up their small businesses today. And I don't know, Rocky wants to get petted a lot, so he's like, yeah, here he's moving the whole—

he's moving the—

he's moving the microphone stand around.

Yeah, that's enough.

It's moving around our desk. So today, like, there's just some crazy stuff in the news when it comes to the crypto, you know, in general. So like Congress and the SEC are talking about it and how to regulate, um, how to regulate crypto, NFTs. Who's going to look after it, the SEC or some other stuff. And then this, the Consumer Finance Protection Division, which we've talked about before.

So many divisions involved in it.

Yeah, there's just too many. But the two big stories are how the company FTX, owned by the guy Sam Bankman-Fried from Miami, who's like super wealthy, right? Super rich, right? Because there's like a stadium, or I think the Miami where the Heat play. His name— yeah, I think that's the— the FTX.

Oh yeah, no, it is the FTX.

Yeah, so how they're tied to the company Voyager, who went bankrupt. The other thing that's going on in the news with the crypto companies is that, uh, SEC wants to figure out how to regulate the companies who were doing crypto loans. So there's a lot of problems with that. Celsius, the one that was— excuse me, money on their crypto to buy homes. And it's a really— it's a big hot mess because people basically— what you could do is let's say you had a 1 Bitcoin that was worth 50 grand, right? Right. And that, let's say, when at its height, let's say it was worth 70 grand, right? Or 50— let's say it was worth 60 grand. They would loan like up to 70% of the value. Well, now that same piece of that crypto that was worth 7— let's say 60 and they loaned you 70% on that. So let's say they gave you $50 grand to use a round number, right? And let's say you gave them 4 coins, so you got $200 grand, and then you went out and bought a condo. Well, now there's a problem. You're upside down in your loan because your crypto that you gave as the collateral now only worth $80 grand, and they gave you $200 grand.

So what is that company doing?

They're in big trouble. They're trying to get the people they loan the money to to pay back and accelerate their, their payments. That's going to cause—

right.

And what's that going to cause? Chaos. Yeah. And foreclosures.

I mean, I— but legally, I wonder if they—

I mean, they can foreclose on the house.

Who can?

The loan. They— that's what happened in 2008, 2009.

Oh, the bank can actually foreclose.

So they're the bank.

That's right.

Right. In 2008, 2009, what happened was people were going out.

Well, I guess it depends on how that contract was written. Like, if they just— but if they just loaned them money.

Yeah, specifically on a house, there was collateral.

So the house is collateral?

Yes, to the loan and the crypto.

So they could take it all, right?

They could take it all.

So that's a bad deal for you people who bought houses like that.

So there's going to be a big problem with that. You know, 2008, 2009, the same thing happened. You had people going out getting these 100% loans for a house, right? Right. The market was inflated just like it is now. You have inflated housing market. We're going to see— we're going to see a lot of— I think we're going to see a lot of foreclosures in the next— if they can't turn this— if this economy doesn't make a turn, right? Like today, Goldman Sachs came out and said, well, the price of gas has gone down. It's gone down because people just can't afford to drive, so they're driving less.

I was gonna say, like, I don't— right, they're driving less, and I am gonna park one of the cars all weekend, right?

They're driving— people are just driving less, so they're organizing their day. Oh, I need to run 4 errands instead of like, oh, run an errand, come home, then go do another errand. No, they're organizing. So, right. One trip, do it all. Maybe instead of going to two grocery stores, go to one grocery store, right, and get everything there, because gas is just so expensive.

I mean, yeah, it's so crazy because we were going— we would go to Trader Joe's, we would shop at Whole Foods and Aldi's and Publix, right? Because all those places had different items.

Exactly. You can't get everything you need. Like, I go to Costco, you can't do that right now. Right. So a lot of people aren't doing that.

I can't afford it. I have to go to a regular place, right?

No, no, but I'm just— I know, but I'm just saying in general, most of the public can't afford to do that.

No one— yeah, and I'm not just—

so Goldman Sachs says because of that, the supply hasn't changed, right? So the only reason that the price is down, because the— because demand is down. But demand is going to go back up because we're coming— you know, people have to drive for the summer.

School's coming back up.

School's coming back. More things have to be going on on the road, and the price of gas is going to go back up because they haven't done anything to increase supply. In fact, it's negative what they're doing now because they're taking gas out of the, the reserves, which is not a good thing to do. Because if we have a major hurricane and this guy's dumping out— Biden's dumping out a million gallons a day— that's not going to go well because then you won't be able to get gas during a hurricane for If you cripple out, let's say, Houston, like it happened a few years ago, right, right, all of a sudden everything— gas production is shut down. That's why you need the petroleum reserves for when that kind of thing happens. No, I— not for what's going on now. Now what they really need to do is go to the states that have gas and get them to pump the gas out of the oil out of the ground and get it out of the ground and build the strategic reserves back up and also stop selling gas to China. So I saw an interesting title—

side note, stop selling gas to China, right?

I saw an interesting, uh, somebody doing a webinar and I said, oh, great subject, inflation strategies for small businesses. What should small businesses do?

Did you just say you jacked something from a webinar?

No, I said I saw somebody had a webinar And that was the title. Uh, that's the strategy. It was much longer. It was a whole drawn-out thing. And I was like, well, that's way too— I don't know. I have no idea what they were going to discuss. But I said, oh, interesting. Inflation strategy for small businesses. What should they do? And, you know, we did the 100th episode. So people were asking, you know, what should restaurants do? You know, how do they do POS, point of sale selection? You know.? They have a point of sale system, like, what, what can they do? And strategies for small businesses— probably restaurants are the hardest hit, and the, and the, you know, hardest hit industry, one of the hardest hit industries, you know. Probably another one is dry cleaners, because as people who have to stay at home from work—

oh, that's people I never even thought about—

less people, you know, I went totally casual, like, to polo shirts instead of a dress shirt. I'm not going to see anybody, and a polo shirt is great, and I can put my brand on there, B2B Vault or MPS Bank, and have a nice shirt while I'm doing a Zoom meeting, you know.

And Justin's sitting in an office in a nice New York Yankees jersey, right?

But I'm saying the days— everything's gone very casual.

Oh yeah, everybody.

So how can business—

except for Dave. Shout out to Dave Burney, the last man standing. He's gonna be He's gonna die standing up in his— in his— in his— in a suit and a tie. And a tie. So shout out to you, bro. So I'll go to dinner with you with a suit on though. I like getting dressed up.

Yeah, why not? I don't even know if I have a suit.

I don't have a suit right now because I lost so much weight.

So inflation strategy, what should businesses do?

A lot of businesses, they're burning down.

No, they're turning the cash discount—

cash discount is high.

Get the— push the fee so that saves them on their credit card processing fees. Listen, I've seen— we signed up a bunch of businesses. One guy, he's saving $1,700 a month. Another guy was $2,000 a month. Okay, you know, time— everything's tight because how much can they raise? They can't just keep raising the prices because the prices of their goods that they're buying goes up and down, you know, a little bit. But they probably— we don't know if that's reached the total peak yet.

I don't think so.

And that's one thing. And B2B companies can do the same thing. They could pass the fee. But one thing B2B companies need to do is they need to seriously start to consider— the Fed has raised rates twice. They're going to raise rates again. This inflation bill that's going through is not going to help inflation. No, I mean, that's already been talked about.

And on top of that there's the, the tax thing inside of that thing, right?

So, you know, we posted a link. I posted a link today again on my LinkedIn. I posted a link on my Facebook.

I've shared it on Twitter.

Click the link, write your congresspeople. We wrote enough— enough people wrote to the Senate and they removed it out of the bill in the Senate. Now this thing is sitting at the House. You need to— I, I wrote my congresspeople to tell them no, we don't want that. So you need to do that if you own a small business, you know someone that owns a small business, you shop at small businesses. You need to click that link and get these things sent, get the notes sent over to your congresspeople. Ted Deutsch, I hope you listen to the podcast. Tag them. Don't vote for that even though you're retiring. Don't vote for that, Ted.

What he said.

Yeah. And B2B companies need to strongly consider electronic payments as an alternative to waiting on their money, because if you have to access your capital right now, you're going to be paying 6 to 10% on your, on your capital accessing your line of credit, you know, because the prime, you know, everybody pays Prime Plus. And the prime rate keeps going up, and credit card processing is way cheaper than accessing your line of credit, right?

Okay, the next thing I want real quick before you go into the next thing, just, uh, yesterday we had the 100th episode. Thank you to everyone. We announced the winners of the giveaway. Um, the Meta Quest should be on— it's gonna be— we're gonna mail it on Monday.

Well, if they come, if they come do another pickup today.

Okay, going out, it's going out between today and Monday by the latest. Um, still waiting to hear back from the other two winners. If I don't hear from you by Monday morning, yeah, we'll pick two. I'm gonna pick two other winners. Um, thanks again to everyone who entered the contest. You know, I'm sorry you didn't win. Uh, please, you know, check back. There's still— we still got a lot of stuff planned. The podcast isn't going anywhere. So yeah, man, check out B2BVault.info for any past episodes you want to look up, or if you want to get in contact with Allen or myself, there's a form for you to fill out at the bottom. If you have any topics you want us to touch on, any questions, concerns, you want to tell us that we don't know what we're talking about, go ahead. We're waiting for you. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, @B2BVault. You can search the Payment Technology Podcast and we pop up everywhere. So yeah, man. Oh, real quick, and also if you need a merchant account, like the main thing of what we're talking about here, text BOOK to 954-827-9818 and we'll get back to you right away. Or you can head over to b2bvault.info, click the Apply Now button, and you get yourself started.

Awesome. So the other thing that's gaining traction is kiosks.

Kiosks?

Yeah.

What's a kiosk?

Self-service. So people can order food self-service, just walk up to like a machine, looks like a sort of like an ATM, or like when you sometimes when you go to the airport, they have the big screen and you like—

yeah, we were talking about the— there's a company that's a— yeah, the pizza company revolutionizing the pizza industry because there's actually no one that works in the place. All you do is it's a machine. You walk up to the machine, you order your pizza, you select your toppings, pay for it, it spits it out, right?

There's gonna be— there's all—

genius. It's blowing up. It's like— I forget, it's on the East Coast right now or the West Coast, I can't remember what they said, but it said it— they're getting more requests for it every day in all the different locations.

So that's something we can help you with. Like, if you have a quick service restaurant or you have a sub shop, you would be surprised how inexpensive it is to do a kiosk or to get a point of sale that has an online ordering feature so you can get people to order their food, pay for it, you know, off their phone. And because labor-intensive businesses are having a hard time right now hiring people and wages are up, so it, you know, costs more money.

So it's just crazy because, you know, like, I don't— side note, but, you know, my wife's been looking for a new job, right? She has a degree. She's educated, she's bilingual. No one is calling her back.

No, it's crazy. It doesn't make sense. They have job openings, but they're trying to find people that will work cheap, and nobody want— no, people can't afford to work cheap. It costs too much to put gas in your car, right? You know, so people don't want to do that. People don't want to drive far for work.

No one wants to drive far.

And then I looked up an interesting article, so I wanted to see like where are people opening up businesses. So it's funny, like, where do people incorporate? So it's funny, they— the trap— people try to incorporate in states where there's no state tax. So Florida is popular, you know, and then there's states that have like privacy, which I think is kind of funny because it's private in one sense, but then it's not really private because if you have to get credit card processing, you have to tell them who the owners of the corporation are. So it's kind of weird, but people use— I never heard that.

What, what, there's states that like you can—

like Delaware, Nevada, now like Wyoming.

So if you search that business's name in—

you can't see the owner.

You can't see the owner, right? Like in Florida, you Sunbiz.

Yeah, you could see everything, right? A lot of people go to, you know, so—

excuse me, but why would they want— why?

I don't know, for the anonymity. Who knows? I don't know, but that's Maybe some people are concerned with that.

I'm not— I can see whether, you know.

Yeah, so some people are— Wyoming is becoming very popular to form a corporation as you can do it much cheaper than in Delaware or in, uh, Nevada. Delaware and Nevada used to be the top ones, like every credit card company.

And you don't even physically have to be there, you just gotta go get an address.

Yeah, no, you just use the they have these people and they call them their registered agent, right? And you just have a mailbox there. Some of them even provide other services where people can send mail there, right? And then they actually have employees that open the mail, scan it, and then upload it to a portal or email it to you. I've heard of that before and stuff like that. So it's pretty good, you know, services. I mean, I know a lot of companies who use those type of services to receive faxes and physical mail and then have it all uploaded and they deal with it from a portal. They can go in and send it to whoever it needs to be sent to on a daily basis and do that. So what were the top states? So I wanted to look at it. I looked— they had like 9 different metrics, like how were they rated for economy, for employment, and all that. So I clicked around and I came up with— so, um, where people are opening tons massive amounts of businesses. North Carolina, Tennessee, of course, you know, these are states—

North Carolina's been booming for—

right, North Carolina is booming.

Like, they want to be the new, uh, like, the tech hub.

They're being like a lot of tech companies moving to North Carolina, a lot of companies moving to Tennessee. Washington State, which I don't know why, it's cold. Uh, Florida is getting big. A lot of companies move from California to Florida Yeah, to, to, for their warehousing because the access to the port is better.

There's a couple— that's one.

Um, and also no tax in Florida. Texas, there's no state tax.

I also heard about in Florida too, is like a lot of— there's a lot of cannabis businesses moving their headquarters to Florida to help push the 2024 recreational bill.

Yeah, well, they're at Trulieve. Yeah, they, they investing a lot of money. Oh yeah, pushing for recreational marijuana. Yeah. So, um, you know, Idaho, that's kind of funny. I met somebody and they started a whole business in Idaho. And I think that, you know, with this like whole remote work thing, people locate to these two— people will locate to multiple areas. Like they'll say, okay, well, I'm gonna have my house in Florida in the wintertime or in Texas. And then in the summertime when it's hotter than all get-out, I'm going to go up to these, you know, Idaho, you know, go to Idaho or Washington State. You know, Oregon is another one that was on the list of people that were— yeah, but they were going—

they were like dual, like, right, like snowbirds.

Yeah, like snowbirds. Um, Utah's being very popular. Georgia, a lot of stuff goes on, you know, business in Georgia.

So much land in Georgia.

Well, it's not just that, it's access to the ports. So like, let's say you want to have access to the ports, you could be in southern Georgia and your, your goods could be coming into the port in Tampa, it could be coming into Louisiana, to Texas, to Pensacola, to Jacksonville, and then trucked into your warehouse.

It makes sense.

So that, that's why it's becoming very popular with Georgia and Florida, Texas also. No taxes, that, you know, they read around Minnesota on there. Who? Montana.

Oh, I thought it said Minnesota.

I'm like, Montana's on the list.

I know Minnesota is a cool place, the Land of Lakes, but I mean, and then Indiana and Colorado, which I didn't really—

Indiana? Yeah, weird, but they might have—

sorry, Rocky, I blew up Indiana.

You didn't like Indiana?

I don't like Indiana, bro.

But people are moving out.

I love everyone that lives there, but I don't like—

no, but people are moving out of places like New York, Chicago, cities where there's a lot of issues going on. You know, they're moving out of those places because they had the shutdowns, you know, in California, and a lot of businesses relocating their warehousing because they couldn't have their employees work. Look at Elon Musk, took his whole operation out of California because they basically closed his factory down He was built— already building the factory in Texas, right? They just took all the workers and they said, you guys need to all move to Texas and finish this factory because we're closed. They couldn't open in California, so they just took everything, went to Texas, got the factory opened up, moved everything out of the factory in California and opened the factory in Texas.

When did that happen?

Well, during the pandemic. Really? Gigafactory. Remember hearing about that?

I mean, I wasn't really— I was— no, the Gigafactory was really trying to figure, you know.

And then you read about all these car companies. So like, I drove a Tesla to see how that was, but the prices keep going up. And then Polestar, they're— I didn't even know who they were associated with. They're associated with Volvo.

Oh really? Yeah.

Let me tell you, that thing can go very fast. Room. I was actually shocked. The guy was like, uh, why don't you just punch it? So I punched it. I was like, wow, that thing has some get up and go.

What color was it?

They have that— that's, um, that a white one, a gray one, that one like all tricked out with leather interior and wood. And it looks more like a normal car than like Tesla. Yeah, like Tesla kind of looks like very like you're sitting in the Jetsons. Futuristic. Yeah, very futuristic.

I like to— I like the, the inside of it.

And then they had some different features in the car, which I thought was cool. You could have it in like electric car mode, which means if you take your foot off the gas, the car basically— it's like a brick.

Yeah, really?

Yeah, well, it just stops going. Yeah, you take— you remove your foot from the pedal, or you can leave it in like regular car mode, and then it kind of acts like a regular car, but you can literally drive without touching the brakes. Really? Yeah, you could just learn how you could just ease off the gas pedal and come to a stop.

Is that how they prefer you to drive?

Well, you save a lot on brakes. You won't have to brake as much. I drove it, I was like shocked. I was like, wow, I didn't have to hit the brakes at all. I mean, I was doing it, then the guy said, hey, try it without doing that. I was like, wow, that's a way crazier way, one foot driving.

Because that would have to take some time to get used to.

Yeah, well, you get used to it real quick because when you take your foot off the gas, the car like, it like literally starts slowing, like almost comes to a stop. Really? You're not rolling. No, you can leave it in rolling mode and then it will roll, but if you have it out of rolling mode, you take your foot off the gas, it stops going. So it's pretty crazy.

It's kind of cool.

But that's your FinTech Friday for today.

Keep it short and sweet.

Keep it short. We had fun. Appreciate everybody that, that watches the podcast. Like Justin said, we did the 100th episode. We grew a lot during 100 episodes. We changed around how we present the podcast, how we talk on the podcast, the structure of the podcast and everything. And People seem to like it. I had a call today with somebody who contacted me because they— that was one of the appointments we found this morning— that they got contacted me because of the podcast.

Oh, cool.

So it's very interesting. So we've got some interesting subjects coming up for this week, and I'll be at that conference, the, uh, Mobile— the, the Mo— the MPC. Mobile Conference. Digital Payments Conference. They changed the name of it. Used to be the Mobile Payments Conference. That's the Digital Payments Conference.

I like the Mobile Payments better, but it's still called MPC.

They have a lot of good speakers there talking about all kinds of things for businesses. I'll be there speaking about the future of point of sale and payments for businesses and how business can, can small businesses actually accomplish accomplish omnichannel or omnicommerce? And the answer is yes. If you want to find out more, text the word book to 954-827-9818, or you can go to the website b2bvault.info and get in touch with us there. So have a great day, enjoy your weekend. Peace out. Carpe diem. Boom. You want to hear something funny?