FinTech Fridays | The latest Trends In FinTech & Small Business | 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, it's Fintech Friday. So everybody makes some noise for Friday. We're finally here for the weekend. You know, for me, the work never stops. I'm one of those people that on Saturdays, I wake up early and do stuff to get more funds in my bank account. So yeah, FinTech Fridays is where we kind of— it's way more relaxed. There's actually— there's no structure. There's really, you know, we talked about a little bit of the stuff that's going on within the office and, and in the news and anything that really is related to FinTech. Yeah, so actually, Allen's getting ready to go to a conference up in Atlanta, Georgia. The— what is it called again?

Digital— the MPC, the Digital Commerce Event.

So he's gonna be gone for 3 days next week. Yeah, party in the office. So yeah, me and Samantha got a bunch of stuff planned to get done that we normally don't get to do, you know, because we're so busy with, you know, the day-to-day operations. So, you know, looking forward to get some check marks off the good old checklist.

Yeah, so it's going to be an interesting conference. I'm speaking on a panel and I have a booth there, and there's going to be owners of, uh, companies, CEOs, CFOs, um, at the event. And I'll be talking about the point of sale and what consumers expect from businesses and how businesses can meet the demand. So part of that, you know, that we've been developing an omnichannel program for the SMB, small to medium-sized business market. And, um, you know, so we're going to be revamping, uh, the nationwidepaymentsystems.com while we already soft launching the product. Now we're going to be moving into a much, a much more hard launch on that in the next few weeks.

Yeah, you know, so we've been— we got a lot of domains, we got a lot of web properties, and just been organizing ourselves. And, you know, got some really valuable input from some people last night about npsbank.com. So gonna use the, the insight that I got to, uh, hopefully generate more leads, man, make more people aware, more small and medium-sized businesses aware of the products and solutions that Nationwide Payment Systems offers. So good challenge. I got a challenge ahead of me.

Yeah, so that's a really great thing. And omnichannel is a big buzzword, you know what. So that basically omnichannel enables the traditional omnichannel, right? Basically omnichannel is what— that we can give you a dashboard we call it the dashboard or the HQ, the headquarters, so that you can basically process— do all your processing in one place. Your card-present, your non-card-present, your website invoicing. We give you a host of tools, a loyalty program, all kinds of tools. You can subscribe, so you can run subscriptions, send invoices out, you can keep track of what's going on with your employees. There's all types of things you can do with the omnichannel. And big businesses, like a big store like Bed Bath Beyond or whatever—

get off the table, please.

I know there are— there— the big companies are already using omnichannel, right? They built it out custom. Now we're bringing that at an affordable price to the small to medium-sized business market. So that's what I'm going to be talking about at this conference. There's also a lot of other speakers there. So hopefully I'll learn something. Maybe we'll find some new vendors, new partners for different types of services that we can offer and things like that. So it's going to be very interesting. What else is going on? Uh, there's a big conference this weekend. I was actually surprised, like, you know, because the crypto market has been, you know, up and down It's raging in all kinds of directions, right? But this weekend in West Palm Beach, they're having the Crypto Connect Expo at the convention center. Scored some, uh, passes. And basically they're expecting to have like 65 to 100 vendors there, all types of stuff. They expect 5,000 people to show up. There's 100 sponsors, 50 speakers. It's pretty—

what time is it?

It's on Saturday, and let me see the exact schedule. I don't think it's on Saturday and Sunday this week. There might even be stuff going on tonight.

Excuse me, Saturday starts Saturday and Sunday.

This, yeah, Saturday tomorrow. And, um, they're having an NFT gallery and exhibit speakers. And there's—

speaking of NFTs, did you see, uh, Tommy Hilfiger just, uh, partnered up with, uh, Ready Player Me?

Yeah, that's crazy.

To, uh, so like on— so like every, you know, piece that Tommy Hilfiger designs, right, it's going to be available in the metaverse.

Yeah, I know this, you know, the metaverse is still going on, so people don't know. So yeah, so it starts tomorrow at 9 AM. And then there's stuff going on, they got all kind of special events going on, and then Sunday it ends at 6 o'clock. So, you know, if you want to find out more about NFTs and crypto, go check out this, um, conference. There might even be a way if you search on the internet to score free tickets, I don't know, but there's definitely—

so what's it called again?

The, the CryptoConnectExpo.com. You can probably find it on Eventbrite or Google it and see what's going on with that. But it's a pretty interesting— they have all types of, um, things they're talking about, the metaverse. And, uh, we're gonna go check out who the vendors are. If people are looking for credit card processing, let them know what we do in the in the realm of that.

And I thought it was just really cool that, you know, like all these other, like, brands are starting to adapt, you know, they adopt.

I mean, there's definitely a lot of brands I've been reading about— nightclubs, hotels— all trying to figure out how to put, use NFTs. But here's something that's gonna put a little twist on that. So comes out in the news, There's been a lot of discussion, and you know, I follow the regulatory committees in Congress. My favorite— my least favorite is the Judiciary Committee in the Senate, where my favorite— least favorite senator, Dick Durbin. So Richard, what's up, Senator Durbin?

Don't be a Richard.

We'd love to have you on the B2B Vault podcast. We sent you a couple emails. I don't know if you'll come on.

I mean, I've added them on Twitter. Yeah, I followed you on Facebook, bro. You still haven't responded, man.

Yeah, we'd love for you to come on the podcast and discuss payments. And, um, I can definitely tell you that whatever he wants to do, people have already reacted that he doesn't know about to make changes to thwart that off.

Yeah, I mean, they— this morning I was reading too that they're already taking They're making more changes to remove those, uh, just, you know, for tax audits.

They're looking to remove that even more, the verbiage of it even more. Well, what's crazy is, is they did pass that bill with the 3.8%, um, tax in there, and everybody's going nuts. People are writing their congresspeople. We've posted it on Facebook. The Senate took it out of their bill. I'm not sure how the House was able to put it back in and then Biden signed it, but there's— everybody's upset. They want to hire 87,000 IRS workers. Okay, well, if you're going after billionaires, you know how many billionaires there are, Justin? Less than 1,000. Why do you need 87,000 IRS agents to look at— to look at—

so what was the tax? Is over, uh, the profit?

Well, no, they—

$1 billion for who? Income. That's where the—

$1 billion of income? No, what? No, net worth of over $1 billion. What people don't understand is just because Elon Musk is worth billions of dollars, he doesn't have that in cash in the bank sitting somewhere. That's what he's worth. He owns Tesla. So what I understand what that means, I know, but most people don't understand that. Even Mark Cuban has said these taxes don't make any sense. If they came to him and said, oh, Mark Cuban, you got to pay a 3.8% tax on your net worth. Mark Cuban's gonna go, okay, well, I'm gonna have to sell some of that.

That's what it was though. It was not about their net worth, it's about what they make per year, right?

But I'm just saying, like, they're taxing the amount of money that— right, because I'm just saying a lot of these people don't have that. It's like they want to tax like what the business made. The business already is paying taxes. And when, when a business— okay, so let's say you own a business, whatever it is, justinstshirtshop.com, it's incorporated, right? You make a— at the end of the year, you do your taxes, it says, okay, after salaries were paid, expenses were paid, and all this, that you made a net profit of $50,000. Okay, they want to tax that at 3.8%, that $50 grand. Now, that $50 grand normally, in a normal situation, gets taxed at a much higher rate than that because you're going to take the $50 grand and you're going to take part of it and invest it back in your business, right? So why should you pay taxes on money you're going to reinvest in your business? And then you're going to maybe take some of it to yourself, right? Let's say you took half and re— you want to reinvest that in your business. And then the other half you're going to take. Well, you're going to pay like almost a 30% tax on that. So it makes no sense what they're trying to do. Now they want to just add on another tax. That's only going to cause more inflation because businesses, if they have to pay a 4% tax or almost 4%, they have to raise all their prices because how can— they can't afford to do that. But they're not talking about just taxing it on the profit. They want to tax you on your sales.

But they're not taxing people who make $50,000 a year.

That's what they say. They said— that's what they're telling you, that they weren't going to tax anybody that does over $400,000, that made less than $400,000. Okay, well, you know what the— you know how many people make over $400,000? Not that many. You don't need 87,000 employees.

Well, I think you're making us think about the amount of employees that they're hiring. I don't care about how many employees.

Well, I'm saying what I'm happy that more people are getting paid. Right, but I'm just saying, so 87,000 people—

I don't think that 87,000 people are going to be sitting there like investigating.

That's what they want them to do, that they're not all 87,000. I know, but what I'm trying to explain to you is if you're trying to collect tax from the top 1% of people, right, that make over $400,000 a year, right?

Well, maybe those— that 1% makes it really difficult to track the money, man.

Not really. Not really. It's pretty transparent.

I don't know.

Okay, we don't know. But what I'm trying to explain is you don't need 87,000 people to go look after a small group of people. Okay, my point. That's fine.

So obviously, but you don't have the taxing the 400,000, the people who make more than $400,000. You don't have a problem with that, right?

No, they got to pay their taxes, right? You know, and listen, they can't—

the part where they come— where if you're a business If you're—

they want to tax small businesses that make less than that. I have a problem with that because the majority of jobs are in small businesses. The majority of businesses are small businesses. So yes, there's a problem with that because that's especially now when you're in a recession where you have inflation, it's going to be a huge problem. So it's not— I'm not, I'm not for that. You know, the guys are fighting it, the National Federation of Independent Business Owners. They're fighting Congress. I've posted the, the link written to my congresspeople. It's really important.

I was reading about it and it's kind of, it's, you know, from what I was reading, it's kind of 50/50. No, but the thing is, is that I'm saying like between businesses, like literally like business owners and who are against it and for it, it's kind of like 50/50. Well, I don't know what I would say that would be for it because I was reading them all. There's plenty of people, like Google it, dude. Okay, I'm serious.

They're saying they're for the small business tax?

Yes, yes, it simplifies things for for you, then it's good.

But if it's not going to simplify—

small business tax, they're for the, the, the tax that they passed, the bill that they passed.

Oh yeah, the bill is one thing. It has a whole bunch of stuff in it that's not going to help for years. So it's kind of— I don't agree with what the bill, what that whole bill was about. We're not going to have a discussion about that because a lot of the stuff, if you go look at the—

it's out of our hands, right?

It's out of our hands. Whatever they did, they did. That's it. But now they're talking about They want to have Bitcoin and Ethereum to be regulated as commodities by, by another agency called the CFTC.

People call Ethereum Ether.

Yeah, Ether, Ethereum. That's the short for it, which I thought—

I think I've never heard of anyone.

I have, or ETH, Ether. So the FCC, SEC, which is roughly 6 times the size of the CFTC, which is the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is over commodities, will still control some act— access aspects of crypto governance under the new bill, but its reach would be shortened. And the new Senate bill clarifies the SEC should only see securities, but now they're going to say that Bitcoin and Ethereum are going to be call securities commodities, commodities. And that's going to be— I don't understand what they're doing.

We'll see how that affects the price of a whole bunch more alphabet boys running around making rules that have nothing to do with anything.

No, I mean, I was on a meeting today with this guy from a car dealer association, and he's like, oh, car dealers have a new rules from the government that just got passed about privacy of the data that they collect. So I was like, and they have to appoint— each car dealership must appoint a compliance officer. So I thought it was interesting, so I Googled it up. Sure enough, there's a whole bunch of FAQs from the FTC, right, and the CF— the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, CFPB. PD, right? Again with the alphabet, right?

Yeah.

So the whole thing is, is that they, they, they, they now have to have a compliance officer for each car dealership. That person has to make sure that they're compliant with all sorts of things. Some of the things were— so let's say Justin comes in and he bought— you want to buy a car, right? And we do paperwork, and then I send your personal information to 5 different finance companies. Okay, so I'm now required to inform you with a piece of paper who I sent your stuff to, who I sent your information to, and then anybody else that I have to share your information with, like the warranty company. This guy, you have to give the person a document that discloses all of that.

Really?

Yeah. And people— and apparently, like, there's been some car dealerships that got sued for millions of dollars for, you know, running people's credit that didn't buy cars and all sorts of, all sorts of stuff. So I thought it was pretty crazy when you think about it, like, you know, that they're not— they have to be compliant with personal data. You know, the same thing, like, we were talking to the chargeback department And chargeback department was saying, oh, you're not supposed to transmit any personal data over to the chargeback department anymore. They don't want to see necessarily pictures of the person, copies of driver's licenses, uh, a picture or imprints of credit cards. You have to— you could send it over, but you have to mask it. So you have to take off the driver's license number, the person's address, like black it out with a marker or something and then rescan it into your— so you can't transmit this, this personal data. So PD, personal data. So there's a lot of businesses getting fined and sued for, um, non-compliance with these rules that they don't even know about. I mean, we collect people's personal data. In fact, we're moving to a full online system where you're going to apply for probably 95% of your merchant accounts, right, through this system. And, you know, that makes us fully— makes everything fully compliant. We're fully compliant now because we don't share your data with anybody unless we tell you that we're going to share your data. So we don't share your data, and until you sign like an electronic document Nobody's running your credit either. So we're compliant as far as all of those, you know, as far as all of that goes, you know, we're 100% compliant. And, you know, that's like what's going on. It's some— there's some crazy stuff going on as far as like compliance with data. Same thing like HIPAA compliance, right? Or, you know, doctors' offices. People don't understand. We always talk about, oh, what's the difference between PayPal, Square, Stripe? And having a regular merchant account, or even the type of new merchant account, the omnichannel, we're going to be offering. So the difference between those companies and what we're going to be offering through the NP, the Nationwide Payment Systems, is that we don't— shit, you have actual— you actually get a merchant number. So you have an actual merchant number and you're not under another another merchant, even though you're working through a similar type of system. You actually have like a merchant account. And what happens is, is those companies— Stripe, Square— I don't know if you ever noticed. Let's say you go to a food truck and they're using Stripe, I mean Square, and you run your card. If you've run your card before and you put in your email address, you know, they don't ask you to do it anymore. You put in your phone number the system automatically sends you the receipt. Cool. You notice that?

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right. So our system doesn't do that. We don't share information amongst merchants. Merchants. So if you go to a doctor's office and they're using Square, that's— or PayPal or Stripe, that's non-HIPAA. They're not HIPAA compliant. No, because they share your debt, right? Because they're working with it. They're working with a company that's sharing data. For sure. And in fact, the CFPD, whatever, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, right? I can't remember all of these.

They're many.

They're making all these companies now go to come before Congress, you know, all of them, uh, you know, all these different— those companies, the pay— the pay now, buy now, pay later people, everybody. And they want to know what they're doing with all the data that they collect. And how come they're sharing it and what are their policies. And that's going to be— it's going to be a big thing. It's like if you have a doctor's office, a dentist's office, or any kind of medical practice, you should not be using any of those companies, right? None of them, because they are sharing your patient's data.

You said Clover?

Um, I don't know about Clover. I don't know what Clover does as far as sharing data.. But any companies, you have to ask them what's their policy on sharing data. Yes, you should, right? So you should know, are you HIPAA compliant? Are you not HIPAA compliant? We've set up doctors before. I would hope you'd know who— I would know, or the business owner would know. Yeah, the business owner should know. They should ask, are you, are you, is your software HIPAA compliant? And how do you, what do you do with the data? And do you share my data?

Simple, right?

You should know if they're sharing your data, that's a problem. That's not HIPAA compliant.

Well, before we end the show, I just want to say thanks to all the, the listeners, the followers out there. Please subscribe to YouTube, B2B Vault, the Payment Technology Podcast. Put it in a search, will pop up, I guarantee it. Um, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn @B2BVault, we're there. Head over to the site, B2BVault.info. There's information, there's past episodes for you to get caught up on, contact forms to get in touch with Allen or myself if you want to chit chat, shoot the breeze, I don't know, whatever they call it nowadays. Sponsor the podcast if you want to, there's ways for you to do that as well. And if you are looking for a merchant account, on the top right, b2bvault.info. Apply now, click that, fill out the form. 10 minutes later, you'll be making money. And if you want to talk to Allen, or if you want to talk to me personally, you got a bone to pick, you want to shoot a fair one, text book to 954-827-9818. Again, text the word book to 954-827-9818. And we'll get right up with you and, you know, figure it all out.

All right, well, thanks to everybody listening to the live.

Oh, if you're in Atlanta, Georgia, connect with Allen. You'll need some payment processing or some payment cons— cons— concierge consulting. Concierge is what's the word?

If you want a payment concierge, concierge. So it says to help you with your business, we will be your consultant and your concierge.

Check him out at the convention. He'll be in Atlanta, Georgia for 3 days. What's the name of it again?

The MPC.

The MPC Digital Commerce Event of the World. Craig. All right, guys, we're all right.

Peace out. Thanks for listening.

Have a good weekend.

FinTech Fridays. If you didn't catch it live, you're watching the replay. Hope you enjoyed it.

Hey, Mom.

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