Video Transcription

Hello, Allen Kopelman here today with the B2B vault, the payment technology podcast. And today, we’re going to do the year-end wrap-up. So ending 2021, we’re going to approach 2022. It’s going to be an exciting year for the B2B vault. And, you know, we just wanted to go over all the topics that we covered in 2021. And then you’re going to, you know, watch for our 2022 kickoff episode. So watch out for that. Also, watch out for, you know, if you follow us on LinkedIn, look for our contests, you can win an apple watch. It’s cool. So watch for the contest and our social media posts.

So what did we talk about this year in 2021, as we launched the B2B vault? So we talked about the IRS tracking bank transactions. This is something that was included in that first infrastructure bill or whatever Congress wants to call that where first they talked about $800, and they talked about $600, and it was $10,000 a year. And hiring thousands of IRS agents to monitor all this. This is still something that’s on the radar. So I would be carefully watching the news to see exactly how the IRS is going to approach this because, um, so far in some other stuff that we’ll cover later in this podcast, the, they said they were going to wait till 20, 24, 20 25. And that hasn’t been the case. They’re, they’re moving on this stuff very quickly to collect taxes. So the $400,000 a year, and, and under who aren’t going to pay extra taxes, that’s definitely not going to be the truth. High-risk business merchant accounts. This is a subject we’re probably going to cover again. And, uh, the new year and, you know, the high risk doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re high risk. It could mean that you’re a niche business could mean you’re an emerging market, where there are not many people selling what you sell or offering the type of product or service you offer. So then it becomes very niche where only a few banks are offering to process those types of businesses and nationwide payment systems. We’ve been around since 2008.

This year was our 20th year in business, 2020 to be 21 years. We’re very experienced and find banks and processors to process consumer financing for merchants for your business. This is one of the most searched items we find in our Google. What’s that thing called Justin. Uh, we have the Google analytics and search console. So when we go look in there, consumer financing is prevalent. So buy now pay later. Other types of consumer financing. We have, we work with consumer financing companies to arrange consumer financing for goods and services. Um, doctors, lawyers, all kinds of stuff. So if you need consumer financing for your business, whether it’s a business for personal consumers or business to business, and you need, you have to, you have some business transactions where you need that, uh, arrange for financing for that. We can help. We can help your business buy. Now pay later; this thing is rolling like crazy. You know Congress is looking at it, square, bought a huge company. Other companies are getting into it; MasterCard’s looking into it. I’m sure the banks are trying to figure out how they can offer buy. Now, pay later directly. There were also some issues with collections evolving. Buy now, pay later. I mean, if you’re a consumer, I would say, you know, you need to make sure what the terms and conditions are of the buy now pay later. And if you’re a merchant, you want to make sure what you’re offering as far as buy now, pay later, you know how it works. You want to get signed up for that, with information on our website of act consumer financing and buy now pay later. So take a look at that. Cryptocurrency has done a ton of episodes on cryptocurrency. The first one was the top 10 questions about cryptocurrency. So we answered all those. And we’re going to talk a lot more about crypto. Um, then we did a news Roundup episode, and we are, you know, that’s something we try to bring you every week is what’s in the news. So there are things that could be going on in the news, things going on in Congress, laws being passed, different things like that. That’s what we cover in the news Roundup episodes. We try to focus on news items that affect payments or affect, you know, SMB small to medium size businesses. Um, then we talked about taking cryptocurrency and getting paid in us dollars.

I believe that in 2022, this will be a trendy thing with, uh, businesses, especially businesses, you sell luxury items. I take items, international transactions, real estate crypto, and your strip club or crypto in any nightclub. You’re offering bottle service at different things like that. You have high rowers, or you want to attract more high rollers to your nightclub or your adult strip club. You need to, to us about our crypto and the club program. We have designed something unbelievable. You could either have somebody go to your website. You can have them scan a QR code, and you can be accepting cryptocurrency. You can be attracting a whole new set of customers to your business that is probably not coming there now because if they don’t know you offer crypto, they’re not going to ask you if you accept crypto, the same thing in any other business. If you don’t, if you don’t tell people what type of payments you accept, they assume whatever they want. Oh, they take cash. They take credit cards. Let your customers know that you take crypto and our crypto program is easy to work with. There’s no monthly fee. There’s no yearly fee. You pay as you go. It’s a great program. And then if you want to use our, uh, crypto in the clubs’ software, or you want to build out, want us to show you how to build out a shopping cart onto your retail site, we can help you, you know, with all of that. Uh, then in our next episode, we talked about our merchant statement, analysis, interchange secrets. This is like amazing software we have, or we can help you. You know, it’s great. If you’re an emerging market merchant, you know, we can show you how the interchange affects your SIC code, and we make sure that your SIC code matches your business type and that you’re getting the best interchange. So there’s a great product. Check out our website, interchange secrets.com. Um, then we did another news Roundup. So we love talking about the news. We did another episode about why you should choose NPS bank for 20 years. So, you know, it’s a great episode. Talks have talked about a lot of things. Um, we talked about ATM kiosk, vending solutions, eight, while everybody’s talking about this cashless society, I keep hearing it all the time. Oh, we’re going cashless. Um, I can tell you that ATM transactions are a component of going back. So we’re going to try not to compare 2021 to 2020. I compared 2021 to 2019 and 2018, and ATM transactions are up. We saw with ATM transactions that every time they issued a stimulus if ATM transactions spiked by 20%, so cash is still king. Um, I believe we’re going to see a big growth in the kiosk self-service kiosk, especially, you know, that more businesses will need to develop the self-service type of options in your business. I think businesses that 20, 20, 22, I think businesses need to get creative, and they need to pivot. One of the things is all kinds of self-service options, which I’m going to get into, and another podcast coming up, but you’re going to, people need to come up with more self-service type things.

Like someone comes to your restaurant and wants to place an order to pick up. Do you want them standing there waiting for an employee, or do you want to put out a kiosk? You know, I think kiosks are going to become more popular. You can link your kiosk into your point of sale system. There are all kinds of stuff you can do with kiosks. So, you know, we work with the hardware companies that make the kiosks then, which can link up to the point of sale. And then someone can walk up to the kiosk, place an order, boom, and then the kitchen can make it and bring it out to the customer. You know, everybody, there’s a labor shortage. So, and I believe that you know, we have kiosks, you go to the airport, nobody ever thought kiosk would replace people at the airport in a million years. Kiosks are all over the place. Now it’s going to hit more businesses. And I believe that businesses in 2022, if you don’t figure out like different things like, oh, what you need to offer in your business. If you’re a retail, a retailer, you need to have a website. You need to have e-commerce on that website. You need to offer in-store pickup, curbside pickup, local delivery, possibly, and then shipping. And the same thing in a restaurant needs to get creative. You need to have online ordering local delivery, possibly curbside pickup, and restaurant pickup. You have to figure out how to provide many services to your clientele. Vending solutions. I believe vending solutions will also grow in 2022 because businesses are going to figure out, like, oh, what can we, what kind of vending machine? You know, there are vending machines that can hold all kinds of stuff, including food; they’re selling cannabis and champagne. So you can put just about anything in a vending machine. Okay. Just about anything food, you know, so, uh, you know, there’s us went into a restaurant recently and they set up in the front of the restaurant, like a refrigerator, and they’d put in prepackaged salads all kinds of stuff. And I think that restaurants have to look, think outside of the box and retailers also with all these things. I think it’s also going to change commercial real estate and that businesses will not necessarily want to be in the shopping center anymore. They’re going to want to be in a free-standing building.

So it’s going to be easier for curbside pickup. I’ll tell you someone who did a great job with that was all with garden. Boom. Soon as the pandemic hit, they cranked up their online ordering. They put signs outside with space numbers. They made sure they liked when your food was ready, sent you a text to pull into this space, and did an awesome job, and they’re all free-standing buildings. So they were re they boom, they pivoted quick. Poof. And I think businesses need to think about that for 2022. How to pivot a great book. I always go back to who moved the cheese. I did an episode in my Thanksgiving episode; I talked about that book and, you know, these types of things will help people grow this year, uh, payment processing for charities. I think charities need to look at how they collect payments. They collect payments that what type of payment portal they use, uh, if they’re passing the fee on to their, uh, donors, I think that’s going to be very popular, uh, option, uh, accepting cryptocurrency and for charities is also going to be big, uh, emerging market payment solutions. Um, I think that there’s a lot of emerging markets out there and those markets that you could come to us, if you’re in emerging market business, emerging markets covers everything from childcare, uh, education, telecommunications, utilities, companies, recurring payments, subscription companies, insurance companies. The list goes on and on. You can go to NPS bank.com, go to the industries, go to emerging markets, and you can see all about what emerging markets are. Still, there are also new emerging markets because there are new businesses that nobody’s ever done before. You know, and all of a sudden, that’s an emerging market business. Also, chargeback rescue, you know, one thing that’s going on right now, which I’m not too thrilled about, which I’m going to talk about in another upcoming podcast, is the number of chargebacks coming into retailers and restaurants and bars right now. I mean, the EMV chip was supposed to do away with all this, um, all these chargebacks. And now it seems like there’s a lot of chargebacks.

I think the card issuers, I’m not a fan of card issuers. So card issuers, I’m not a big fan of them, especially like they see somebody went into a business, they use their EMV chip card. That’s supposed to be the end. All that was the whole reason for upgrading the EMV. In 2015, this was supposed to be the end; all will stop chargebacks. But then chargebacks are at an all-time high and card-present businesses, and this needs to end, and we help our clients. They get a chargeback. We help them because I’ve seen the stupidest, uh, reasons for chargebacks. There’s an episode. I suggest listening to a couple of episodes where I talked about chargebacks and fraud and listening to that. And if we can help you contact us ACH, I think an ACH for our company, we grew a R a C H um, processing by 300% in 2021. And we look for that to repeat in 2022, for more companies to offer ACH, the check is in the mail, that’s old. And if you are still waiting for checks in the mail, you got to get your customers to pay you by ACH. And that way you could get paid faster, it’s all the time value of money, time, the value of money. And we can show you how ACH can help. You can lower you; we can show you how to put ACH and credit card processing together and lower your overall costs of accepting electronic payments, especially B2B. Any business can do it, but B2B or your invoicing. You know this is a great way to take your overall costs and lower that down and get paid faster because 30 days always turn into 60 days, 60 days turns into 90 days, et cetera. Uh, then we did another news Roundup that business to business payment processing. We talked about time, the value of money and ACH and credit card processing, and how businesses can also use cash discounting our surcharging to lever it. You can leverage those in a beat in your B2B and collection of invoices by pushing people from credit cards over to ACH and overall lowering your costs to accept payments. So we go over that a few times. Uh, you know, I think that businesses expect other businesses to pay to be more friendly, with more friendly payment types and have a payment portal. So they don’t have only to pay between nine and five. They can pay their bill, you know, at seven o’clock at night or after dinner or Saturday morning, you know, they can go on your website, boom, pay an invoice.

I think businesses need to look at this, look at this because this is a solution that you need in your business. And I would tell you that I talked to businesses all the time, and they’re just not with that. And I don’t know what’s stopping them, but I think that you know, in the future, you’re going to lose business. If you’re not offering a payment portal, e-commerce solutions for merchant e-commerce are huge. In 2020, it will be bigger 2021, and it will continue to grow. And also, we’re going to talk in another podcast. Uh, the very first one of 20 22, 1 of the first ones we’re going to talk about, we’re going to be covering a lot of stuff about e-commerce and trends in e-commerce card, not present transactions, this, this, you know, this is a continues to grow. We specialize in the card, present noncard, present transactions, you know, for all types of business, all types of businesses, you know, taking orders over the phone, the internet, all of that comes to noncard present. So w the next week covered in episode 21, merchant services for developers, talked about our developer program for developers, software companies, ISV. We’re going to be taught, talking about it in the future, about our new program, that where we can show you how you can pretty much take your software company from start to getting your first customer processing credit cards. Within 30 days, this is a new program we will be offering in 2022. And we did another news Roundup. And then we went into a whole crypto series. We talked about crypto part one, part two, the autumn of motive, him, and, uh, Marine industries. You know, we’ve talked about charities and nonprofits, not talking about charities and nonprofits, that it also includes schools. I mean, listen, wouldn’t it be great. Someone wants to put their kid in a private school, and you took cryptocurrency for that. You know, so the charity was About the, uh, high-end High-end luxury, luxury businesses, and high dollar transactions is literally. This is the big, big market for crypto, including real estate. Okay. Clue polluting real estate by cryptocurrency, I think, will show a lot of growth in the large ticket. Um, big-ticket things are what it’s going to do. Do you want to see a lot of growth in 2022? Oh, then I did my Thanksgiving reflections, talked about my favorite books. It was a lot of fun to do episode 27. I talked about holiday scams. Uh, one thing I was amazed about this year, I did get a lot of phone calls about people trying to get scammed, you know, and usually, the phone call goes like this, oh, you’re preventing me from making a sale. I said, oh, I’m preventing you from losing money. And I would say with my 20 years of experience in the business, if I think you’re going to lose money, that sounds like a scam. It probably is scammed because I’ve not been wrong that many times, but, you know, holiday scams, this, this started bothering me. After all, it spiked this year. And I think we’re going to see a lot more scams. I got scammed. You got scammed, Justin got scammed, Bought a Nintendo switch online. Yeah. I never got a tracking number and never got a receipt. I’m waiting to hear back from The bank. Yeah. Merchants need to be cared for. Uh, consumers need to be careful when shopping on websites, make sure the website’s legitimate, and also merchants need to be careful and watch out for where these items are being shipped. Is the person shipping to the billing address shipping to another address? Is it going to a mailbox store? A lot of the bigger companies run the software. And if they see like an address is going to like a mailbox door or some office suite type company that will not ship the product, unless it looks legit or at least they’ll call the person and try to fish it out.

Then we talked about cryptocurrency at nightclubs and adult clubs. Again, we get more news roundups. You know, there was a lot of crazy stuff in the news this year; we did a chargeback rescue part to crypto and international payments. You know, international payments have been like a real pain in the butt for the last 20 years. But now, with this crypto product we have, I think this is a home run. If you’re doing business internationally, this is a home run, a home run because in the U S people look at crypto like the stock market, but outside of the US, people don’t look at crypto like the stock market. They look at it as a safer place to put their money rather than in the bank. And they know that it’s perfect to use for international payments because they do more. When someone’s in another country, they need something that they usually buy from another country. So nobody wants to deal with currency exchange, wires, and all that. There can be money loss than, uh, you know, when you send them money from, you know, sending some Mexican pesos to the US sometimes there can be errors in the, uh, currency exchange. So crypto payments are an excellent solution and have low costs. You know, it could be free too cause it’s a meager fee, and that can be passed onto the customer if needed, but we may, it’s cheaper than doing a wire and a wire and a currency exchange e-commerce and your AVS settings, this goes back to, you know, fraud and protecting your business. We went over that, uh, virtual currency and the IRS, you know, the IRS promise, like when we talked about the very first episode was that $600 thing. And that, you know, and how is the IRS going to do, you know, enforce that? And then the virtual currency, you know, the IRS, all of a sudden, they came out in the infrastructure bill, and they said, oh, cryptocurrency. And, uh, was going to be looked at, and we were going to, they would do something about it by 2024. Well, that turned out to be a big fat, uh, white lie because they put it on the 10 40 this year. So surprise. They said they were going to wait, but they didn’t. So let’s not, you know, they’re going to tax everybody. They even renamed cryptocurrency to virtual currency. And that leads to a lot of, um, interpretation to what exactly is a virtual currency, virtual currency, going to cover, uh, gift cards, uh, gift certificates, uh, cryptocurrency, obviously stable coins. Is that going to be included? I mean, it’s going to be hard to tell what the government is going to do, but they’re going to monitor it. And it’s on the 10 40 for this year’s cannabis and payment process. And we talked about the complexities of this, and is this going to be the year 2022? When the house passes the safe banking act, the Senate goes to the president’s desk, CBD payment processing.

This is one we’re going to hear more about, but it’s a growing industry, just like the cannabis growing, growing industry. So that’s the wrap-up for the 2021 B2B vault payment technology podcast. We hope you guys come back in 2022 and listen to more podcasts from us. We’re on all the popular networks. We just got added to Amazon music the other day, which I was excited that, that a whole approval process for that. And we got we’re on a bunch of other networks too. So look for wherever you listen to your music. We’re probably there; search B2B vault, and you’ll find the beat B2B fall podcasts. Remember, look for the contest win an apple watch the contest ends at the end of January, we’ll pick a winner and, uh, everybody happy new year, and we’ll see everybody soon and watch after more episodes from B2B vol. Thank you very much. Carpe diem seize the day, looking forward to 2020 to have a great day.