Payment Trends for August 2023 | Biz To Biz Podcast

Yo, what's up everybody? It's Justin live from B2BVault, the Biz to Biz podcast sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems, hosted by this guy, the Bill Parcells of payment processing himself, Allen Kopelman. And we'll be providing you educational information about fintech, small business payment processing, and the technology businesses are using in the world today. And in today's podcast, we'll be talking about payment trends of August 2023. Not too much happening. A few things that caught our attention. But, you know, for the sake of payment trends, we have to do it for once a month. So here we are.

Yeah.

How are you doing, Sarah?

I'm doing good. Having a good— it's been a pretty hectic little week here.

Yeah, this week has been nuts.

Yeah, we had a lot going, a lot of little things, personal stuff going on for me, man.

I mean, not personal. It's just, it's all like little beginning of school year, uh, switching my internet. It's just, I just got back in town.

What'd you switch your internet from? Comcast? Yeah, I got rid of Comcast. Xfinity?

Uh, I'm switching over to the dark side of AT&T.

Okay.

Hopefully I don't, um, regret it. Um, I don't see that I will. Apparently, this is, you know, Comcast, Xfinity, whatever you are, whatever entity you want to be called today. So apparently, our original contract ended, right? But we, you know, so anyway, long story short, our internet went from the best top-tier internet, right? Like whatever it was. Yeah, the high speed from, you know, to 800 down to 100 up, right? Like, and I'm— for the past, we've been just for, I would say, 6 months probably.

Yeah.

Calling, calling them.

I've been complaining about my internet too because you should look It's clippy.

Look on the back end of your account, right?

Yeah.

And see which package you have.

Right.

And see if you were downgraded.

I'm just curious, man, because it's been clippy lately.

I can't even tell you or begin to explain how frustrating it has been to deal with Xfinity.

Yeah.

Because we're—

they're horrible. They used to answer the phone, right? Now they got this app and this chat and all that.

And you have to wait.

And then let's not talk about that.

Then they just— Then they just tell you to reset your modem.

Yeah, I can't deal with it. I can't deal with their customer service.

I literally was happy to— I had to yank it out of the wall because AT&T wouldn't do it.

Oh, wow.

By law. Okay. They're by law, they can't do it. So I happily yanked it right out of the front of my house.

Okay.

Bye-bye, Xfinity.

Okay.

And your $200 internet.

No, it's crazy, the prices lately. Of internet and cable is crazy because they're losing.

They're just losing out for the subscriptions.

Well, it's not that. And then these subscription things is crazy. Oh, this one's $5. This is $8. This is $10.

And I mean, it makes sense to me. I, I feel I like the subscription model. Yeah, because I don't watch TV like that, right? So like if I want to watch a show that comes out, you know, whatever quarter of the year or whatever part of the year, then I only have to pay Starz for whatever, how many months that is. Right. And then I cancel it.

Right.

You know, so, but to add Starz to your cable bill per month is ridiculous.

Right.

It's not $5.

That's what I'm saying.

It's like $20 or something because they make you get the premium movie package.

Yeah, the whole thing is crazy. I'm thinking about switching also. I'm just not happy with that.

I killed cable in general. We no longer have cable TV because no one watches it. It. Everyone streams what they want to stream.

Like my son Jacob, he only wants to watch sports.

Exactly. So pay for a subscription to ESPN or the NFL Channel or the MLB Channel, and you'll literally get everything that you want, right? So I'm cool with that.

I, you know, hopefully this all works out, but it's like football is going to that too.

It's like, yeah, me and Pops always go half on the NFL package. It's crazy for the year and just stream it, man, because it's just easier. You don't You know, game, you get every game that you want. You can, and it's, you don't have to worry about it being blacked out. Like, it's just, it is what it is, man. It's us as a people, like, we've basically set ourselves up.

The cable companies need to get on board and change how they do business, their business model.

Well, no, the problem, there is going to be no more cable companies.

No, no, I know that. I'm saying like they need to change their business model to accommodate, right, so people can get what they want, like à la carte, right?

Because even now my dad has that antenna that he just put in his window.

Yeah.

And he gets like 50 TV channels, right?

You know what I mean?

So what is the point of having cable? I don't know. I mean, for kids, you need it for kids. Cartoon Network and all that other stuff. But whatever.

Yeah.

Other than that, I ain't got much going on, man. Just here grinding it out one day at a time.

Happy to be here.

Blessed.

Awesome.

Thanks for being Allen Kopelman. Allen's a great guy.

Thank you.

Without him, I wouldn't be able to do a lot of stuff.

Justin is great too. Does a great job. Appreciate you, sir. Good co-host. Keeps me on my toes.

Get out of here, dude.

No, but there's a lot. Technology is like a crazy thing, and I get frustrated with technology. This morning we're meeting with a technology company. And they're like, oh, we want to sell you this package. First it was $14,000, then it went to $7,000.

Yeah, man, that was— I was getting frustrated with that.

And then, and then they're like, well, we have this other package, it's $199, or this other one that's $69. And I was like, great, because I just want to try your product out before I go spend $7,000. Now, if it actually works and you can get the leads and you can get all the stuff that they say you can get out of this You know, it's like intelligence software. If I can get all of that information out of there that they say I can get, and guess what?

It'd be well worth it.

It'd be worth $7,000 because that's about—

it'd be worth 10 grand, right?

It'd be worth 10 grand. But we want to try it. Let's—

I was telling them, then the free trial, you don't get this part of it, you don't get this part of it, and you don't get this. So what is the point of having a free trial?

No, you guys got most of it.

No, but not the one part.

Oh yeah, we didn't get the intelligence off the web. No, no, we got intent data, but not the intent data from our website.

That's what I'm saying. Like, that's— well, that's what we're hitting you up for, right?

I get it, but you know, whatever. We'll try this out for a month or two. Yeah, if it works, then we'll upgrade to the $199 plan and we get the intent data from the website.

I like it.

And it's, you know, she was nice.

She was the nicest person that we've dealt with.

Yeah.

On—

and I—

well, she's just a salesperson, but she's definitely— she knew her stuff. No, she knew her—

she knew the platform.

She could answer the questions, and she knew a lot about marketing.

Yeah.

So I was highly impressed with that woman. She— I forget her name, and she knew how to use the software.

The other thing is, is that I was explaining her— I said, we had another company pitch us, and they had a more expensive product to do like the social media posting.

Yeah, but they gave us 3 months free, and then you let us use it full, full, full dove, like there was no, no holds barred, like no holds barred.

At the end, you had access, you had either go in a contract or go bye-bye. Yeah, and I was like, man, the software was great. Everyone in the office liked using it, easy to use. We haven't had problems with like posts showing up and the pictures being weird. Nope. Remember how, you know, some of them, you know, that— and weird stuff in the post. So that, you know, I was like, what's the name of that company? I forget the name of it.

Uh, Metricool?

No, no, Samantha, what's the name of that internet— the posting tool we use? Sprinklr. Sprinklr.

Shout out to Sprinklr.

Yes, shout out to Sprinklr. Great product. A little pricey, right? A little pricey, but worth it.

All right. Well, let's hop into payment trends, man. What you got? What you got? What you got?

So let's talk about some of the— we'll just list them off and then we'll go down them. So the first one I want to talk about is B2B payments. What's going on with that? The New Jersey law on surcharging and then real-time payments versus FedNow. Mobile payments, which is going a little bit crazy now, and then pay by link. And all of it, you know, all of this has been in the news steady.

Yeah. Don't forget India landed on the South Pole of the moon.

Yeah. And it landed on the moon. That's crazy. Yep.

The moon rush is upon us. They've been up there. They're going to go up there and they're mining.

Who is?

That's what everyone is trying to get up there and do.

And mine?

Yes.

What are they going to get?

Precious metals.

Interesting.

No, it's not interesting.

I hope it doesn't move the moon.

No, that's the whole point, man. Like, why would you touch the moon?

Yeah, it could cause a problem. I've seen movies where the moon gets messed up and then there's problems.

Dude, Russia blew up trying to land on the moon last week. Did you see that? No. Yeah, there's—

oh yeah, I saw their, their thing blew up on the thing.

Yeah, yeah, gone, done.

Was there people in there?

No, it's a—

oh, unmanned.

Yeah, it's just the rover or whatever they call it.

Yeah, well, that's not good. Don't mess with—

landed on there and they say that they're looking for water.

Water for what? What do they need water for? They got—

y'all got to stop messing with nature. But anyway, I digress.

Okay, so B2B payments has been in the news, and then yesterday we were at a business The other day we're at a business conference and one of the breakout sessions was talking about, you know, B2B payments, how B2B payments is changing and business-to-business companies need to make it easier for their customers to make payments and give them payment choices.

I should have went in that one.

You should have went in that one.

I feel like I would have learned something.

It was interesting because what they were talking about was you should raise your prices 3% and then save on your inventory 3%, therefore effectively increasing your profit by 6%. And but the other thing that she talked about was hard costs, which are labor, rent, and other fixed costs, which seem to be rising. And that's causing a big problem for a lot of businesses because people are in, you know, Uh, rents are going up, which I don't understand. You drive around this general area where we are, Cypress Creek Corridor in Fort Lauderdale, and there's— I would— I— if they told me there was an 80% office occupation, I would call it major bullshit. Yeah, exactly. It's got to be less than 50%.

Dude, there's no way there's—

it's got to be—

there's no— 50% sounds high. Because leaving here is a ghost town.

Exactly. It's crazy. And that's changed in the last couple of months, right? You can noticeably see that the traffic is much lighter.

It's getting less and less and less.

Right. It's been much lighter recently.

Last year, if I left at 6:00 PM to go back home—

It would be crowded.

It'd be pretty packed. The freeway especially. Yeah, not this year.

Yeah, I mean, I know people took vacation.

I know a lot of people left Florida too, though.

Yeah, but they didn't leave. What happened is people are moving out. Their leases are up.

Yeah, I mean, they moved out of Florida.

Their leases are up and they moved out of their office and they go to their house. So, but B2B companies need to figure out, like, nobody wants to call you on the phone and give you the credit card number over the phone. They want to go to a link and do a click to pay.

Okay, if you're still doing payments over the phone, dude, you got—

you gotta do— you gotta— you gotta get into— and I also talked— when I talk to B2B companies and they tell me they have tons of outstanding invoices, I go, why?

Somebody tried to do— get me to give them my credit card over the phone today. I'm not doing that, dude.

Like, send me a link.

I said to them, I said, first of all, I didn't even set up the account, right? You're only calling me because I'm attached to this account, right? I can't update the credit card, right? Call my pops, man.

Oh, you don't like that either, right, Rocky? Rocky said, do not give over the phone credit card processing. Over the phone credit. So today I was doing a demo and I was showing this company. I'm like, yeah, you can set up this page, your customers come there. And I said, You know, do it the way you want for right now.

He didn't look like he was very interested in that. And I was kind of befuddled.

And I said to him, when I said—

this is what comes— this is what you're—

and this is what I said to the guy. I said, when you're telling me you're going to do business with the DOD, right? Some universities, you're going to see that they're going to give you some pushback on what you're asking them to do and how you're asking them to pay. Right. They're going to say—

they're going to say, no way, Jose.

They're going to say, we want you to send us a link.

Or yeah, no, they're going to want to— that invoice thing ain't going to work.

No, no, they're going to want— no, no, they're not going to want to give you the card over the phone. They're going to want a link. We just went through this with a company who is doing business with AutoNation. We showed them how to send the link. We had another company does business with insurance companies and the government. We showed them how to set up the link. You just send them the invoice, you send them to a link, boom, you're done. They register, they put their email, Yeah, they register, they put their bank account, they put the credit card, they could use it.

And then they're logged in, then there's information to save with them.

Right, and it's on the gateway and it's all safe and nice, and you don't have to worry about keeping—

It's good stuff.

You got to be compliant. You know, we're going to talk about compliance. Oh, I left that off the list, but that was another thing on the list, compliance. You want to be compliant. You don't want to have credit cards on a spreadsheet on your computer credit cards on a sheet of paper in your drawer. That's not compliant. It's not PCI compliant. It's not compliant. We've talked about other compliance, HIPAA compliance. We could do a whole podcast on HIPAA compliance. But this way you can manage your business better. You give your customers a choice. Oh, pay by credit card or pay by ACH. Some business— and then you can lower your cost because you could say, oh, if you pay by credit card, we'll charge you, let's say, 2, 2.5%, and we'll let you do ACH for free. And then you lower your credit card cost acceptance very, very low, your payment acceptance.

And you're getting your money way faster.

And you're getting your money faster because you're giving them a link. People are short—

And they're happy because they trust you.

Right, there's more trust.

It's just so many positives.

Yeah, you're giving them a, you want to give a good customer experience to your customers when they pay you. You want to make it easy, not call on the phone. And the same thing with QuickBooks. We can do the same thing. You're using QuickBooks, FreshBooks, or Xero. We have software that interfaces with that so you can send your customer the invoice the way you send it, give them a link, and then they click and pay. Makes it easy. And, you know, with all this accounts receivable, you're just rolling the dice. We're coming into— the Fed just raised the rates. They're going to raise it. They say they're going to raise it 2 more times. 2 more times, we're going to— means we're going to have a ton of inflation. So if you're carrying somebody for $10,000, $20,000, $30,000, or you're carrying whatever you're carrying on your receivables, $20,000, $30,000, $40,000, $50,000, that could turn into— that you could be— that could be a big fat zero because those companies could go out of business.

Yeah, you'll be—

So let's move on to the next thing. So if you need B2B payments, you want to see a demo, show you the demo. Takes about 15, 20 minutes. Believe me, it will change everything. It will help you be more efficient. And that's important, to be more efficient, save time, and people can pay you 24/7 and on the weekend too when you're not working. New Jersey, they come out with this surcharge law. It's very wishy-washy. The governor says, oh, businesses are overcharging people and blah, blah, blah. And doesn't make any sense. There's already a national, a federal law with the Durbin Amendment, and you got Visa trying to put a cap on surcharging, and the governor doesn't even understand what surcharging is or fees or anything. And first they said it was 3.5%, then they said it's 2.5%. This doesn't make any sense. And then they said, oh, well, they can charge up to 3.5%. As long as they don't charge more than they pay and profit from collecting the fee. I don't know how they think they're going to monitor that. How are they going to monitor it? It just doesn't make sense. You pass a law and then how are you going to monitor the— the— how that— how you're going to monitor that? Just going to wait for consumers to call up and go, oh, I went to this place, they charged me a fee. And then what, you're going to spend money sending somebody over there to go slap around a small business owner.

I don't get it.

I mean, gas stations even do that. They can't. That's what I'm saying. It doesn't make sense how they can make a state law that's superseding the federal law of the Durbin Amendment.

Yeah, they can't do that, right? Doesn't—

I don't know what they— I don't know if it's enforceable.

It doesn't supersede federal law, right?

I don't know how— I don't think it's enforceable. Yeah, but we'll see.

It's like a scare tactic for businesses not to charge more fees, right?

And it'll just end up going to court at some point, right?

Because someone's going to get sued and then they'll litigate it, and then they'll be like, this is, this is against our constitutional rights, right? Or whatever. Yeah, you can't, you can't single us out. There's 50 other states or whatever, right?

Oh, and the Supreme Court already weighed in on it. Clarence Thomas says it's up— business owners can charge what they want because they have free speech to say to charge what they want.

Exactly.

So We'll see how that works out.

New Jersey, go get a life.

And the next one is, you know, there's all the talk about FedNow. FedNow, what is FedNow? Da da da da da.

What is FedNow?

FBI, open up! Fed— Rocky didn't like that. He goes, "Huh, FedNow? Is Ice-T here? He's gonna bust you." The FedNow is this fast real-time payments network You know, and then people are confused because there's already a thing called RTP, the Real-Time Payments Network. That's how like Uber and different companies pay the driver so fast. Like you drive all day and then you go in your app and you go, "Oh, I made $300," whatever you made, "$200 a day." You hit the button and within an hour, the money's in your bank account.

That's nice.

Right? That's real-time payments. FedNow is a similar type of thing, but they don't have enough companies working with it. Plus, they haven't figured out the fraud aspect of it.

Can you even download the app?

No, there's no app. Exactly right. They, they were making big things on the internet for a while. TikTok— oh, you're going to be able to walk in the store and you'll whip out your phone.

You're supposed to be able to download the app in July, I thought.

Yeah, there's no app. There's no way to use it to make payments. Plus the fraud part of it, because the difference between Real-time payments is basically pushing payments out. Right. And the Fed now wants it to where, like I say to Justin, oh, you owe me $500, I go take $500 out of Justin's bank account, or he sends it to me like Zelle. And we all know with Zelle, Venmo, PayPal, and all that, there's been tons of fraud in the last couple of years to the point where Bank of America, Wells Fargo, other banks all got getting sued. There's still a bunch of active lawsuits. Elizabeth Warren's going bananas about it still in Congress, wants them to pay all the money back to all the people that got scammed. And they say, well, they didn't— they got scammed by scammers. That's another thing that's all in the news is this ID scan and these tech scams and these scammers from India. I just don't understand how the US government— like, these— there's these guys on YouTube called the People's Network or something, and they got a bunch of scam— they're They're like, they go and find those scammers and then go put like viruses in their computer and stuff. They like pretend that they got a phone call from them.

Yeah. And then they'll call the place.

Yeah.

And then they'll call the call center. Yeah.

They call the call center and then they, they get them to, you know, do that AnyDesk thing. Do not. Anybody—

I love those videos.

Anybody ask you to put AnyDesk on your computer and you don't know them? No. The answer is no. Hang up the phone.

Close your browser.

Do not download. Run. And then they hack into the hacker's computer and hack them up, you know. And I don't understand how the federal government here— I read it was in the triple-digit billions of money lost of people in the last year, mostly senior citizens. Yeah, okay, money. And I think the federal government needs to put the kabosh on this stuff going on in India. You know, that's just crazy. But we'll see. I think, you know, FedNow, the, the, the, uh, the jury's out on that.

Real-time payments, I'm going to say FedNow is never going to see the light of day.

Well, it's going to take time. Real-time payments has been around for 10 years or more, and I mean, not even—

I just don't— I just—

it's not a big struggle.

I don't see the United States lasting that long.

I'm kidding. Well, the next thing is mobile payments. So mobile payments is in the news because every single company now is releasing their app for the phone so that you can take payments on a phone without any equipment. So there's just more and more and more companies releasing it out. Chase released it, some other companies.

I mean, if you're not setting up mobile payments by now, dude, you're— where are you? You're— are you hiding underneath a rock?

I tell people all the time about it.

They go, well, did a house land on you?

Like, they don't want to do— a lot of people don't want to do it. They don't think the customers are going to trust it.

Their customers are already paying their bills with the phone, man.

That's what I tell them. Just do it. Businesses need to do it. It's a low-cost way for you to accept payments. You don't need any equipment. You just use the phone that you already have. It's a great way to take payments. So you need some mobile payments? Let us know. Contact me, contact Justin. We'll get you hooked up. And, you know, the other thing is this biometric payment thing with the palm. Yeah, with— with— now they showed a store in, in California that's run by Amazon. There's no The only employees are employees stocking the shelves. Yeah. You have to scan your palm to open the thing to let you in the store, and that's how you pay. There ain't no way I'm going to that store.

If that is not the mark of the beast, I don't know what is.

I'm not doing that.

No.

And then Trader Joe's came out.

Might as well just get the chip in your hand by that time, bro.

Yeah.

And sign up and try to get it installed. Well, let's watch. What's— man, do you remember that show The V?

Yeah.

When you put the glasses on and everyone turned into aliens.

Yeah. You could see all that. Who was an alien?

I wish we had those glasses.

We could see who's the aliens. Yeah, that would be interesting for sure. And, you know, the other thing all of a sudden in the news, pay by link. We've been offering that for like 10 years.

Pay by link. Yeah. But, you know, we were just— you just talked about that.

Yeah, I know.

I'm just saying it's like all of a sudden it's in and it is part more— it's getting more popular because it's a secure transaction.

—right—

as opposed to doing it the old way of, hey, I got this bill, you need to pay this bill, what's your credit card number? And then, you know, Nancy over there is in the corner, got you on speakerphone writing down all your information because her niece is a scammer in East Cackalacka, New Jersey, or whatever. You know what I mean?

Like, yeah, that's why, that's why you need these things. But I was showing those guys the platform that even the pay-by-text platform we have, pay-by-text or email, you can add a tip line so So it's good for tow truck companies, it's good for service companies, things like that where people want to maybe tip the worker, right? So that they can leave a tip. I mean, I get upset sometimes, like these guys come to do a service at my house and then I'm like, I'm paying them and then there's no tip thing and I don't have— I got no cash. I got no cash on me.

I always offer a bottle of water.

Well, I do that, but I'm saying I feel bad. I want to flip the guy a $20 sweating.

Yeah, throwing a guy a dub is probably the best bet. Like, I would always do that if I had the cash on me. But, you know, like you said, who has cash on them now?

Yeah, well, that's the other thing that's been floating around now. A lot of cities and states are just starting to pass laws saying that it's illegal.

Jersey said that, right? No, there was Jersey as well.

Jersey.

And they said that you can't— not—

you have to accept—

you have to take cash.

You have to take cash in your business. They don't— they're putting a stop to people that want to be completely cashless. They don't want it, especially in the, in the, you know, in the neighborhoods where people don't necessarily have access to credit cards, stuff like that. They want people to have cash. I mean, even the ACLU came out a few years ago and said that people that use credit cards should pay extra. They don't care. Like you would think they would be against the fee on the credit card. They don't care. No, they feel like they should pay the fee on the credit card and the business should you give people a discount that pay with cash. Makes sense. Right? So cash discount. I love it. And they agreed with it, ACLU. So that's payment trends for August. Boom, boom. If there's something you want to hear us talk about, our opinion on something, let us know.

Got any questions about, you know what I mean, with anything that we talked about. But yo, smash that subscribe button on YouTube, Biz to Biz Podcast. Like, comment, share to your peoples, your folks. Fam and them, folks and them, whatever you call them, you know, your bros, your sisters, the entrepreneurs of the family, people who are interested in financial technology, etc. Entrepreneurs in general, small business owners, we got the stuff for you, you know what I mean? Come get it. Uh, yeah, this guy's the encyclopedia of payment processing, so he's got a lot of knowledge to give. Check us out on YouTube, B2B Vault. The Biz to Biz Podcast. Peace out.