Inside the Mind of Allen Kopelman: Business Insights & Services

Welcome to the Biz to Biz Podcast, your number one source for all business news. Hello everybody, welcome to today's episode of B2B Vault, the Biz to Biz Podcast sponsored by Nationwide Payment System, hosted by me, Allen Kopelman. But today there's a little switch up. Today I'm going to be interviewed, and today the special guest host is going to be one of my friends for a long time, Dale Lassik. Of this. She's the content strategy director for The Green Sheet, greensheet.com, which is the oldest payments magazine in, in the payments business. So if you don't subscribe to The Green Sheet, you need to. I write a column in there called Street Smarts. Dale also is a longtime payments journalist, has been writing for The Green Sheet for many years, and Today, Dale is going to be interviewing me about the project that we're— that we've been working on, and we already— it's already launched out. We have clients using this software, but this is like a little commercial for us today so we can talk about the project that we've been working on here at Nationwide Payment Systems. So welcome to the show, Dale.

Thank you, Allen. It's really a pleasure to be here. I appreciate the opportunity, especially because writing about products is probably my favorite thing in the world. I love to ask people what inspired them, and I think when it comes to this product, I can't help but imagine that you've poured all of your decades of experience into creating, designing, and bringing it to life. So tell me, what was your initial inspiration for creating NPS OneClick Biller?

So the big inspiration is, is that whenever you're trying to piece together software for merchants, you know, it's— and especially when you're dealing with B2B clients, And even, you know, as credit card processing, as dual pricing has gotten more popular, everybody— merchants, you know, in the real world, right? In a retail store, it's easy, right? People come in, they pay, they can pay with a credit card or pay with cash. Okay. But online it's much different. If you want to pay with a credit card, you can pay with a credit card. But then let's say they want to pay you with an ACH. Then you need another vendor. So it became very apparent to me that, you know, that companies needed to build a better solution so that you had one dashboard, right? That was your gateway, your credit card processor, and your ACH. And, you know, I went to the company who we work with and I said to them, I go, listen, you guys have to do this. Because this is the— this is a big growth area, and by not having this, we're missing the boat. So that's what they did, and I was on their advisory committee, and they would show me, oh, this is what we're doing, and this is how it looks, and, and all that. And, you know, and we got it there. And then the last little piece was, you know, everything has changed, like, you know, for accounting-wise, everything is like in the cloud now. So people are not on these like desktop computing systems much anymore. Everything is like in the cloud. So they did an integration to QuickBooks Online and now it's super, super important because this way you could use— so we have two, basically two gateways. One is like NPS, one is like Lite plus the plus internet with a WooCommerce plugin. And payment links, but it's like the light version. And then the heavy version is the ClickBiller for people doing $50,000 a month. And you know, you can do invoicing, payment links, credit card, ACH. We support surcharging, we support dual price, we support a convenience fee model, can support any kind of model that you need to, to recover if you want to recover the fee on the credit card and then you pay the fee for the ACH, which has been super popular with mostly B2B companies like accountants, lawyers, you know, anybody, you know, selling like business to business, like even in the air conditioning space and plumbing, they all— that's how, you know, they want to get paid. Like, you know, they have a lot of people that want to pay by ACH. So it's super important and we're processing millions of dollars, millions in ACH payments because of this. We're able to process millions of dollars for all different sorts of companies by balancing, oh, pay the fee on the credit card, the ACH is free. And, you know, eventually we'll have maybe— and we're going to, you know, that's, that was the dream behind it. So now Instead of having 3, like, you know, you want to have a credit card, ACH, and a gateway. That used to be 3 vendors. Now that's 1 vendor. And also with Clickbiller, you don't need ACH, credit card, a gateway, and a QuickBooks vendor. Now we wipe that out. Instead of having a 4-vendor setup and getting the merchant to sign 4 documents, now it's 1 document, 1 phone number. Boom, everything's done in it. Completely done for you with one vendor. Because before you had to use 4 vendors to accomplish that. Okay, 3 vendors. So now it's one vendor and that's it.

Yeah, so it, it sounds like you've created an all-in-one solution. Um, now in the past when a merchant had to deal with a different gateway and then processor and then a separate ACH processor. That's a lot of fragmentation. What type of problems did you see out there in the, in the field with merchants when they had to deal with all these different vendors? And how did you solve for that?

Yeah, a lot of merchants would get confused and they would be like, oh, who do I call for this? Who do I call for that? We're fielding a lot of phone calls and then you've got to figure out like, Oh, they're saying, oh, I had a problem with a transaction. Oh, was it a credit card or an ACH?

Right.

Maybe something got disconnected along the way. And then you have to have access to different reporting systems. You have one reporting system in the gateway, another reporting system for your credit card, another reporting system on your ACH. And merchants kind of like would get confused by this, right? Or something would get unhooked. To the, you know, like the, the sync wasn't sync, you know, you have to like plug these softwares into each other. So now it's just all plugged into one place. So if there's an issue, there's just one phone number to call.

Exactly.

And you know, it's like the old POS systems.

I was just gonna say that. Yeah, because, you know, we've both been in the industry for a few decades now, and I remember back in the day where it was a really big deal to tell a merchant, you've got one toll-free number to call, right? You know, that at one time that was a differentiator. But I guess you could still argue that it is. It's still a differentiator when we're aggregating all of these different solutions. You've got all of these different apps going on out there. When there is one central contact and one central dashboard where everything is all aggregated into one place, What type of feedback did you get? And oh, that reminds me, are you, are you beta testing this now? Is it, is it widely available?

Oh, it's widely available. We already have dozens of merchants using this. We're processing millions of dollars through that system.

Awesome.

And merchants with multiple locations love it because if they have different locations or somebody's running 3 or 4 Like we have one guy with 5 businesses. They log in and they can toggle between their 5 accounts. Another really good thing about the ClickBiller part is that when— for QuickBooks, they charge for licenses. So when you're paying for licenses for QuickBooks and let's say you have 10, 10 or 15 employees, you could be paying a few hundred dollars a month for licenses. With our software, You could drop yourself down to the $65 one where it gives you 3 licenses and your employees can just use our gateway because every— we sync up your invoices, your customers, and your products and services. So those 3 things all flow into our gateway and whatever you do in QuickBooks goes into the gateway. Whatever you do in the gateway goes back into your QuickBooks.

Okay, Allen, take me back, take me back to your early deployments. Take me back to your beta test. Have you— do you continue to innovate and iterate on this platform? What type of feedback are you getting from your merchants? How is it evolving?

Yeah, the merchants really like it. They're very satisfied with it, and you can use it with or without QuickBooks. It's just, just so if you're selling, doing a lot of invoicing, you know, this is great software. You can also use a webhook with it. You can do a lot of different things with the software. And people don't like to give their credit card information out or their banking information. So you're sending somebody a link, right? People are getting used to this. You're sending them a link and then they're making their payment. And the great thing about this software is after they make their payment, They've created an account, so now they can go back and look at all their invoices. They're not bugging you. So it's also, you know, it's a time saver for merchants. And the other thing is it also gives merchant privacy. So let's say I have 10 employees and they're sending out invoices. Now they're using our product, the NPS One Click Biller. They don't have— they're not going to have access to your bank account information, your credit card information, your email, and all that inside QuickBooks. Books. So that all remains because you can go in QuickBooks and create all these permissions, but I would say they don't always work, work the way you want them to work. And if people know how, you know, if you're not very careful, you can, you can, people can, your employees could be looking at your books basically. So this eliminates that, and you can create different roles inside the software too. So you could have one role for a technician, one role for your employee in the office, a different role for a manager who can create invoices, who can make adjustments. So you can make different roles. And, you know, the next iteration of the software is we're going to be adding equipment to it. So there's going to be an app and you'll be able to have technicians. They'll be able to make their own invoice, take a card in person without sending people a link. But if people want to— people like to pay with links because they like privacy. Okay, you can make it where you're collecting their name, their address, their phone number, their email, having the card on file. So then if you have them sign an authorization form and you do work for them, you can just click the invoice and the card is on file and take a payment. And you're not chasing people. These type— this type of software is automating your accounts receivable so that you're Your accounts receivable is now audit, you know, is automated and it has automated features in there to send out reminders if you want to give them a prepaid, like if they pay before it's due, maybe you have 30 days, but oh, we'll give you a 2% discount if you pay in 5 days or something, or you'll waive, you know, the credit card fee or whatever it is. You can set stuff up in there for that. You can also set up a late fee. So if they're late paying, it'll add money to the invoice too.

So it's all automation. Yeah, automation. It sounds like you've covered a lot of features and benefits. And, you know, I can definitely see that merchants are going to save time. They're going to save money. They're going to improve efficiencies. It makes sense from a bottom line and also from an operational perspective. But when you think about the big picture, what would you say is your primary differentiator in the market with this?

The primary thing is that we're gonna get— we're about to like put it onto the website where basically You're going to go to the page, you're going to see sign up now. It's going to have two pricing models, one where it's dual price and another one where it's flat rate. And then if you want a special quote, you'll click for the special quote. But literally, you're going to be able to board yourself as a merchant. You'll be able to click the link, put in your name, your email, your phone number, go to next. All the pricing is going to be there. And then you're just going to fill out the application and apply just like you do with Stripe, Square, PayPal. You're going to just go through the application process. And then obviously, if we need some additional information, we'll reach out and say, oh, you know, you need to— because it tells you upload a driver's license, a voided check. If there's a certain amount of processing or ticket, high ticket that you put in, then there's additional documents that will be requested. But it's all automated. It just sends the merchant a message and then they go click and supply information all without no paperwork, no signatures, no DocuSign, none of that. We're eliminating all the friction of setting up a merchant account.

It sounds like you went fintech big time, Allen.

Yeah, I went fintech big time with that. So and then we can see that somebody applied and if they partially filled it out, maybe had some questions, We're going to be able to see, oh, there's a partially filled out application.

Oh, oh, I like that.

Reach out to that person over the phone. Oh, did you have a question? Did you run into a problem? That's actually very cool because I think, you know, and then the place where they, the place where they went into, they have to make a username and a password there. So that's where they go back.

Okay.

They're not getting a username.

Oh, so it's a smart, it's, it's a smart process. It's Yeah, okay.

It's the same thing. You create your account on Stripe, and then that's where you go. You create your account on NPS One, and that's where you're going to go back to the dashboard.

Okay.

So you're always going to the dashboard.

This is a very— and you know, that really brings me to— that's a perfect point because we're living in an on-demand society right now, and it's really great that you've come up with a way that Merchants can opt into an entire merchant account where they get a suite of technologies at their disposal. But tell me about how they can customize. I want to hear about the branding component.

Yeah, this is a really great aspect of both of these platforms. As a merchant puts in their logo, okay, put in their color scheme, obviously, you know, you don't have to know all the numbers and everything. You can play around with it. But if you knew the exact number of your blue, right? Okay. Type it in there. So you get your exact blue, right? Like my shirt. You want to, you know, you can, you can, you can match it up. And then also all branding. So like if you send an invoice to me or a payment link from PayPal, Stripe, Square, QuickBooks, it all comes with their info on there.

I love it.

With us, you're It's your payments. You're the—

you're—

it's your company. They're going to see Dale Incorporated, right? They're going to see Allen Incorporated. They're not going to see anything about us. They're just— see, you're billing platform.

All right.

Somebody pays a bill, they can go back into the platform because they have an account in there and then they can see all of their invoices that they paid, if there's any past due, this and that. They could go— they don't have to bug the merchant to get that information, you know, oh, I need to see my last 5 invoices. And also has a nonprofit component. And for nonprofits, which is important, they can create these payment links where let's say they're having a barbecue and they email that out to everybody and then they can have their donation page Donations. The donations are— they can set up one-time donations, recurring donations, and then the system, as that flows into the system and somebody needs to get their end-of-the-year statement, they're going to be able to down— the donors will be able to go there and download. They'll be able to see, okay, this was the donations that I made and these are the other things that I paid for through the church or the synagogue or the nonprofit, you know, because like dinners and stuff like that. Bad or not tax deductible. And they'll be able to download all their information and get those totals, you know, without bugging— without bugging the merchant. Plus it goes right into your QuickBooks, and you know, you're able to section that out like, oh, this much went to the barbecue. And you're going to be able to make a P&L and everything. And you know, just from there, going right into your accounting package.

Okay. And I, I do— you know, when it comes to accounting, I also have another question for you because I hear A lot of different companies are promoting various QuickBooks integrations, right? But I don't think they're all very much alike. Is there anything about yours that you feel is unique? Or, you know, tell me about it. Is it, is it a deeper integration? How does it work?

Well, it's a two-way sync, so you don't have to create in QuickBooks. And then program the gateway to send out the invoices.

Okay.

You basically, you can just once it's synced together, you can create an invoice in QuickBooks, you know, but you don't need to. You can just go to the gateway and create invoices and they go into your QuickBooks. So you don't have to worry about, oh, I did something over here and now I got to go over there. You can just do everything in one place. Oh, that's good. Having your employees, you can be giving them access and not worry about, oh, did I set a permission where Dale can't go look at my banking, right? It's not there, so they can't look at it. It's okay, they can't hunt around for it or any of that. And then, you know, you could set up all your permissions, right? But we're just making it easier for people to use the software, and it's very intuitive. So When I say it's intuitive is when you get boarded. Yeah, we're going to have videos we're going to send you. It's going to show you, oh, this is how you link, this is how you sync your QuickBooks. And then the next one is going to go through all the settings. This is how you do all the settings. And then if you need a quick training, you just set up a training with us and then we go through and we train everybody. But also inside there in the settings, there's videos so they can go and there's little 1 to 2 to 3 minute videos like how to create a customer, how to do an invoice, how to make a payment link. There's two.

Okay. Well, you know what, getting back to your two-way sync, I think what's really remarkable about this is that it doesn't matter where you, you set up that invoice. You could be in QuickBooks or you could be in your software and you could create that invoice one time and, and it's going to automatically be accessible across these two platforms. So it kind of feels like maybe you've created omnichannel accounting.

Well, the thing is, is let's say you're working in the office, right? You create an invoice, but now I'm going to the customer. I need to add a couple of things to the invoice. I don't have to call you to do it. I could just—

that's right, you could just do it.

And I could add the couple of items on there and then exactly email it or text it to the customer.

Yeah, you know, in our industry we make a big deal about anywhere, anytime, uh, commerce, but in a way this is kind of like anywhere, anytime accounting. I think that's also a really cool differentiator.

And one of the things that we bought— yeah, one of the things we also did is this is bundled. So when I say it's bundled, right? Okay, one thing I hate about merchant services is, and this is something that we've done at Nationwide Payment Systems, is we want— we don't want our merchant to get a bill and go, okay, now it's $19 for the terminal Right. It's $10 statement fee and $10 for PCI and then $5 for this and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So if you want a terminal from us, it's a basic, you know, stick a terminal on the counter. We have a program. It's $39, includes the terminal, no statement fee, no PCI, no other fees, one flat fee. We did the same thing for this. So this is like a SaaS product, $69 a month. Boom, you're done. You're not getting a bill for ACH. There's not a separate state. Because if you do all the— if you put this all together and you go, okay, what would this cost with 4 separate companies? Yeah, a lot of money. You're going to pay your credit card company $10 statement fee. Then you're going to pay $10 for PCI. Then you're going to pay a $20 gateway fee. Then you're going to pay $20 for your ACH. Then you're going to pay anywhere from $30 to $50 for your QuickBooks plugin altogether. That type of product would end up costing you between $100 and $130 a month. With us, it's $69. You're done. So we streamline this whole thing. So you're not going to see statement fee for credit card, statement fee for ACH, PCI compliance fee. You're not going to see a gateway fee. You're not going to see QuickBooks fee. Nothing.

Boom.

Done. One price, $69 a month, and you're done. You're all in.

Well, it sounds like this is definitely going to have a broad appeal to a lot of different merchants and a lot of different verticals. Tell me a little bit about your addressable market.

Oh, the addressable market is huge because it's anybody that's doing invoicing from a main service, HVAC, recurring transactions for anything, plumbing, accounting firm, small accounting firm, bookkeeping companies, plumbing companies, AC companies, you know, just B2B, you know, parts companies, anybody that's, you know, because there's tons of companies that basically do invoicing. I mean, there's plumbing companies where they only work, they only do business, you know, they only, they primarily do businesses. Right. So yeah, when you go do a plumbing job at a business, it's going to be $5,000, $10,000. You're not going out there and, and trying to get them to give you their credit card. They might not even be there.

Right.

So you have to send an invoice to them. This is going to also help those type of companies speed up the process of collecting the money.

Exactly.

Because now you're just sending them a payment link and that's it. You're done. The detailed invoice is there. Boom, boom, boom. Goes right into your QuickBooks. So you don't have to do double entry or anything or taking or keying it in on a gateway and then marking it paid in your QuickBooks and then reconciling it in QuickBooks. We're cutting all that work down. So, right, there's a big addressable market of, you know, of companies and there's a lot of companies that do ACH only to eliminate paper check. And we've got companies that do that too because they want to— they have companies, they don't take credit card because it's larger transactions. So they just take ACH. And that's a lot of companies that do that, providing marketing services, virtual assistant companies, bookkeeping services. Yeah. When they sign up clients, we also have a boarding link so they can send their client a boarding link and the client gets the boarding link and they just fill everything out. They create their account, they put in their payment method. And boom, they're done. And then, you know, they're not giving anybody their credit card information or their information. It's all going in. It's all truncated, you know, encrypted with all the blah, blah, blah, fancy stuff. Merchants don't have to worry about this information stored because it's on the gateway, it's in the cloud, and it's on, you know, it's on a PC, PCI, you know, RAID, you know, whatever, PCI Level 1 server, you know, that the processor is running. So you don't have to worry about where is this data, you know, things like that, because that's what a lot of people don't understand. You know, they save somebody's— you're using a QuickBooks Desktop or you have a spreadsheet on your computer with everybody's credit card information that could be easily exposed. There's no information exposed.

It's true.

It's law firms using this that are processing, you know, millions of dollars a month in credit card and ACH. It gives you so many options to create a payment portal.

Yeah.

And it's all branded. You know, that's what businesses need to know. It's not— you're not sending out a payment link and it says Stripe on it or PayPal or Square or QuickBooks. Now it's your payment link.

That sounds great, Allen. Tell me about what's on your near-term product roadmap.

So the next roadmap is going to be adding devices. So you're going to be able to have a countertop device and create an invoice and then EMV your card and have it marked paid and go right into your software. So because, you know, you have a lot of wholesalers where they'll have like a counter where people walk in and buy things and then a lot of other stuff is going on on the internet. And then other stuff is, you know, other commerce is going on over the phone, right? Where they're taking phone orders and invoicing people and all that. So it's a— it's going to be able to handle all of these functions all through one gateway. You're going to run your e-com, run your invoicing, and then, and then run your counter also, because you'll be able to basically create an invoice, have somebody run a card on a device different kinds of devices and, and have it all centralized in one spot.

So it sounds like it's not just one terminal, but it's actually a family of terminals.

Yeah, well, it's going to be able to handle all parts of your business at one time— card present, invoicing, e-com— all together, because that's what— that's where businesses are going these days. When you look at all these different products out there that merchants can use, This is something that they need because you'll see, you know, we see companies now and they'll be like, well, I use QuickBooks for my invoicing and then I need you to give me a merchant account for my e-com. Well, now we're going to be able to combine those both together for you. So now you don't have to— you don't have an expense of having two merchant accounts or looking for two different deposits. It's all going to be together.

And it's like You've obviously put a lot of thought into this, and basically all of the experience that you've had working with all kinds of merchants all over the country, it's all been part of this process. And I think, you know, the fact that you've come out and created a product, that's the ultimate expression of all of the the experience that you've had talking to all these different business owners and trying to help them have a better experience?

Well, when you look at payment processing, right, I think it comes— today it comes down to technology, right? I wrote an article, you know, what are, what are we doing, payments or products? And this is a product. It's not payments anymore, right? This is a technology product. It's a SaaS product, right? This is not a— this is not like, oh, I'm selling you credit card processing. No, this is a product to help you run your business just like you buy any other SaaS software. This is basically your sales software to do invoicing, payment links, everything you need it to do for— for—

thank you. Thank you, Allen. This has really been incredible. Tell me, How can customers find out about this?

So you can go to— you can go to nationwidepaymentsystems.com. That's our main website. You can also go to getnps1.com. That'll take you right to the Clickbiller page, and you'll be able to see we have a little video there. We're also going to be launching some webinars that are going to be educational for accounting professionals, and then another webinar for merchants. And we'll be doing that within the next 30 days. And because, like, we, we believe, like, this is an automated system and there's going to be all kinds of different things that we're going to be adding into the dashboard over time— payroll services, embedded finance, the ability so you can get a loan, ability to get a credit card. And a lot of other different cool things that are on the roadmap to add into the dashboard so that, you know, we become a hub for your business.

Well, thank you so much, Allen, and congratulations. I can't wait to see what's next. Yeah.

Nationwide Payment Systems has gone fintech.

I love it.

Well, thank you, Dayle, for interviewing me today. It's usually me interviewing somebody else.

My pleasure.

I'll interview Dale on the podcast and we'll talk about payment trends.

Okay.

Thank you for listening to today's podcast about Nationwide Payment Systems, NPS OneClick Biller. You can follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify Podcasts, anywhere you listen to podcasts, and you can watch our video podcast on YouTube. You can follow me on LinkedIn and follow the podcast there, and you can get more information at the website nationwidepaymentsystems.com. And you can book an appointment, you can book a demo there, anything that you need. Thank you very much. Carpe diem and peace out. And I was just in Iowa, so hence the hat. And I was at— visited the Field of Dreams while I was there.

Awesome.

And now this was my dream, and we did it. And now we have— we're processing millions of dollars, and now we want to process— we want to open this up and get more people, show people that we can do the same thing as Stripe, and we answer the phone. Thank you very much.