B (46:39)
Sure. So look, I'm trying to, you know, as I, you know, you practice your pitch, etc. You try and come up with ways to describe it. I'm thinking at the moment, and this might not work for someone trying, it is think of a car, right? In the 1930s, if you bought a car, you really needed to know how a car worked. Right. You needed to understand how gears worked, how to check your fuel with a dipper rod, possibly how to wind it up, all that kind of stuff. So there was a lot you needed to know, engineering wise, about a car. And as cars have moved on, more technology has been laid on top of it. To simplify all that to a point where we are now, where I won't name them, I have members of my family who wouldn't know how to change a tire even if they got a flat, or what to do if they ran out of fuel. And we're at the stage now where even a car mechanic just has to plug in a device and it will tell them what's wrong with the car. So just layers and layers of technology added onto it. It's a much more technical, complex thing. A car now. But these layers of technology have just simplified things to a point where you don't even need a gear stick. You press a button that says go and a button says stop, and then off you go. And it's the same with payments. So payments early on, obviously, cash moving around, horses, everything else. Along came cards to simplify that process, and then merchants needed to accept these cards. So you had the point of sale devices. Early days at cybersource, we had point of sale devices. That's how we were processing online transactions. We were literally printing things out and typing them into machines. Like layers of simplicity. So really early on, a layer of simplicity that allowed a merchant to work directly with a visa or MasterCard through that back end. And then you got processes added on top of that. They allowed that to be extended to other people, including banks, etc. And then you got payment processes like the stripes, the braintrees, the cyber sources of the world that got plugged on top of that to make it easier for merchants. And then you got the wallets and things like PayPal, etc. That make it easier for the consumer. But all these layers get piled on top of it and things get simple and then they get more complex and to a point where they need to get simple again, and then it gets more complex. So that's generally how payments and technology really works. Where we are at the moment in the world is, look, payments got super complicated recently. You look at Europe, for example. PayPal and wallets do more transactions than Visa and MasterCard today. Then underneath that, you've still got pay by invoice, you've got all these other ways of paying, plus you're getting these alternative payment types. So that layer of what you've got, simply from a European perspective, is a lot more complicated. And you've now got open bank income coming, which is going to change, right? Free way to move money instantly. That's going to change. Go to Asia and it gets even more complicated. You get to countries like, you know, the big example is China, where people just don't use cards. But it's more complicated to go to Indonesia. People are using grab, they're using other things. You go to Malaysia, they have something different. So as a merchant or as a person running a business, taking payments is really, really hard. Now, like, you could just take credit cards, but in that case, you're only reaching 40% of your audience. And in some countries you're reaching even less. So you need to start adding these other payment types. You need to start basically making your systems more complex. Now, if every company is a payment company, which is what Zach from Plaid said relatively recently, why the hell are people building this all themselves still? Why is there not a platform, why is there not a software that allows a merchant to control where its payments going to what payment types they get, how that payment flows, etc. And people would argue about, well, you could just, you know, connect to Braintree or connect to Stripe and yes, those guys will give you some of it, but that takes that control away from you and it also means you run the logic. So what we've built is what's called a payment orchestration platform, which kind of the words there help you. It helps you manage where your payments go and how you connect to those payments. We've got a universal, nice, open API that sits on the front. You connect to that and then we built a no code platform in the middle for anyone who's not a developer or you can be a developer, you go in and you essentially build your payment flow and you build it in a visual no code way. If you want to add Apple Pay or if you want to add WePay or your GrabPay or whatever, it's a case of click drag, drop. Rather than go actually a developer and say, look, we need to add this, he says, six months, roadmap, half a million dollars and you're like, screw it, it's basically going to allow you to do that. The other thing it allows you to do is add as many payment companies as you want to it. So say you're working with payment company A, that's charging you 3% of transaction. And over here is payment company B that wants your business, but it's going to charge you 2.5%, right? Most people don't realize payment is a massive tax in your business, right? There's not many other parts of your business that every time someone buys from you, they're taking 3% cut, right? It's just saving half a percent on something is huge. But the problem at the moment is one, you're held hostage by technology. So if you're using payment process A, you're probably integrated to their APIs using their technology. Long comes payment processor B, that's going to save you X. You need to do the math. It's going to save me X, but I'm going to need to spend Y in order to move from A to B. And what happens if B doesn't work as well as A, we can just, you can just switch on with us and then you can say, put 20% through B, 80% through A, and if it gets good, move it. So it gives you as a company total flexibility to choose what you want to do when without being held hostage by the technologies. And we built this thing in the cloud, actually. We built it in what's called kubernetes. It's a technology that means we can spin it up anywhere. So we can spin you up a cluster in the cloud, we can spin your cluster in your own data center, on the edge, on your cell phone. We can spin up anywhere. And so this whole idea of simplifying the complexity of payment and what's happening with payment today, we believe is the next stage of payments. We think our views are being echoed by investors and other people around the world is like, this is the next stage. This is software as a service for payments. Payments are getting commoditized. Like the price of payments is going to make payment companies less money. So it's going to be a good, better time for retailers to get good deals and to have a flexible platform to allow you to get good deals. Take the payment types that your customers want you to take. Plus do other fun stuff that you can't do with traditional payments, like things like escrow, micropayment, subscriptions. They're all way more complicated than they should be.
