The Achieve Podcast - Tedd Huff (Voalyre)

Welcome to the Achieve Podcast, the show where we highlight the leaders, creators, and entrepreneurs who are building meaningful businesses and shaping their industries. I'm your host, Stephen Bunker, and today we're excited to learn from Ted, founder and CEO with Volere. So Ted, for those getting to know you, can you give us a quick backstory of your organization?

Uh, well, the organization was, was built off of, um happenstance, actually. Uh, it started out as being a couple friends asked me for some help, and lo and behold, it turned into a full-blown business.

That's awesome. So it was just kind of like navigated through just relationships. Were you— did you have any prior experience with like fintech or banking or that industry?

Yeah, so This year it'll be 28 years in fintech and banking, so I've had a lot of experience in the space, and I think that's what led me into starting Bolir is just the broad experiences we've had and so many people saying, can you help me? And kept saying yes, and someone offered to pay me, so we were, uh, off to the races.

Yeah, I noticed when I was looking at your site, it looks like Um, like, you guys primarily work off referrals, or how do you get business that way?

Or— yeah, almost all of our business is through referrals. Uh, we honestly probably have more incoming than we can handle, and so I could probably figure out a way to do some outgoing, outbound, um, lead gen, but Right now, by getting these referrals coming in makes it a little bit easier for us through the, through the process of getting somebody started.

Yeah. So I'm kind of curious, like, what do you do and like, who do you serve as far as just like the nature of your business? I mean, obviously fintech and banking is a huge category.

Yeah, it's funny you mentioned that fintech and banking is a huge category. I was just speaking with a group of investors and they said, we invest in fintech. And I said, fantastic, what's the specialty? And they were like, fintech. So we went round and round a few times and found that their specialty was more in the consumer finance space. And so what we do at Volere is we focus on financial technology companies that are leveraging the ecosystem and the infrastructure that the banks and other financial institutions provide to them. And then we also sit on the other side of the table and we help financial institutions that are looking for fintechs or looking to launch a fintech program. We help them get everything set up and ready to go as well.

Okay. What does that look like? I'm actually super new to fintech. I'm a marketer, so it's like, okay, what exactly is fintech?

So if you're, if you're familiar with Square or Stripe or Mercury, or let's just start with those three, right? So none of those, none of those groups have a financial institution license themselves. They don't have a charter. They have to rely on another financial institution to be able to collect, store, and transmit money. And there's a ton of infrastructure that goes into that, and not everybody can do everything. So they decided that they're going to be a— either a developer-facing, for the cases of Stripe, a technology or business company being Mercury, and then you have Square that focuses at the point of purchase. Okay, so all three of these companies are in the value chain of financial services and money movement, but they focus on a very specific niche area. What they are not are experts in the rails. What they mean when I say rails, I'm talking bank-to-bank transfers, credit card acceptance, uh, digital assets. They're not, they're not normally experts in those spaces.

Yeah.

So what we do is we take to these newly fintech companies who may have decided to partner one of the— with one of these third parties and have grown out of it. So they've gotten a little bit bigger, they're looking for a little bit of autonomy, they're looking to have a direct relationship with the entities being the banks, the regulators, and/or the network providers. And we help them get that autonomy instead of being held back by a third-party company.

Okay, that makes a ton of sense. So why is there this trend towards fintech in the first place? I mean, like, is it just like a technology wave or like, is it just an iteration of existing technologies? Because obviously you had like the Visa credit cards, they came out, you had PayPal, and now you got fintech. Like, is this like an evolutionary adoption or change or like, where is this headed?

So I joke with, with my colleagues a lot in the industry is that we were in fintech before it was called fintech. It was just called banking and infrastructure. So, so now because there are these technology companies that sit on top of the banking and the infrastructure, that's really where the fintech came into play. Because I don't know about you, but I can't say that the banking apps that I use are the best user experience. I also can't say that getting money moved is really simple in a lot of cases. And that's really where fintech came in, is like, let's give the consumers, whether it be a business or an individual consumer themselves, a better experience around pay— making payments, getting payments, keeping track of their money. Like, those types of things were really missing because the bank would like, this is what you have, that's what you get. And the banks were, were trying, uh, were a little bit hamstrung because the infrastructure providers were like, this is how you have to do it. And so now over the period of time, especially when APIs— and they are, uh, so application programming interfaces, uh, I forget that a lot of times people don't think about this, but think like a machine talking to a machine. Um, or a software talking to a software. That became very prevalent in open source in the late— I would say my kids would laugh at me— late 1900s, uh, so early 2000s. Uh, it really became really popular at that point. And, and so that really started making it look like— and also remember, the iPhone came out about that same time as well. So the idea of the app economy really propelled forward, hey, let's, let's make these interfaces a lot better. And that's where fintech really was born, was like that layer on top of or instead of to give a better experience.

That's fantastic. So currently, like, what is driving growth for your organization? Like, obviously the referrals, but just like market trends, like what's driving growth for you right now?

The biggest piece that's driving growth for us right now is the fact that cross-border money movement, um, has moved into its next phase of growth. Before, you, you would have to have multiple banks involved, and it'd have to move between here, here, and here, and it'd take multiple days and all these different things. And now we're moving into a scenario of minutes, hours, sometimes seconds. And that isn't one pathway anymore. In the US, we've got what they're calling real-time payments, which is provided by one infrastructure provider. You had the Federal Reserve offering FedNow, which is a real-time payments money movement. You've got both Visa and MasterCard, as well as American Express and Discover, allowing you to push money directly to a debit card. If you've ever used Square Cash, Guess what? You've actually used that Visa rail to push money via a debit card to somebody else's bank account. But not only we have that, but we have up-and-comers that are coming into play, which are stablecoins. And last year, with the Genius Act being passed, that has become really, really big. So what's driving most of it for us is that people are trying to figure out how to use the right the right solution in the right place for the right use case for the problem they're trying to solve versus trying to solve the same— the different problems with the same solution.

And so you're just bringing a wealth of expertise from all your experience to these various organizations on how to navigate that landscape.

Well, we go a little bit further. One of the things that we pride ourselves on is that we don't just go, hey, here's the landscape, here's the ways you could do it, and here's what we suggest you do. We actually take it a step further and we say, okay, and let's do it with you. So that's why we call ourselves an advisory firm, not a consultant. We advise them all the way through the time of actually going live and it happening in real world and helping them navigate the pieces where they're like, we thought it was going to work this way and it should have worked that way, but it ended up working this third way that no one had thought about. What do we do now? And that's really where, because we've seen it from conception to execution, we're able to help them navigate through what that means for them and their organization.

That's really cool. Wow. I, uh, have a friend who's in e-commerce, and he was telling me that he sees a trend right now with AI towards, like, um, basically AI-intermediated transactions. He said he was noticing that, like, their ads aren't being as effective. And like, because like these days, a, a tools are starting to make algorithmic decisions. Do you think there's going to be a place for like a third party, like such as an AI chatbot or tool, actually making purchases on your behalf completely independently through these rails or tools?

These— this is a conversation that we're having every day right now, is how do we ensure because it's going to happen whether we, we want it to or not. It is going to happen. It's already started to happen. There's a, there's a, a percentage of transactions that has exceeded 10% of transactions last year that are agentic, and they're leveraging in a lot of cases stablecoins. And that really starts to, to drive a lot of pieces. Now what we're starting to hear from the credit card brands, meaning Visa and MasterCard, they're going all in on Agentic, but everybody's approaching it a little bit differently. Are there— some are approaching it from the, I want to validate and guarantee the identity and the fact that the end user, being Ted or Steven, have decided that that purchase can be made. There's another camp that's looking at it as Well, was the intent of Ted and Stephen to make that purchase there? Not was it there an absolute authentication and verification that the purchase was to be made, but was the intent there? And I think that's really where we're starting to see some of the fuzziness come into play. What's really good about all this though is that it's making it harder and harder for fraudsters because we're starting to build out an identity network.

Oh, really?

Within all of these.

So because identity is like— you're thinking about APIs, right? You got your API keys, you have identity. Is it like tied to your personal identity, or is it tied to just like an algorithmic identity? I know I'm not an expert, this is just my—

it's fantastic. So, so it Again, remember there were two models that we were talking about. So if you're, if you're talking about an individual making the decision purchase, then it's, then it's an individual identity. If you're talking about intent, the identity is based upon the behavior of that bot that you're using, that agent that you're using. So that agent bot will have its own identity that is tied back to Stephen or Ted to say, hey, is this, is this within the same context? Where is this coming from? Hey, by the way, the credential that we have for a purchase matches what has been already authenticated through traditional means. So there are a lot of different pieces that come into play with that. Now, are we in a perfect place yet? No. A lot of this is still in the early phases of, well, let's try that. Oops, that didn't work. Okay, well, let's try that. Oops, that didn't work. So we're still kind of in that phase, but it's progressing a lot faster. And I think that's the piece that has been the most exciting in the Agentic AI and the Agentic Payments side of the house— Agentic Commerce, I guess, is probably a better way to word it— is that the pace in which we're seeing these things change just increases over and over and over. And I thought it was interesting that you have all of the major LLMs that are trying to figure out how to do shopping inside of the systems. Yeah, so you've got Gemini trying to figure it out, and Google I think is a little bit ahead because if you remember, Google has a shopping cart and Google has a marketplace already that you can buy stuff from. And then Google Merchant Center Exactly. So they, they got a little bit of a leg ahead, but Claude and Anthropic, that whole team, they figured out a way to, to search the web a little bit better than, than some other folks. Chat and the folks over at OpenAI, if they haven't already, I have a feeling they may step back from the agentic commerce side of the house for just a little bit to figure out a better way to do it than the way they have done it. But I don't think it's going to stop there. I think you're going to see it go a little bit further down. You're going to see it fall into the shopping carts. You're going to see— I mean, you're gonna have WooCommerce. Shopify's already started to do some interesting things, but it's not full e-commerce yet, uh, agent of commerce. It's going to move faster than we thought, but at the same time, it's going to feel really slow for those who just want it today.

I think it's kind of like, uh, current workflows I use now where I'm not set using the AI to send an email for me, but I certainly don't mind it to draft the email. I wouldn't mind having an AI chatbot do a bunch of research for me and like pick the product and put it in my shopping cart. And then once it's on my shopping cart, I can double-check and make sure it's what I want and say okay.

So, so you just hit on something that we've been talking about a lot, and like I've been talking a lot with folks in the last couple weeks, um, and there's a— one of my partners on the technology side is an AI company, and so I'm looking at it and they're saying, so we figured out how to get all the data, how to parse it, and how to regurgitate it. We figured out how to automate and run processes and, and follow instructions on to take actions. Right now we still have to have a human in the middle, a human in the loop to, to decide to go forward or not go forward, for very, very good reasons, especially when we're talking about fun finances and money. But we're not far off from getting to a point where it starts to see, hey, Steven likes to get a Starbucks every Tuesday morning on his ride to the, to the office. So instead of waiting for Steven to pull out the app to order the, order the drink, what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and we're just— we see his pattern, we've already identified his pattern, so we're going to go ahead and send that order in for him, alert him that it's coming up, and give him the option to cancel it if he so wishes. So now you have a machine in the middle that is making the decision, and the human isn't saying, yes, go ahead. The human is now saying, yeah, it's, it's an opt-out scenario. And I think we're going to go to opt-out next, and then after opt-out, then it's going to be kind of like a really good executive admin. Yeah, they just, just knows. And I will get there. We're also pretty close to it.

I think there's some— a ton of power with that opt-out option because like, I mean, I do a lot of marketing and I'm, I'm mixed between like type service type of marketing versus like e-commerce. And one brand I've been working with does a lot of like equipment sales for like heavy equipment, and I can see how you could actually get a hold of your suppliers and be like, hey, we have a system that does like predictive parts ordering for maintenance, right? And then if it's like, if it's predictive ordering for maintenance, then like if you tied into their system, they could then, you know, have the order kind of get auto-placed or auto-drop, whatever. And then like they can just approve it or even just predictably have the AI just order inventory and stuff that they need. To make sure it could go even further.

So think about it this way. So I have ordered— I'm just gonna make something up. I, I have a car, um, I've had brakes done. Last time I was in there, it was, you know, 7/32 on my tires, and I draw that— they're noticing that I'm driving approximately 10,000 miles a month, which means that I should probably get a pair of tires in for Ted because he's gonna need tires. And so I'm gonna alert him that, hey, guess what, you probably need to have tires. We go— we already have them. We went ahead and ordered them. We have them in stock for you. Here's the price. Here's the price compared to everybody else in the marketplace. Would you like us to pick up your vehicle?

That's genius too.

So, so like, that's where some of the things— and, and that's not new. I mean, if you look back, I mean, Amazon has attempted this, and I will call it attempted, um, this predictive purchasing behavior. Now it's gotten them in trouble. Um, it's— I think actually it was Target they got in trouble, but where they, they identified someone was looking at certain things on the website, and so they asked them if they wanted diapers because someone had been looking at baby items and looking at bottles and formula and all this. So they predictively identified that most likely this person is going to need diapers because they've been looking for 8 months at all these different things and they're only 1 month out. So we're probably going to do that. That was Target's I believe it was Target that made that piece of it. But Amazon, for a little bit— and it's probably been about 10 years ago now— well, they were trying to curate and, and figure it out where they would look at everything you're ordering online. And maybe you ordered a, a thing of dog food and you ordered it about every 40 days. So instead of waiting for you to put the purchase in on the 40th day on the 35th day, they went ahead and shipped it to you, and it got to your door. And it got to your door, and someone would call and say, hey, I didn't order this. And Amazon was like, oh no, no worries, no worries, um, we can take it off your account unless you want to keep— if you want to keep it, you know, we'll just— don't worry about it, we'll charge your account. The other side with them also was, if you don't want it, just let us know. And now they had the feedback. It was cheaper for them to send the product to find out whether or not you wanted to keep it on a subscription basis than it was to ask you to sign up for a subscription.

Oh wow, okay.

And so, so before you had the subscription model with Amazon, they were testing to see what had the higher— highest cost of acquisition. Was it sending them the product ahead of time and hoping that they said, yeah, yeah, I meant to order that anyways, or not realizing they didn't order it and paying for it anyways? Or do they call in and say, hey, I didn't order this, um, where do I ship it back to because I don't need it? Or like, these are— they, they found that their, their, their cost of acquisition was— the CAC was, was a lot lower to do it that way. Now, it didn't last long, and they've gotten a lot more robust in their efforts. But I think something in the middle of that, I think we're going to get to. Um, yeah, and on the fintech side of it, what we're starting to see in the same area is the spending behaviors and looking at what is considered not what am I credit worthy. Yeah, but two other things. Not what my credit score is. That, that's, that's a, that's a trailing indicator. But now it's what does my cash flow look like? What does my incoming cash flow look like? What does my outgoing cash flow look like? What is their propensity to repay? Not do I see if they have— not only do I see if they have enough money, because maybe they don't, because I don't see all of their money. But if I look at their propensity to pay based on payment dates and how many times they're late or what's going on, I may feel more comfortable issuing that line of credit because their propensity to pay for my type of product and services is really high. Yeah. Versus my, my card for Guitar Center is always paid because I like music and I always want to be able to buy new equipment versus maybe, uh, an in-store clothing card might, might get a little bit paid last. And they— this is the type of area that we're starting to look at. And this is really where the agented commerce starts to come in place as well, because they're starting to understand price points and how to adjust that based upon your propensity to pay.

Oh yeah, this is—

so I'm kind of curious, a lot of this stuff is really in its infancy, but we've seen tests in the past. And, you know, you all have to do is look back to see what's going to come forward.

Oh yeah, it's like it's heading in a certain direction for sure, even though there's a lot of roadblocks in the, in the way. I mean, I'm kind of curious, like, as you're trying to grow and expand, what are the biggest bottlenecks and obstacles that keep showing up and getting in the way, as far as just like what you're seeing, especially with your business?

I think The biggest obstacle that we're seeing has been margins getting compressed. The compression and profitability in a lot of these organizations makes it really hard to invest time, money, and effort into things that they may not feel have a guaranteed ROI. And that's been, that's been the biggest piece that we're seeing happen. Um, the secondary bottleneck that kind of comes along with this is the uncertainty of the regulatory environment. Just because it's okay by the regulators today doesn't mean it's going to be okay tomorrow. Um, just because it was mentioned in a tweet doesn't mean that it actually changes anything. Just because the organization has made a statement or there's been a lawsuit that's been won doesn't mean it actually changes the approach in the enforcement side. So I know that sounds— that is very broad, but it's really the uncertainty of understanding who is actually doing and pulling strings. And that's been the secondary bottleneck that we have. It's just pure uncertainty.

So meaning you're trying to give advice and yet you don't know what advice to give because it's a moving target to some extent.

So this is where it becomes a, a risk threshold, risk tolerance discussion. It's how— and, and then the uncertainty then leads it into those organizations who are more risk adverse are going to do fewer new things because they want to stay in the same tried and true pathway. Those who are more or less risk-averse are going to be willing to make a bet somewhere else. And so there are fewer— there are fewer of the folks who are willing to make a bet on something they're not completely comfortable with. And when I say not completely, like 70, 70 to 80% confident that it's going to be a good bet is a lot harder than 90 to 100% that it's a good bet. And that's been another bottleneck that we found.

So when you think about the next stage of your business, where you guys are headed, what are you most excited about? Like, what gets you excited about going to work and solving these challenges?

Well, The thing that gets us most excited is the fact that because of all the uncertainty— so although uncertainty is a bottleneck for it, it is also the thing that drives us. Yeah, not knowing what's going to happen tomorrow, make— looking and seeing if we can— I won't call it predict, but identify options, identify paths forward. Option A, Option B, Option C, and getting our clients prepared to hit those. That's been— that's the piece that really gets us excited. That's the reason why we have folks joining the team. That's why we continue to grow and expand, is because with the uncertainty, there are needs for multiple options and different perspectives from outside the walls of these institutions.

Yeah, I think every time there's a— you can always look at it as either a good or a bad thing, but every time there's change, right? Um, for better or worse, there is opportunity in that change, and it's a revolution that's happening right now on the payments. I mean, just in technology, I mean, everything's moving so quickly.

Yeah.

And if it's moving quickly, it means there's a lot of change and opportunity. That's awesome.

There is.

So when you look at your own journey, the wins and the mistakes, like, what lessons have stood out to you? Ah.

I, I think where the biggest lessons that we've, we've learned is to hold on just a little bit longer. Okay, don't, don't, don't change at the first sign of a difficulty. Go ahead and let it play out a little bit. Now, what I'm not saying is just don't— just don't stick your head in the— I'm not saying stick your head in the sand. What I'm saying is get a little bit closer to the ground, see what— like, see what you can before standing all the way up on top of the mountain, because you're gonna see the little little critters moving around and seeing what direction they're going, it's going to give you a good idea. And then so that when you get up at an altitude, you can see a little bit further out and you understand why things are moving. That is— that has been the biggest piece that we've learned as far as what to do. One of the other pieces that we've run into that has been a huge learning has been really not being scared to communicate when we think something is headed the wrong direction. We've learned don't wait until it has become a problem to communicate a problem. So the earlier we communicate that there's a potential for a problem and things to look out for, the better we've, we've been with our clients moving forward.

Okay. So do you have any final thoughts or just advice you'd give to other entrepreneurs who are on a journey similar to yourself?

Oh, I think the final thoughts that I have is fintech is highly regulated, which means we have a lot of, a lot of guardrails put in place to keep us from doing stupid stuff. That doesn't mean that we won't do and things that don't get done stupidly, but there's fewer opportunities for that. So for those who are in industries that may not have as strict of guardrails, take the time to identify what are your guardrails for what you want to do with your business in your industry, and do your damnedest to stay in between them. Because that will help you move faster and go a lot further.

That's a really interesting perspective. So meaning like, you feel that way sometimes, like with the regulations, a lot of the bottlenecks you guys have to push up against, that like those guardrails actually kind of give you an edge?

What they do is they— the restriction creates momentum. So when— so when— and it's kind of like, have you ever gone bowling and you had the bumpers up? Have you done once or twice?

I'll admit that. Okay, for my kids.

So now my question is, was it easier to bowl a strike with the bumpers up or with the bumpers down?

For sure with the bumpers up.

So what the regulatory environment does, it gives us the bumpers that we can bounce back and forth off of so that we're always hitting a pin. Without those guardrails, we would very easily go into the gutter. And I think, and a lot of entrepreneurs don't have the benefits of these regulatory pieces, so the likelihood of them going into a gutter is, is very high. And so leaning on industry experts, leaning on mentors, leaning on others who have gotten to where you want to be, and letting them help you align and create those guardrails, put up the bumpers per se, that, that will exponentially increase your score. And I think that's So that's, that's a big piece that although I complain about it, you could talk to any one of my clients, I complain about those bumpers being up because I feel like I, I could go faster without them. We always fall back and find that they're there for a good reason, and we actually end up moving a lot faster when we have that, those restrictions put in place.

So that was very insightful. Thank you, Ted. Um, I really appreciate just taking the time to share your insights and story today, especially just how you're navigating Honestly, all this, everything, the change, the regulatory environment. This has been a fantastic episode. I feel like I've learned a lot. So to learn more about Valaire, visit valaire.com. And that wraps up today's episode of the Achieve Podcast. A big thank you to our sponsors, Achieve Fractional, which provides fractional leadership services for growing businesses, as well as Achieve Bootcamps, where entrepreneurs can learn hands-on how to build their own marketing and automation systems. If you enjoyed today's conversation, follow the show and share it. Thank you for listening to the YouTube podcast.