What's Going On In The Business World Of Banking | Biz To Biz Podcast

Yo, what's up everybody? It's Justin live from B2B Vault, the biz to biz podcast sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems, hosted by this guy, the Bill Belichick 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 a few banking things in the news. The banking pod, uh, or the state of banking.

Yeah, first, the state of banking for small businesses. What's going on in the business world of banking?

Yeah, a lot of stuff going on banking, especially for cannabis. A few other cool things going on. Um, I found a, a new startup that I'm gonna shout out. So anyway, how you doing?

I'm doing well. Bill Belichick, not one of my favorite coaches, but because that's a big rival of the Miami Dolphins.

How can the Dolphins have a rivalry?

And I don't even want to get into it because it's in the Eastern Conference. Okay. Same there in the same conference. You got, you got New England, Miami, Buffalo, and the Jets. That's the conference. Doesn't make sense that we have 3 and used to be the Colts too, but not anymore.

The Colts never made sense in that division to me. I know, but I'm saying like Miami should be a Midwest division, East Coast division, a down south division, a Northwest division.

Yeah, like we should be— I see like us being whatever, Atlanta, New Orleans, Miami, Tampa, and Jacksonville.

Like, that would be a good conference. Yeah, that would be like, you guys all suck, but no, I'm just kidding. Uh, yeah, no, it'd be good.

No, but I'm saying if they organized it more like that, then, you know, and then you have Texas, you could have the Dallas, Houston, Arizona, Arizona, Las Vegas, Las Vegas, and, uh, and San Diego, something like that.

Anyway, football season is coming up. Preseason already started. I can't believe it. That is just blowing my mind.

Yeah. And we already got like a bunch of injuries on the Dolphins.

Oh, I don't know. I don't really follow football, dude. Like, it's— I will do my— a better job this year because my dad— anyway, yeah, I got to do some— I got to be better at watching. You know, keeping up with the pack. All right. Because he likes to talk about it, and then I feel bad if I'm not, you know what I mean, like caught up.

I got you. So how's your week going?

Uh, so far everything is everything. It's very slow.

Um, we're waiting for this cockamamie hurricane too, so hopefully everybody stays safe.

Yeah, this weekend went by really quick. It was my daughter's and Jacob's birthday last week Thursday. So, and then I feel kind of bad. I don't feel kind of bad. Mr. Verdin was in town, one of my— he's basically, he's like a dad to me. He was visiting his son Julian, my little brother. It's awkward, right? But I mean, it was just busy. Like we were really busy. He was, he's kind of like, he's a super empty nester now. Like he's an OG. So like he could kind of do what he wants, Mr. Verdin, but So like, I don't party and, you know, Julian likes to get out on the town, but I couldn't really connect up with them. But Saturday we took Jasmine and the grandkids to the beach over to the state park and the— I forget what the state park name is.

John Lloyd.

No, the other one.

The one in Fort Lauderdale?

But no, the one in Dania.

They changed the name, but it's was John Lloyd.

Yeah, it's not that.

I know they changed the name.

Yeah, anyway, so we went there and they did it, man. Let me tell you, I shouldn't tell you, but I will tell you. We've been waiting for them to fix— like, that's been my favorite beach, like, moving down here because it's kind of secluded. Um, but the erosion had destroyed it.

Yes.

And so it's next to the port, sort of. Yeah, kind of close to that. And, uh, well, it's on the southern side of it, but Anyway, there's no more erosion. They fixed all the beaches. They're like white sand beaches. It's really amazing. I wish they would have fixed the grills, but you know, you're asking for a lot. But at the— yeah, man, we were there for almost all day. Was smart this time and stayed out of the sun. Well, I didn't fall asleep in the sun.

Yeah, that one time you got toasted.

I couldn't even walk, bro. I had my feet were so like sunburned. I couldn't put pressure on the bottom of my feet. That was insane. Um, never again will that happen to me. Uh, never say never, right?

Bring a tent.

I had a tent. I fell asleep in the tent. But this is new too. Yeah, you know that you can't put tents up down there.

Oh, they stopped that now?

No, but we got away with it. Okay, so you— but so apparently people were doing stuff they're not supposed to do. Okay, sexual stuff.

Gotcha. I—

the guy said we didn't care about people doing drugs on the tents. It was, it was when they were having—

right, well, you know, there's whatever.

Yeah, so, uh, so the hack is you got to make the— you got to leave it open and you got to put the tent facing so that when, you know, how they're doing their drive-bys, they can see inside of it. Okay, so we got away with it. I mean, probably having a grandson there, newborn, you know what I mean, probably helped a little bit. The lady was probably feeling a little bad. She made us move it, but we put— I put it back together. I wasn't going for it.

Okay.

What are you going to do, kick me out? Yeah, right.

No, it's all fun times.

Yeah, but other than that, everything's good. Watch out for her.

What's her name again?

Hurricane Adalia.

Adalia. Yeah.

I don't know if Hurricane Franklin is on the East Coast, but he's going up towards Maine.

Yeah, but you know what's crazy? These hurricanes with the letter I been doing not so good for the last few years. They've made a lot.

Knock on wood for that, bro.

I know what I'm saying. The letter I, not good.

Really?

Yeah. They make a lot of damage.

Well, I hope everybody in Tampa, Fort Myers, and on the West Gulf Coast is making precautions and doing the right thing and not trying to hunker down like you guys did last time.

Yes. Get out of there. They're already showing storm surge.

Exactly.

So let's jump into the banking thing.

The banking pod.

So some of the stuff going on at the bank is You go talk about what? Talk about what?

What are you going to talk about first?

I want to talk about one thing that's going on at banks that, that's a little weird.

What is it?

So when businesses go to the bank and they bring in cash and they go, oh, I need to do my change order, right? And they bring in, let's say, a bunch of $20s and $50s and $100s.

They're telling them to get out of there, aren't they?

Yeah. A lot of banks don't want to give change. And then when they do want to give change, they want you to deposit that money into your account first.

Yes.

Right. So then that might be like what you call vault cash for your business. And, and that's causing a lot of bookkeeping problems. And businesses need to— there's a couple of things you can do. A, you get a smart safe from us too, and then have a separate bank, have a separate bank account for that change order. Right? So that way you can account for that correctly with your accountant. You don't have bookkeeping problems.

Smart.

Um, you can do that, and you could— or you could get a Smart Safe, and that's what people need to do. And the other thing is some banks are not carrying change anymore, and I thought that was weird. So no more rolled change, and you have to order it. So having a Smart Safe, you can get your cash picked up and then you can get your change delivered, and it's pretty affordable, and it's safer for you, safer for your employees. Yeah, and your money's in the safe, and it gets deposited to your bank account daily from the safe electronically. So it's pretty cool.

Makes sense to me.

So the next thing with banking is Elon Musk is going out and he's securing money transfer licenses, and he wants to turn X into the next— into some sort of PayPal thing.

Yeah, he's— I've been hearing a lot about it. He wants people to use X as a revenue stream. As I, I don't get it. I haven't done too— basically he's trying to say that Twitter is going to be the place for creators to make money, right? Um, and be able to accept payments inside of the platform, send money, invest, etc., etc. I don't get it.

I don't get it either. I don't understand what the play is.

But I mean, I— okay, let me rephrase the word wording of saying I don't get it. I get it how making it a way to send and receive money, right? Because that happens all the time. Facebook did it.

Everyone's doing it. Everyone's Cash App.

Right? So I mean, you can send and receive money, but I don't, I don't see the appeal that Elon does when it comes to X as being the place for creators. I don't know, people are leaving that platform.

Well, they're leaving, right? People are upset, you know, like I was talking to my daughter, right? And they use— they were— she used to use the TweetDeck because she's a meteorologist to keep up with the weather, and then post-weather stories.

Well, that's the TweetDeck's fault for not adapting and making it—

he got rid of it.

But if he— if TweetDeck, yeah, would have been proactive and rebranded it accordingly, I doubt that—

I don't know—

Elon would have booted him.

He said he wanted everybody using the TweetDeck to be a premium member of, of, uh, Yeah, but what if it was called the X Deck? I don't think— I think he still would have wanted— he wants everybody to pay to be on there.

Well, I mean, the pay-to-play premium model is standard operating procedure in 2023.

I guess so. I guess you're gonna have to start paying for all of these platforms.

I'm not— I'm not gonna pay, but I'm saying, like, I mean, let me rephrase or take that back again. I'm not currently, but right, that could change if they're— if they're— if it's the only way, if you have to. And unfortunately, it's leaning towards this more and more every day. Like, you're gonna have to subscribe, bro. Like, if you want to be on that platform. Yeah, if that's your platform of choice. And I believe in the next 2 to 3 years, the only way that you'll be able to use X or Instagram or Facebook you're going to be paying for that.

Yeah. And the one thing that I don't understand about the X, and I think he needs to solve this problem, is let's say you have your platform and then you have a business, right? You have to pay for both. I don't think that's right. You have to pay for—

yeah, you shouldn't— you should be able to register. I mean, I guess that could get sketchy for like agencies, right? Because for instance, for me, I manage, I don't know, 27 profiles, right? So yeah, if I register it as like an agency, this, you know, he's got to figure that out. There's got to be different packages because the agency is going to have like 40 different profiles to manage, right?

No, but I'm just saying, let's say you have— I have my profile and then I have a business profile. Do I have to pay for mine, my profile and my business profile? I mean, and it, you know, it's going to get expensive.

It should be a business. It like just from like when you, when you know, like it should be personal.

Yeah.

Small business, whatever.

Yeah. You know, whatever agencies, whatever agency.

Right.

But it's— they got to fit. They got to come up with something. I like to— I don't like this word equitable solution, but they need to come up with a tiered pricing model.

A tiered pricing model would benefit X for sure.

Yes.

And I think—

and I think they need to do the same thing on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Yeah, LinkedIn, LinkedIn Premium, whatever the cost is for—

it's expensive for people. It's up for a month. Yeah, I bought a month.

I can't afford that.

If you want the premium premium, it's $100.

Yeah, I'm not paying LinkedIn $100.

And then other stuff that's going on in the banking world is how is this raise— the Fed has raised rates again, 11, 12, 11 or 12 times. To a total of 525 basis points, causing— we're going to see mortgage rates go up to at least 8% and car rates on car loans.

Well, I'm not—

could go up to as high as 12%.

Yeah, I'm, I'm like I said, I'm like this close of voluntarily returning my vehicle.

I'm just saying it's crazy. Yeah, the, the car loan situation is getting out of control. With car loans. Car loans.

I mean, everything is out of control.

Yeah, well, inflation is out of control and the Fed's talking about raising rates 2 more times. And that's—

and the other thing that's going on, who is going to be able to survive that?

It's going to be very, very tough because like here I got a credit card bill the other day and, you know, I pay off my credit card and then I look and I'm like, the interest rate is really— it's 22%. I'm like, that's insane. 22% interest on a credit card.

That's high.

And then you have on the flip side of that, these buy now pay later companies are having huge problems. They have massive amount of defaults. Car loans are also seeing a lot of defaults on car loans now, especially the higher car loans. Yeah, people took out. But the buy now pay later—

I'm not defaulted, but I'll tell you what. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm pretty much like, do I pay this or do I tell them to just come and get it? Because I'm—

what's between the car and the insurance, like my insurance was— my car insurance was double. I had to go switch car insurance companies. But the thing is, like, now this buy now pay later, they're— the only way they can fight back is like a firm, and some other ones are going to issue a credit card So they could slow the defaults down because the scammers have kind of figured it out. They go and they open a bank account, right? Or they get Chime or something like that, right? Then they go do a buy now, pay later. They make one payment. They buy a bunch of stuff. They probably make 8, 10, 15 purchases using various buy now, pay later platforms, PayPal, this one, that one, right? Then they just go close the bank account. And then these companies, they don't pull the credit, so they can't really chase after them that hard.

Pretty ignorant.

And then the other thing that's going on, which is crazy, is the government's coming down on a lot of these banks and whacking them with huge fines. Like Bank of America got a fine, and they're about to get another fine. Wells Fargo just agreed to pay $35 million fine for overcharging on advisory fees. Morgan Stanley has to pay over $6.9 million because they used WhatsApp to discuss business, and they're not supposed to do that because they didn't record the— they didn't save the conversations like you can with email. You know, the only good thing about the rates going up is the CD rates have gone up. It's the first time in years that you can actually have money in the bank and make money off of your money. So that's—

yeah, I got 2 cents last month.

I'm just saying that's the only good thing that's going on. But Bank of America is in the— been in the news for the last 2 weeks of closing up bank accounts randomly. And not only them, Capital One, which does also has bank accounts, you know, like for small business.

Yeah, I read as a more than the banks that we're even talking about. There's a— it's a— this is a thing.

It's— yeah, there's an epidemic of banks just closing up randomly. And I was reading in the article that there's no legal ramifications. Yeah, they don't know. There's no ramification where the bank has to tell you why they closed the bank account. So they don't even tell the person, they just close the account. And that's it. We've had 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 people in the last 2 weeks have to switch their bank accounts.

And there's no warning. The bank doesn't send them an email or anything. It's just like, well, they send them a notice.

But a lot of times, you know, you have—

they don't even get that notice sometimes, right?

They send it in the mail. You're not paying attention. You're out of town. We had one guy because they don't send those type of emails where the guy was on a day Do they send— yeah, they send an email. Well, we had a customer, they were on a cruise.

Oh well, they're not getting that mail.

So they didn't get the mail, they didn't get the email. The guy's calling me from the cruise ship, he's like, dude, my deposits aren't going through. I'm like, call up the credit card processor. Said, yeah, this guy's bank account, it came back closed. So we have all the guy's money and he's on a cruise ship, and he scrambled around and I got him the phone number for somebody and he was able to open up a bank account at a bank. Somebody more connected him to somebody and they opened him up a bank account and were able to get him his money. But that messes things up. Let's say you have automatic bills coming out of the bank account, like your phone bill, your electric bill and all that. Now all that's all messed up.

Your entire business is typically is functioning from that one bank account. Typically.

And I think it's wrong. I think that they should have to— I think the banks should have to disclose why they're closing the bank account.

I think it should be— there should be some sort of— there's got to be a procedure. I don't, I don't know if—

I mean, a 10-day— they send people like a 7 or 10-day letter. I think they need to provide somebody—

7 or 10-day letter for a business to restructure an entire business, and that's not long enough, right?

Exactly. That's what I'm saying. They need to give people like 30 days.

That's insane.

That happened to me one time. We had a bank And I don't want to get into the whole crazy conversation, but they may— I had emailed someone at the bank and I said, hey, why am I getting a letter that my account's closed? Accidentally on purpose, the person forwarded me an email that had the complete email chain of the, the people at the bank discussing my business. Well, before the person realized they did it, but before they realized they did it, I already hit the print button and printed out about 40 pages.

Nice.

And, uh, I had a nice little conversation with the president of the bank about the 40 pages of stuff that was written that I didn't like. I won't go into what it was, but it was not appropriate for a business conversation. But, you know, I think that, that—

oh, I remember this. Yeah, there was some anti-Semitic stuff in there.

Yeah, there was anti-Semitic. There was questions about people we did business with that they somehow saw that we did business with certain companies or certain types of companies. There was quite a few complaints. So, but whatever. But now, you know, banking, you know, and also like Now cannabis banking and banking for cannabis-related businesses is getting a little more affordable. We've come across a couple of banks that have some more affordable solutions. Instead of paying $2,000, $3,000 a month, you can get a bank account for a lot less money. And we're starting to refer people over to these— to this bank. We're going to do a little referral program.

Yeah, we got to figure out how to make some money off that.

Yeah, so we're talking to a couple of other banks, but for people who need a bank account, we can help them out with that.

Yeah, we're always down to help, but trying to make some money too.

Exactly. So if you have a bank you want to partner with us, you have an affordable program for cannabis merchants, let us know. Yeah, and we're helping cannabis merchants too. We, you know, they're A lot of these cashless ATMs are shut down. Now you need a regular ATM.

Cashless ATMs are what?

No good. Out of business. MasterCard is being bought.

It's not illegal, but it's so far in the gray that once you find— once someone complains or anything, the bank is going to shut you down. They're going to hold your money, and you're not going to have a way to make money. I don't know why businesses are so still signing up for this. I understand you're in it for the money, man, but shit, sorry, like you could make more money if you were operating legitimately.

So yeah, we're putting into— we have to locate two new dispensaries that we're getting set up right now with ATMs. Yeah, with ATMs. And then they're arranging their own cash pickup. We got them hooked up with somebody to do that at a reasonable cost. And, you know, so we're safe, secure, safe and secure. Everything's good, reliable.

Yeah, so all those good stuffs.

Smart Safe is going to be the new solution for business.

I'm interested about offering the Smart Safe. I think that's going to be really beneficial.

It's going to be a big solution because these banks not wanting to give out change orders is going to be a problem in future.

Absolutely.

Because I think businesses are going to feel the squeeze.

They're already feeling the squeeze, but they're going to feel it even harder.

Yeah, well, I don't think— then this economy, now is the time to, to tighten your belt. And I think we're going to see a lot more merchants want to do cash discount, dual pricing also, with the current economic conditions. I agree. Any way to save money You know, reduce, because there's certain things you can't reduce, you know what I mean?

No, right?

So you're— people are going to have to— you got to refigure out which expenses you can reduce and reduce those expenses in this current situation with all this bank stuff. But also watch what's going on with your bank and make sure that you have a good bank relationship.

If you guys got any interesting stories about your business banking relationship, man, feel free to drop us an email or reply in the comments. But yo, Smash the like button, subscribe to the Biz to Biz Podcast channel on YouTube for us. Like and comment, share with your people, your constituents, uh, you know, your, your— I don't know, share it to the people, man. Share it to the masses. Uh, we love you guys. Thanks for listening. What you got? That's it.

Yeah, carpe diem. And, uh, just like I said, you know, if you Leave us a story that you experience with banking. Indeed.

Peace.