Payment Trends May 2023 | Visa Sucharge Fees | Senator Dick Durbin | FedNow | Latest News about AI & chatGPT | B2B Vault | Episode 165

Yo, what's up everybody? It's Justin live from B2B Vault, the payment technology podcast sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems, hosted by this guy, the Axl Rose 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 providing you some payment trends and news for May of 2023. And please do not touch that mic ever again in your life.

I won't touch the mic.

Thank you, sir. Uh, yeah, man, so it's, uh, middle of May. My birthday weekend.

Happy birthday, Justin!

Whenever this podcast, you know, gets aired, you know, my birthday is May 13th. It should be soon, I don't know.

Yeah, my dad was May 18th.

He's a cool dude then. He's a Taurus, fellow bull. I bet he was a stubborn mother son of a gun.

He was, yeah. My dad, he's been gone a while. 1989 he passed.

I was 9.

I was 29.

Well, I'm glad that you had that time with him.

Yes, I'm—

I am very blessed. I still have my pops. Shout out to my pops, the creator of this guy right here, you know, swimming around in his, uh—

shout out. Yeah, Mr. Your dad sends me like weird TikTok videos sometimes.

My dad is intense, man.

He's cool.

He's pretty cool. He's all right. I love you, Dad. I love you, Mom.

Anyway, yeah, Mother's Day.

It is Mother's Day this weekend as well, you know. Taking my mom again, like, dinner again. This is one of these prime examples of, oh yeah, it's my birthday, and then, oh yeah, don't forget it's freaking Mother's Day. No, I'm just saying, all the time. No, it's happened my entire life.

Oh, okay. I've been—

I'm 43 years old. My birthday is on the 13th, which is the same second weekend, Mother's Day, blah blah blah. It does not matter.

It, it, it's all the time.

It, it— yeah, like it could— it's just Mother's Day.

That's like my birthday comes on the Passover holiday for the Jewish holiday.

See, there you go.

Almost every year. So I never get a decent birthday.

There you go. And then I had one of my daughters on May 17th, so not only is it Mother's Day, but it's also my daughter's birthday coming up. So it's kind of like I just, since, I don't know, it's just like, man, like when people call me, you know, my daughter asked me, hey, you got any plans for this weekend? Like, what? And then their very next text messages is, hey dad, I need some ideas for Mother's Day to get mom. Like, Like, dude, it's my birthday, you didn't ask me what I wanted. But whatever, it's all good, I don't care, I'm gonna have a good time regardless.

Is what it is.

Yeah, so, uh, it's payment trends. We haven't done payment trends in a while.

Yeah, so let's get into it.

Yeah.

All right, so some— here's the top news stories that are going on, you know, search the news. Look what's going on. Happy birthday! Happy birthday!

Thank you so much. I appreciate you guys. Thank you.

Even Rocky joined in.

Thanks, Rocky. Thank you, Anna, Camille, and Samantha. I didn't get too red. They were walking up on me again. See, man, today, real quick, quick story. I walk into the office and all three of the ladies are sitting in the front of the room And I'm like literally terrified to walk in the door because I didn't know if I was about to get jumped, stabbed, shot, beat up. I didn't know what was going on, man. They were just like— it was just very, uh, eerie. Like, really? Yeah, I was terrified, bro. I would have got pounded because my hands were full. They could have just jumped me and—

so what happened?

Stuck me in a dumpster. Nothing. They were trying to figure out what was for lunch.

Oh yeah, we had a nice Asian lunch today.

Chinese food.

Chinese food.

Don't try to make it in some like Chinese food, bro.

Chinese food. Okay, listen, I don't— you don't know anymore.

I had Szechuan broccoli and I had— oh yeah, you got to be careful with the—

yeah, mushu chicken. And Rocky had some chicken wings.

This dude put the mushu chicken on a tortilla with some—

it's not a tortilla, it's a rice—

I know it's a rice plate. Yes. I, I know.

Okay, so basically I had Chinese fajitas, sort of kind of Asian fajitas. Yeah, Asian fajita.

I don't know if you could say— can you say Chinese food anymore?

I don't know what—

we've said it like 10 times already.

Well, it's done.

We're canceled.

We're done. That's it.

Okay, we got them.

Let's go on to the first news story. The first news story, we've talked about this a couple times on the podcast, but This thing keeps popping up in the news about Visa changes the surcharge fee to confuse everyone and to send— and, you know, sending shockwaves through the merchant service industry. Merchants don't seem to care about it. The credit card processors don't seem to care about it. Everybody's putting together workarounds. Meanwhile, in my opinion, Visa, you know, the Durbin Amendment, like, put— let the genie, you know, put it out on the table. Supreme Court cases say that merchants can charge a fee and that's part of free speech. And there's been 3 or 4 Supreme Court cases. And in my opinion, this is probably going to go to court because MasterCard also usually agrees with Visa. Said, oh, we're going to stick with 4%. So that was also another, like, kind of like jab. And who knows what's going to happen with this? Time will tell. I think Visa should pull up, put on the big boy pants. The genie is out of the bottle, the elephant is sitting in the room, and I think they should figure out, like, what they want to do, because Visa's also being attacked because we will skip— you know, I didn't put it in the right order. Story 3 is Senator Dick Durbin, not my favorite guy, and his cohorts are at it again trying to figure out where they're gonna— how they're gonna get this Credit Card Competition Act passed. And it failed miserably about 5 or 6 times.

Yeah, it keeps failing, right?

Because they tried to stick it in a military appropriations bill which another, another military bill, some other bills, the housing, some other—

they try to stick it in the Cannabis Act.

Yeah, they tried to put it in the Cannabis Act, and then they keep bringing up like the cannabis, you know, what's this, what's this, finish talking about Durbin, you know, the, the whole thing, you know, there's just, they're just— I feel like Congress is completely uneducated. Some, this one Merchant Advocacy Group. I feel like they're uneducated because they sit there and they're going complaining about the, the whatever they call them, swipe fees, I think merchant fees. But what I think that they don't understand is, you know, they want to create this extra competition. Competition already exists. You have PayPal, Stripe, Square, Toast, Shopify. You have all these companies that offer payments. Now granted, they'll ride on the Visa, MasterCard rails Right? It all rides on the same rails, but they created their own ecosystems, you know? They charge whatever price they want, which is much higher than a regular interchange pass-through merchant service account, and people don't seem to mind. But meanwhile, you got all this other side noise going on from these, this, uh, you know, grocery store and this convenience store association. They shouldn't even be complaining, you know. Like, if you want to fix credit card processing and your name is Senator Dick Durbin or you're on his staff and you happen to hear the podcast, feel free, call me on the phone. I got a couple of suggestions you could get Visa to put back.

You should definitely be like on board of the merchant committee or something. I don't know if that's a thing.

No, but they should— you know, I should be on the board. I write articles in the Green Sheet.

I'm talking about like it Not saying that's not important, but like something that's like really where you can actually— people could hear your voice. Yeah, well, it would probably be a good thing. It would be nice because you're smart and you're, you know, you have a lot of experience with the topic. So both of those together, you know, it's a good person to be in on a, on a board like defending payment processing.

No, but I've called a couple of these, you know, like places up. I have to call one on Monday, you know, but I called one place up and I was like, I'd like to explain something. You know, you could get better, you know, like the convenience stores, they would get helped, and QSRs, quick service restaurants, would get help if Visa would just put back the small ticket interchange that the Durbin Amendment took away. Right, put back the small ticket interchange. That'll fix a lot of problems with credit card processing, especially— you had a whole podcast, yeah, we did a whole podcast, we did a whiteboard on YouTube, you can learn all about how it works. And you know what Durbin is recommending doesn't exist. They tried it in Europe, it didn't work, it's not going to happen. So Let's see what happens, you know. Let's let it all play.

Time will tell.

Then the third news story is this. Okay, so there's an email that's been circulating around through the community of people in the business, right? So in the credit card world, and a large credit card processor— I don't know, should I name the credit card processor? I don't know if it's public. I guess it's public information.

It's all— can you Google it?

Um, maybe if you put it on Facebook, it would pop up.

If you can find it on Facebook, then yes, it doesn't matter.

Okay, so one credit card processor, CardConnect, also part of something else called Ignite Payments, which is part of First Data, now referred to as Fiserv. No, FIS. FIS or Pfizer, whatever. First Data.

Pfizer, right?

Fiserv is First Data.

Isn't that Pfizer with the forum? Pfizer? No, that's where they built the Bucks for, like Milwaukee Bucks. They built this Pfizer.

I don't remember what— First Data.

I want Pfizer.

I want to make sure who's First Data now. First Data is Fiserv. Yeah, yeah, F-I-S-E-R-V.

Yeah, because they're the ones that built the arena.

If you have a merchant account that's connected to CardConnect or Ignite Payments If you're a merchant, you need to definitely check your statements and check your bank account because they released information that's all over Facebook saying that from 2018 to 2022 that they underbilled merchants and they're coming to collect. They're saying that they, they— I, I don't know if they are good. We're not connected to that company. So, you know, obviously I don't have someone to call on the phone and ask, but I'm being told by people who are connected through that company that they are looking to collect that money from merchants. I don't know how much merchants owe, but also some of the sales agents owe money back because they were also overpaid commission.

I don't think that's very fair because in most cases, yo, that is not neither the business's fault nor the salespeople's fault if they're not charging the right amount of money.

I know in my— most of my contracts, it says you have 30 to 60 days to complain about your residual, and I usually make sure that that clause goes both ways. Smart. You know, in one case we had a few years ago where one of the credit card processors came to me and they said, hey, you know, for 9 months we didn't charge merchants this fee 'And you know, we're gonna— we're not gonna charge the merchants the fee, but you got overpaid X amount of money, and in your contract it says 60 days, but you know, we'd like you to be possibly a little more lenient,' right? So I said, 'What's the total number?' And then I agreed that we would pay half of it, which was about $3,500 over. I said, 'You can't have it all at once.' You lost it over 8 months, we'll pay you back in 8 months, pay you back over 8 months, but I'm not taking on the whole $7,000, right? So I said, I'll do $3,500 and you can divide it by 8 and take it out of our commission. Okay, we got overpaid, we'll give you it back. Now we could all— we could have said, hey, we're sticking to the contract, but we want to be a good sales partner, not, you know, right, be a big pain in the butt to them. And so that's what we did.

You still business with— doing business with them?

Um, well, we do business— we still do some business with that company.

There you go. So how long ago was that?

That was about 7 or 8 years ago.

Exactly. That's a good example of like, we had another good business to just do good business, man.

We had another company one time, they were overpaying us We showed them how they were overpaying us on the spreadsheet. We sent it to the vice president, the CFO, and the president, highlighted in yellow that we're being completely overpaid. We're getting 100% commission on this one client. They did nothing about it. When they finally looked into it— I don't know why they didn't look into it when we sent sent it to them. They said— they called us back, they go, you know, you told us about this and we feel really dumb. We're not going to ask you for the money back because it's our mistake. So going forward, you know, you're going to earn a little less on the client because we were giving you— instead of 70% commission, we gave you 100% commission. Oh, so they, you know, but they ate it.

Which is an example of doing— being in doing good business.

They thought it was pretty messed up that they found the emails that I had sent them for like 6 months going, you're overpaying us on this client because we don't want to give the money back. Yeah, I kept sending it to them every month. They'd like— I'm like, why didn't somebody check it?

But what's this FedNow crap, man?

Oh, so FedNow Okay, I'm hearing like— I'm seeing videos on TikTok, videos on Instagram, videos on Facebook, videos on YouTube. Oh, FedNow is coming! FedNow is coming! No, FedNow is not coming. So hopefully Camille cuts this out of the thing. FedNow is not coming. You're not gonna wake up one day and there's gonna be some FedNow app on your phone and then magically you're going to connect your bank account and then you're going to run around doing FedNow to pay everybody.

I, I disagree, but keep going.

You disagree? Or the date already passed for the release of FedNow. So has—

I'm just saying, I, I, I'm not saying that it's not—

here's the, here's the, here's the pros and the cons of FedNow. Okay, the pros of FedNow, obviously there's going to be lower fees for businesses to collect money. So you walk in, you pay with FedNow, there's going to be lower fees for that. The con of that is, as a consumer, why would you want to do that? Why would— because let's say it's the same as like, okay, you pay with Cash App, right? So if you pay me with Cash App, right, it costs a little, you know, there's maybe some cost to that. Or you send me a Zelle right? And there's no cost, or sometimes if it's a business, they charge the business a dollar, right? Right. And, and you send the money. But now let's just say you came in, you came to my house and you fixed my air conditioning, and I paid you $1,000. And now my air conditioner breaks. I call you on the phone. Hey Justin, my air conditioner broke. I paid you $1,000. You know, can you come back and fix my air conditioner? You could tell me to go pound sand and I can't get my money back. Now, if I gave you a credit card, I have my consumer protection. And I just don't think that consumers are going to give up that protection that they have with the credit card companies. And beyond the protection that you have by using a credit card, the ability to charge back— can you imagine during the pandemic you paid for all your air, you paid for a bunch of air travel, hotel, and a vacation, and this and that that you had planned out, and it was all canceled. I mean, I was owed a few thousand dollars from like Ticketmaster for concerts, a whole bunch of concerts that I bought tickets for, because some concert tickets go on sale 7, 8 months in advance, right? Everything was canceled. My Adam Sandler concert, the Eagles, the, the concert in Cedar Rapids. I was going to see the Harlem Globetrotters. My daughter was going to play with them. I had plane tickets to go to Atlanta, plane tickets to go to Seattle, plane tickets to go to Cedar Rapids. Yeah, I was— I had outstanding between the planes, the hotel, between the plane and the concert tickets, about $5,000 or $6,000.

That's terrible, right?

Now, if you paid all that with FedNow, Guess what? You ain't getting that money back. Not gonna get the money back. The business— the business— not— they don't— there's no rule saying they have to give you the money back. So this Fed now, while it's coming out, oh, we could go move this money here, there, and everywhere, right? Is it— is what it is. There's no consumer protection.

It's crazy.

There's no consumer protection. Like, you had your daughter— what was the story? She paid somebody for sneakers. How much money?

Almost $300.

Okay, and she did— she get the sneakers? No. And now, could she get the money back from— what was it, Cash App? Did she complain to them? And you're not getting your money back. Well, guess what? The same thing exists with FedNow.

Oh yeah, any one of those, any app like that, right?

So anytime you're transferring money, FedNow, Cash App, Zelle, Venmo, PayPal, this, that, you cannot get your money back.

The rooter to the tutor, man.

So are consumers ready just for the fastness of money? Are consumers ready to do that? Well, as a consumer, I mean, you want to give up your credit card protection?

I'm not—

if she paid with the credit— if she paid with a credit card, you'd have your money back. I know, your $300. I know, that's a lesson to be learned.

It's definitely a lesson. I always— I'm with you, bro. You know, I mean, I agree with you. I don't think that, you know, using all these— we always are on the same boat as far as the third-party apps. I'm, you know, I do believe that the United States is in a bit of a transition and they're going to try to catch up to the rest of the countries.

The other problem with FedNow is this.

Okay.

I'm driving a car, a gas car. You have a gas car? Yes. Okay, what if they decide that's how you have to pay for gas? You only pay with FedNow. And you driver, you're driving, they decide, oh, Allen and Justin, you guys drive too much, sorry, you can't get $40 of gas at BJ's or Costco or Wawa, you can only get $20. How are you gonna feel about that? Should they, should they have that much control over that?

Government should not have control over that.

Right, well, that's the problem, you know, just the same thing.

Like, I mean, this is— this, if you're paying attention, this is happening all across the world.

Yeah, well, it's happened— like, other countries don't have the same kind of credit that we have, but they have those payments through the bank like that. But that's some— I'd have to go look into it, but I believe that Alipay and WeChat, they do have dispute processes. Okay.

Oh yeah, I have no idea.

I don't know, but because it's in another language. But I'm just saying, like, unless there's a—

you would hope so, I'm sure, right?

Unless there's a dispute process, I don't want to use that product to make my payments.

Yeah, man, all I just say is, like, when I, I, I disagree about the FedNow thing, I really do. It's going to be like the Beatles album that was just on your phone. What was the album that just— the YouTube album.

Oh, YouTube.

And when, you know, you woke up one morning and everybody's phone had YouTube.

Oh, U2.

Yeah, the U2.

U2 dropped a—

yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm a a firm believer that when they do drop the FedNow, it'll kind of happen a little similar to that.

But businesses— I don't think businesses want to—

yeah, the adoption rate of that is going to be slow as a snail, right? I mean, just like, look at it, it's just like anything, crypto, etc., etc., etc. You keep going on and on.

Yeah, we saw a story about crypto this morning. We'll talk, get into that. I didn't put it on the list, but we'll get into that in a minute. But the thing is, with the FedNow thing I don't think consumers in the United States are ready for that. You know, while I see young people, I think they're ready for it.

I just think that I don't think that people are— they don't understand the consequences of it.

Well, my son, he got ripped off the same way your daughter did. Now he pays everything with a credit card. He will not do any PayPal, no Zelle, no Cash App to pay for anything. Pays with everything with his credit card. Somebody doesn't—

somebody, if he doesn't get what he needs, or what he's supposed to charge back. Yeah, that's how you should do it.

Does a chargeback and he gets his money back because, you know, he learned his lesson the hard way. And people need, need to know that, you know, while they're going to come out with this thing FedNow, this isn't the save all and all that. Plus, I don't want Big Brother looking at what I spend. Oh, they're going to look at, oh, well, you buying, uh You buy too many pairs of— you buy too much underwear. Why are you buying so much underwear, right? Or you have too many pairs of shoes.

You've bought too many fitted hats this month, Justin.

You bought too many hats, Justin.

I would kick them— I would kick the machine over, right? And telling me what I can buy or can't buy.

No, but then this, you know, so you're not my mama. So FedNow, don't be— don't, don't believe all the hype. Okay, it's not going to be one day you're going to wake up and everybody— that's the only way you're going to be able to pay FedNow. I can tell you one thing, the credit card companies, they don't want it. They're making a ton of money. So that would really destroy banks. Their income would be destroyed.

Do you have a whole podcast about banks? I mean, we could talk about banks for a whole podcast.

I know we could talk, but I'm just saying income would be destroyed. I just don't see see it working, all right, right away. So let's move on to the next hot off the press.

We got the AI train. Jeez.

Yeah, the AI train. Oh, AI, AI, AI. Every day there's new videos.

You've been using AI for the past decade, ladies and gentlemen. Okay, well, maybe not a decade. Yeah, well, it's been 5 years at least, 6 years.

There's a lot of AI that's been around. I mean, they check your credit, they check all kinds of stuff using AI.

Voice to chat, you know, voice to chat.

That's—

oh my God, yes, that's AI. Oh no, predictive text. Oh my God, it's AI, right? You've been using it for a long time, man.

Yeah, AI's out there, you know, and I think people need to sit down and, and figure out how to use AI at their business. You know, and, uh, you know, I think it's—

yeah, man. I mean, we're using AI for a few things. Uh, yeah, I mean, it gives you ideas.

You still need the human.

I don't use it for that with it. I use it for processes, you know what I mean? Like, uh, as I said, hey, I want you to be a social media marketer, manager, creator. 30-day marketing plan, right? Just for poops and giggles, right? And spit out some pretty, you know, very useful ideas from it. Yeah, no, I mean, I'm just saying, like, if you're gonna use it for that, use it for that. But their artificial intelligence is going to take over.

Yeah, I think there's going to be a lot of different uses. It's going to take time. It's not like all of a sudden everybody's going to lose their job to artificial intelligence.

I agree. I think that there's going to be a huge shift in the marketplace— I mean, in the workforce.

It's probably gonna, you know, they're probably gonna have to, you know— and I don't, you know, and like, I don't think you should get a college degree in it, but I think AI is here. And I think like on the high school level, or even maybe before that, They need to start thinking about like, hey, in middle school we need to teach kids how to use AI.

Well, yeah. So like the, the, the prompt engineer thing is popping up all over LinkedIn. I don't know if you're on there looking at it, but yeah, they're talking about what a prompt engineer is. Someone who creates the, I want you to be an expert in, uh, content creation. Write me a 400 word article describing B2B payment processing and what are the benefits and what are the, you know, pros and cons of this and et cetera, et cetera. Like those, if you create a prompt like that, you will get a better answer than write me a 400-word article about payment processing.

Right.

So the prompt engineer is, is the person like creating these prompts and then making the extensions for like your browser and stuff like that. So I mean, in schools, yeah, I think that these kids, they do need to be teaching. Like, yo, I— the kids need to have— they need to put STEM in every school, like science, technology, engineering, and math, and that is it.

Yeah, but the thing is, it's like, and arts, every kid needs to get a laptop Every kid needs to learn how to use Microsoft Office Suite, learn how to make Excel spreadsheets, learn basic accounting. People need to learn the basic things that you need to do a job.

But yeah, but we're getting off subject. But AI, you know, you could use these— the AI for all those tools, right? Like, and it can help the youth, it can help them in school, it can help them do better at their research papers. I mean, I don't— I'm super upset that I keep hearing like all these schools banning it. It's just, well, you know, it's the lack of— it's just, it's just them being lazy, you know what I mean? Like, you don't want to— if you don't want them to use it because you don't know how to use it, what does that say about you?

You know what's interesting? When my daughter was at University of Florida, when she was there studying, when she first got there with her laptop and she hooked it up to the Wi-Fi, you know, the internet for the university, She had a couple of programs on there and it said, oh, you need to go down to the front desk and talk to the, to that technology guys down there. And like, oh, because she had like some music app on there and something else and they had to remove it all off of her laptop because of the security network. Yeah, because they don't want to. And, and also like, it was funny when she was living in off-campus housing, all the internet comes from the university and all the all over town. So if you want to have free internet, let's say you rented a house, then you want to have internet, you don't want to pay for it, you can just get it from the school.

Nice.

But you had to obey the rules, so they can control what websites you can go to and not go to. Yeah, you know, so that's pretty interesting. The other story we read today was an article that came out from this— there's this sort of processor They're like a Stripe called Circle. And Circle was the company that was one of the main companies backing the USDT coin against the dollar. And the way they were backing it up was with T-bills, with Treasury bonds.

Yeah.

And I guess the Treasury bonds that they bought, that they bought them so long ago, the interest rate was so low It was good when they got them, right?

But, but they held on to them too long, right? So they were all— they were supposed to be short-term, you know, you, you keep it for like a week and you sell it, right?

But they got into it too long term and now they're in trouble. They're in trouble if people would go and start selling their units because they're—

yeah, well, basically what they're saying is also what the article was saying is that They're not about to put their money or their trust in the Treasury Department for their crypto. They don't want the Treasury Department to control crypto because it's failing. There is no treasury right now.

Yeah, the Treasury's raising— they're talking about raising the rates again when we're already on record inflation, huh? That's what I'm saying.

Like, I don't even want to keep talking about it. Okay, like, let's not get crazy. Yeah, the Treasury Department. So basically, at the end of the day, crypto The crypto companies who created the coins, they don't trust the Treasury to regulate or back the, the, the, the, the coins, right?

The crypto.

And I get it.

Digital currency.

I'm—

that's why I say part of this stuff with FedNow is a little bit messed up because you're going to need to have digital currency.

I mean, it's been like this huge snowball, like, you know, they was poking at crypto. They poked into the point where it, you know, it kind of blew up, the balloon bubbled.

Yeah, we're going to the—

and then they were poking at the banks who were supporting the crypto, right? What happened to those? The balloon blew up, right? And now there's po— like, yo, like, how much poking are you guys really trying to do? It's really— I don't understand it. I, I, I'm not a economist, you know, maybe someone who listens to the podcast can explain it to us, you know. Um, but yeah, man, it's just a—

it's basically the policies that the government has right now are not— are not pro— they're not helping with what's going on right now because you don't want that all of a sudden.

Again, that doesn't make any sense to me because you're not an economist either.

No.

So we need somebody to break it down. That can, can, can explain to me their rationale of what they're like, their street, their strategy to deal with this.

We don't know what the strategy is. To me, it looks like choke point 2.0.

It just seems like they're letting the whole system fail.

Yeah, the government wants the crypto to fail, so they're attacking crypto. Yes, crypto banks taxing the heck out of crypto, and we're going to Bitcoin 2023 and next week, right? It's next week. Yeah, the 18th it starts. So we're gonna go down there and see what's going on with crypto at Bitcoin 2023.

It should be cool to see the—

and then the other thing that was in the news and kind of like pops up and then disappears is marijuana, cannabis. And some bills popped up in Congress, and then they were going to vote on them And then they didn't vote on them.

What about it?

They wanted to vote on the Safe Banking Act.

Oh, that— yeah, right.

And then they, they built it all up. Oh, we're going to vote on the Safe Banking Act, we want the Safe Banking Act, blah blah blah blah blah. Everybody was talking about it. Not, not the president, but the Democrats, the Republicans, the House, the Senate, right? It was all going back and forth. Looked like, oh, we're gonna actually put a vote you know, they're gonna actually do something with cannabis. Yeah. And then poof, it just drops off, you know. They don't— I mean, they don't go for the vote.

Yeah, for me it seems like it's been like this for about, I don't know, 20 years now.

Listen, if they wanted, you know, I just don't understand. Like, you have a deficit right now and you have all kinds of problems.

You could literally be fixing the whole infrastructure of the United States.

Yeah, exactly. They would tax cannabis, a multi-billion dollar business. They would— we could just prop up the economy.

And if while we're on the cannabis thing, the, the way that Florida is doing it, shame on y'all, man.

Well, I think every state is pretty much this.

Florida is— it's been legal down here for 6 years.

It's medical.

How many dispensaries are in Miami?

Tons of them.

No, in like Miami Beach. Oh, none.

Couple? No, there's none.

There's one.

There's one on Miami Beach?

No, I'm saying in that area of like what, like South Beach? Just the whole— that there's one.

Really? Let's see. South Beach dispensaries, medical. South Beach dispensary.

I just read a whole article about it. There, people are super upset. Well, the city commissioner keeps rejecting everybody's applications and gladly tells them to take it up with the whatever. Well, I'm looking at supervisor or whatever.

I'm watching right here on Miami Beach. There's one— no, yeah, one, two, three— no dispensaries.

Uh-uh.

Yeah, right. Look on the map. I don't—

this is not accurate because it's not accurate.

They're closed. I know there was a couple that opened and then they got closed down.

Yeah, no, this is just— no, Allen, that's not— I can, I could do this. Okay, so temporary closed.

Oh, okay.

I didn't look—

click them all.

This is just a smoke shop, and I think the Can of Bliss is the one that I'm talking about.

Okay, that's the one that's open?

That— no, that's the only one that has a license.

Wow.

And there hasn't been any more licenses given out. This— the city commissioner— the— was that the right word for that?

Does—

do they have like city commissioners?

Yeah, they have a city commission. Well, this one says it's open. True Leaf, Miami Beach. I don't know.

I think there's only a couple down there, but from the article, it said that there's one in the— I'm talking about in a specific area that I'm talking about. Okay, right, like where Collins Avenue is. Not Collins Avenue.

Yeah, this one's not. Yeah, I know, that's what I was saying. On Miami Beach, I know that there's only— I think there's just one literally.

And the guy was, uh, they were just, you know, I just don't understand. Like, no, the way that the city commissioner is like, he was— he's blatantly saying like, yo, if you have a problem—

we running out of time—

if you have a problem take it up with the— this guy.

Oh yeah, well, it's a problem. Cities need— you know, the states need to have laws, and the cities need to follow the laws when it comes to cannabis. And the federal government needs to legalize cannabis. So the top news stories we covered was Visa— are they going to deal with the elephant in the room with search— with, uh, you know, with respect to merchants charging fees? We talked about Durban. And him trying to get his Credit Card Competition Act. I offered to come help you guys out with that, to come up with a better plan than you did. Um, large credit card processor might be billing, backbilling merchants.

That's, that's shysty.

FedNow, we talked about, talked about AI, talked about what's going on with crypto. Bitcoin 2023 is coming up next week, gonna, gonna be, let's see what's going on with that. And then we talked about cannabis. And then I want to give a shout out a guy that I know in the credit card processing business for many years, Derek Vowels. He passed away the other day.

Moment of silence for Derek.

Yeah. And I spoke with, uh, quite a few mutual friends, you know, of him. We shared stories. Derek was a fun guy, always smiling, always saying funny stuff. He, you know, we work— he worked at a few companies that we did business with over the years, so we had a business relationship, personal— good guy. And a big shout out to Derek.

Rest in peace, bro.

Yep, rest in peace.

And, uh, well, yeah, man, on a more lighter note, On a lighter note, thank you for listening to the podcast. Check us out on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok. Don't forget to follow us on YouTube. Hit the like, subscribe, turn on post notifications. Never miss another episode. Head over to b2bvault.info. You can sign up for a merchant account, sign up for, uh, be a guest. You can send me and Allen a question if you need be, or complaint, or just yell at us, whatever.

Yeah, ask us a good question.

Hate mail, we're all, we're all for all.

We don't want hate mail.

No, I don't care. You send it to me. I love reading it. Um, it's hilarious to me. And, uh, yeah, man, so, you know, keep up the good work. We love you guys. Thanks for listening.

Peace out. Hope you had a good Mother's Day.

Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to Justin, and many more. All right, y'all, peace.

I hope we didn't run out of time on No, we did not. 10 minutes.