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Have you ever stopped to think about the data behind a debit or credit card transaction? I have not given it much thought but there is a potential treasure trove of information that, for the most part, is still not being used effectively.
My next guest on the Fintech One on One podcast is Mitch Jacobs, the CEO and founder of Plink. You may recognize Mitch’s name as he was the founder, CEO and Chairman of OnDeck for its first seven years. Back to Plink. It may be the most important fintech company that you have never heard of. The work they are doing around transaction personalization is truly groundbreaking.
In this podcast you will learn:
- Mitch’s first entrepreneurial endeavor while in college.
- The other companies he has started.
- The idea that led to the founding of Plink.
- Why card transaction data is not used effectively today.
- How Plink has solved this problem.
- Why they focused on community banks and credit unions.
- How they enrich the raw card spending data.
- An example of how a Florida credit union is using Plink’s data.
- How they are able to determine the relationships between cardholders and local businesses.
- Why the card data problem has its roots in copper wires in the 1980s.
- Why large card issuing banks have not solved this problem yet.
- The scale that Plink is already at today as far as number of merchants.
- The definition of a Plink.
- The opportunity for financial institutions to shape how cardholders are using their cards.
- What can happen you open up transaction personalization.
- The endgame for Plink.
Read a transcription of our conversation below.
Peter Renton 00:01
Welcome to the Fintech One-on-One podcast. This is Peter Renton, Chairman and co-founder of Fintech Nexus. I’ve been doing this show since 2013, which makes this the longest running one-on-one interview show in all of fintech. Thank you so much for joining me on this journey.
Peter Renton 00:27
Before we get started, I want to remind you about our comprehensive news service. Fintech Nexus News not only covers the biggest fintech news stories, our daily newsletter delivers the most important fintech stories into your inbox every morning, with special commentary on the top story of the day. Stay on top of fintech news by subscribing at news dot fintech nexus.com/subscribe.
Peter Renton 00:52
Today on the show, I’m delighted to welcome Mitch Jacobs, he is the CEO and founder of Plink. Now, you might not have heard much about Plink, but I think you soon will be. But Mitch Jacobs is someone who’s been around the fintech space for a long time. I first met him as, when he was a founder of OnDeck. And he has quite the entrepreneurial history, which we do get into on this interview. But most importantly, his new company Plink, or it’s not even that new anymore, it’s been, he’s doing it for many years. It’s tackling a very difficult problem. And that is taking the transaction data, taking card transaction data and personalizing that data. Now we get into exactly what that means in a lot of depth, we get into how the technology works, what this means for card issuers, and how they can take advantage of this personalization. This is a difficult problem that has not been solved by any of the major banks and Plink has solved this problem. And I think they have a very bright future ahead of them. It was a fascinating discussion. Hope you enjoy the show.
Peter Renton 02:11
Welcome to the podcast, Mitch.
Mitch Jacobs 02:13
Good to be here. Good to see you, Peter.
Peter Renton 02:15
Good to see you, I know it’s been a while. Our paths have crossed a few times over the years, I think I first met you as a result of your OnDeck experience. But I want to start this a little bit differently, want to go way back to your time in college because I happen to know a fraternity brother of yours very well. Bo Brustkern is my business partner here, fraternity brother of yours. So I kind of got a little bit of inside scoop on what your very early days in entrepreneurship was like, so maybe you can take us back to the Green Card at Dartmouth and what you were trying to do there.
Mitch Jacobs 02:50
As the world turns, my 18 year old daughter is going to Dartmouth, so. We learned, so it’s a good time to go back there. You know, I started a career in entrepreneurship, and in you know, what we would have called then just payments, not fintech, as organically as it gets. I wanted to eat off campus and all my, you know, my friends could eat off campus, I didn’t have as much money on hand as they did, and decided that you know, it was the, it was the mid 90s, the student ID card had become a form of payment on campus. But the businesses outside the campus weren’t connected to the ID card. And so I built what today we would call a Host Based Stored Value platform. But at that time, I would call it just a way to eat off campus. So I built a whole payment processing infrastructure and rolled that out to 300 campuses, and then ended up selling that right at the peak of the dot-com period.
Peter Renton 03:47
That’s great. Because I mean, there wasn’t prepaid cards back then was there? Did you have to do this manually?
Mitch Jacobs 03:53
That’s a great question. No, there weren’t I mean, you know, so if we kind of go back to the sort of like lineage of, of MasterCard and Visa, which by the way, is very relevant, probably to a lot of what we’ll talk about today, you have that starting point in 19, you know, sort of 68 when the networks come together, and then in the late 80s, starts to become electronic. And so when you get into the mid 90s, you know you’ve got those little gray boxes people might remember the ZON Jr-XLs, and people going from the crash printers to the you know, swiping their cards. So when I started it, I actually started it with a three part receipt and basically just had the business owner keep a copy, you know the student got a copy, and we collected a copy. So I literally would walk around town twice a week and you know, walk my,
Peter Renton 04:45
It’d be pieces of paper.
Mitch Jacobs 04:46
And pick up the piece of paper and then enter them into like a FileMaker Pro based system. But, but I’d use the student ID book to mail something home to all the parents, and my junior summer just basically the parents sent in like an over a million dollars.
Peter Renton 05:02
Wow.
Mitch Jacobs 05:03
First, you know, you think about like a crypto project. I mean, I had nothing and so anyway, so but the goal in my mind was to build an automated network and it took about a year and a half to do that.
Peter Renton 05:15
Right. Right, gotcha. Okay, so maybe you could take us through sort of the steps of your career, obviously, you’re famously the founder of OnDeck. But maybe take us through the some of the different businesses that you’ve started and how you’ve kind of, how your career has evolved.
Peter Renton 05:29
And so, and then after OnDeck is Plink. Tell us a little bit about the, what did you see there? What was sort of the founding story of Plink?
Mitch Jacobs 05:29
Yeah, so I mean, it’s been sort of four businesses over almost 30 years. The first one, we just talked about, the Green Card, the second one was a company called Tranvia. And the idea there was I was trying to take what I had learned by operating these closed loop networks, and I wanted to bring that into the open network environment. So do some of the really cool things that we could do in a closed network, on the MasterCard, Visa network, and so launched one of the first venture backed payment processors. And we were an acquiring and issuing processor. So we did all of the merchant processing, sending transactions actually to MasterCard and Visa. And we also did the issuing processor, we built this in a abandoned motel in Rock Island, Illinois, and had like, tractor trailer size generators, and T1 lines, and all sorts of infrastructure that, you know, was pretty crazy to have at that time. And we were competing with First Data, and Tsys, and all the other major processors to provide acquiring and issuing. And after that I launched on back I’d sold that company in 2005. And just felt like I wanted to switch from using payments, in developing the infrastructure of payments to building an application on top of the payment network, and saw that, you know, payment rails and payment data would be a much faster and cheaper way to underwrite and service small business loans. And so that led to OnDeck.
Mitch Jacobs 07:15
You know, after OnDeck kept a, you know, sort of took a break for a couple of years. And then the thing that I saw, I think what kind of got me going on Plink was the emergence of open banking, which I saw as 180 degree, like regulatory turn. And the idea that, you know, after all these years of fighting to get access to data, and getting FIs to sponsor, you know, processing or sponsor lending, suddenly, there’s this, like, just total change in the ecosystem, where now, you know, the FIs would have to sort of lean forward and really get in the game. And I thought that was, you know, a really momentous opportunity. The other thing was AI. And you know, at the time, it was I think, a lot earlier than where we are now. But it just felt like the problems that I had experienced from an actual technology standpoint, could be addressed by some of the platform shifts that were going on with microservices, with AI, and specifically there are two things I wanted to address. One was the separation between the card holder and the merchant side of the industry. You know, we all like think that, that fintech is this environment, where there’s this incredible foundation, in you know, the transactions that take place that they are the story of commerce that’s unfolding every day with each transaction. But that is true, but none of that is captured in the existing system, it does not exist. A transaction occurs, and it’s a totally stateless system. The second thing is that it’s hard, the whole system is hard coded to do one thing, prove and settle transactions, that’s it. And so sort of saw that, you know, there was a lot of value that was being captured by some of the really big players, by providing a lot of value added services that make up for the fact that the underlying foundational platform, the transaction network, has these limitations. And so that was what I kind of wanted to get in gear to fix. Frankly, I wasn’t really entirely sure how we were going to fix that, or what exactly, you know, the business model would become, but it was very clear that that was a big problem. And that was sort of like the moment in time to go and start working on it. So that was the beginning of Plink.
Peter Renton 09:40
Okay, so then what is the core proposition? Who are you serving here?
Mitch Jacobs 09:44
Well, let me kind of tell you how, like what Plink became, sort of what we are today. So, Plink is now a transaction personalization layer that sits in between the existing payment network and digital channels. So you have the existing payment network that’s processing transactions all day long, and then it’s, we’re getting a raw copy of the transaction as it’s occurring. And then we unify the merchant and the cardholder. So we identify the cardholder that’s in every transaction, and then we add a bunch of intelligence to the transaction. And then we execute an action, so that the financial institution is providing more purchasing power to the consumer, and providing more profit to the business. And so for the financial institution, it’s all about driving more usage and more engagement. That’s their goal and struggle today. And they’re doing that by providing greater purchasing power to the consumer, and greater profits to the merchant. And so we’re the layer in between that enables the existing payment network to now provide that on a completely automated basis, with no human involvement.
Peter Renton 11:00
Okay, so what’s the business model? Are you charging the merchant, are you charging the banks? I’m sure you are not charging the consumer, right?
Mitch Jacobs 11:08
Right. No, so we charge the banks. And then also, we’re building a network from the bank, you know, where the card, the bank’s card holders are spending money, and we monetize that network. And as we monetize that network, we share that revenue back with the bank, which can result in them recouping all of the money that they’re spending on the program. So kind of becomes a, you know, a far more effective growth strategy than, for them on their card usage and their engagement than the money they’re spending today on value added services that aren’t automated. And it also has the benefit of it delivers revenue back to them. So that they, you know, they ultimately can have a growth platform that pays for itself.
Peter Renton 11:59
Ok. So can you give me an example of how this is working? Maybe talk us through something that a bank that is live today working with merchants, I mean how, I’d love to kind of get an example to demonstrate how it works.
Mitch Jacobs 12:13
One of the challenges that we faced in a lot of challenges was finding kind of the right edge of the wedge, you know, where and what, through some iterations, what we discovered was, there was a very high unmet need on the part of community banks and credit unions to create a connection to their local community more than just declaring, you know, that they support their community. I think, Peter, like, if you go back 30 or 40 years ago, as a community financial institution, they could actually do things very differently in terms of lending and other services than, say, a Chase could, right. But today, there’s so much regulation, and they’re so, and you know, the whole toolkit that they’re using, really prevents them from doing those kinds of things. And so they find themselves saying there’s a commitment to the community, but it’s harder to deliver on. And particularly with, you know, constant assault by big banks, you know, entering their, you know, their local market. And then obviously, fintechs eating away at the local market, we really found a high, you know, high demand for community banks that wanted to connect with businesses in their community. And what I realized was that provided us a sort of way to kind of like shrink from the ocean to the pond, and do the work that we needed, the technical work that we needed to do, and do it in one community at a time. And so that became our sort of, you know, our, became our entry point. And so, today, what happens is, a digital banking platform will adopt Plink and embed Plink in their platform. So for example, NCR, which is number three digital banking platform in the US, they embed Plink in their platform. And then now Plink is available to all of their financial institutions. And then what Plink does is basically work from the raw spending data, we identify all of the merchants that the financial institution spends with, and that then becomes a new network. And what we did, one of the early product features was adding a category code for local. So right now, if you’re kind of watching the game on Sunday, and you see that there’s like three times cashback on grocery or three times cashback on restaurants, that is just being driven by the merchant category code. And as the transaction is processed, it’s just, there’s some booster of money that’s being applied by the FI to that transaction. And so what we do is we add in a designation of a local business. And so take like a credit union, one of our credit unions in Central Florida, you know, they have, I think, like 16 or 17 branches, their card holders are spending money at, you know, over 200,000 locations, just around Orlando. And so, you know, trying to determine, there’s no, until Plink, there’s no mechanism to say which of those transactions is taking place at a national chain, or franchise location, and which is taking place in an independent local business. And so we sort through the data, identify which are the local businesses, and then maintain that merchant category code for local. So that’s sort of an example of how we get from all of this data that the FI has, to you know, products that can really impact the way they’re doing business without them having to change all of their infrastructure, with data intellegence.
Peter Renton 15:59
Right, the credit union in Florida has all these people that are using their branded credit card, and then you get the insight into all the different merchants where they’re spending. That’s how it works, right?
Mitch Jacobs 16:11
Yeah. And if you’re, you know, if you’re familiar with like the way interchange is working, at least for the foreseeable future, you know, we focused on Durbin exempt institutions and debit cards, because that was a really good, you know, there’s a good source of revenue there. And this need to connect with their community, and a base of data that we could shrink from. I mean, it’s really remarkable. Just using that credit union, again as example, we’re looking at one in Texas that actually, this caught our attention, because it was a credit union in Texas that has 8000 debit card holders. And every single month, those 8000 debit card holders spend in every major city in the world. And so you know, and if you’re familiar with sort of how the transactions look in their raw form, it is very hard to even tell which country they’re in. And so for that credit union that wants to like, do something very specific in West Texas, they got a big problem on their hands to be able to get from their entire raw transaction set sitting in their core system, to being able to focus in on specific areas. And so we built the technology to solve that problem.
Peter Renton 17:32
Are other small businesses, like actively taking advantage this? I’m just thinking, now that they’re sort of deemed as local and they’ve got all these local cardholders coming into their store, I could imagine that, from their perspective, it would behoove them to sort of take advantage of that, right?
Mitch Jacobs 17:50
Yeah. So once we have the FI on board, we’ve taken their data and identified all of the merchants, one of the outputs of that is now we can say to the FI, who do you want to refer and nominate from this list? One of the other technologies we built was a way to get from raw transaction data to discrete commercial districts. Because if you think about it, I’m sure you’re familiar with having looked at census blocks, census blocks are rectangles. And then if you look at kind of like the classic, like Facebook localization, it’s a radial disc. And if you think about your own purchasing, and just your community, it just doesn’t look like that. But what we’re able to tell from from transaction data is where all the commercial districts are, and which groupings of merchants are related to a grouping of cardholders. And so we’re able to, from the data, determine where the commercial districts are. And so we’re able to present to the financial institution within a very short period of time after them making a data connection, like literally within a day or two, they suddenly have an entirely new view of the relationships between their card holders and businesses in the community. And you know they’re all very eager to establish these commercial relationships as another, you know, another growth objective. And so they provide us with lists of the merchants that they want to see on their platform. And then we’ll provide, got a little bit of a background in how to get out there and recruit merchants and so, we will go and provide get merchant funded offers or other types of hybrid relationships where the merchant now has access to that financial institutions digital channels, and is able to personalize price to each of their card holders. So it creates that closed network environment that was the goal from the outset.
Peter Renton 19:53
So the consumer then, are they now receiving offers from these merchants? Or? I mean, what do they see here?
Mitch Jacobs 20:02
Yeah, so it’s just at any one of you know, now there’s 305 credit unions and community banks where when you open your digital banking, and you are looking at those tiles of offers that we’ve all become so familiar with that often have absolutely nothing to do with what we actually spend money on. And you know, if you’re familiar with like Chase, or Wells Fargo, or Bank of America, and you know they present you with these reward screens, or different offers throughout their user interface, and you’d think of all the parties that are, you know, tracking your behavior and trying to, you know, personalize your experience, the one party that would actually know where you spend money would be your issuing bank. But they don’t because all they have is this display data, they just, they don’t have any infrastructure, zero infrastructure on the merchant side. So all they do is display the card transaction. And that’s why no matter how much time goes on here, you’re not going to see a better, more personalized anything that’s based on your spending data.
Peter Renton 21:16
That is just insane in 2024 that we don’t, I mean, the data is there, you’ve demonstrated that the data is there. But that sounds like it’s a hard problem to solve.
Mitch Jacobs 21:27
Yeah, I mean, we spent two and a half years, just dealing with the fact that amongst these 300 plus institutions, there’s not a single one of them that has the same data form. Because remember at the origins of all this, Peter, there was one goal, get rid of cash and checks. That’s it, right. And it’s also 1980s. So it was get rid of transact, you know, get rid of cash and checks, do it using new technology. But all those transactions were running over copper wires. So you had sort of two problems at work. One was, there was no one worrying about standardizing the data because we will want to use this data for all sorts of value added services. No one was thinking about that. And they were particularly not thinking about because they had to figure out how to send a transaction over copper wires. So the goal was keep the transaction as small as possible. And that’s the reason why when you look at your statement, you’re like, what’s that?
Peter Renton 22:23
It’s still just a whole bunch of random letters and numbers most of the time.
Mitch Jacobs 22:26
Right, and so all of that truncating, all of those other things are all explained by how do we get a transaction over a copper wire?
Peter Renton 22:33
And it was probably written in COBOL, I imagine.
Mitch Jacobs 22:36
100% COBOL. Still, in many cases, still is.
Peter Renton 22:39
So I downloaded your app, and I tried to add one of the you know, one of the top five credit card issuers cards into your app, and it didn’t like it. And I was like, oh, you can’t download your Chase Sapphire Reserve card and put it into Plink, right? It’s just not part of the network.
Mitch Jacobs 22:56
I’ve sort of been through the process now a few times with building these companies. And the, you know, the iterative process here has been really hard. I mean, we when we first started, we thought the right answer was go to merchants, because open banking. And so we don’t need to engage the financial institution, we’re just like everyone else, you know, doped up on our ZIRP money, we’re like, let’s go baby. Let’s just go straight to, you know, straight to the merchants. And you know, we’re gonna use Plaid, or we’re gonna use, you know, we did it all, we did MasterCard, Visa, American Express card link services, we did open banking, I was like, so excited that open banking existed that, you know, we integrated all of that. And the idea was, we’ll just go to the merchants and the merchants will enroll their card holders, and then that data will fuel this personalization. And as we start to get in the data, we’ll be able to fix all of the data problems that you and I were just talking about a few minutes ago. And what we found, I mean, we did a good job, like we built a great stack to provide total personalization to the smallest of businesses or the largest. And the challenge was, we just weren’t getting the data to like fuel that stack. And when the pandemic hit, we just said, we’re gonna, like let’s take advan, let’s, highly destructive to the progress we had made, but it was also an opportunity to look at it and say, this is not working, this idea of having the businesses enroll the consumers, we’ve got to go to where the scale of data and customers already is. I think we, you know I think today folks now recognize that like, oh, there’s this customer acquisition thing. And building apps outside of financial institution is a very, very hard thing to do not because the technology, if you’re building a fairly narrow app, I wouldn’t include us in that category, but if you’re building a fairly narrow app, it’s not that hard to do. The hard part is acquisition. And so, you know we realized, you know in, by 2020, the light bulb had gone on for us that we need to go where the scale of data and customers already is. And that meant going to the banks. So pivoted, so that app you downloaded someday we’ll get back to that. But right now we’re focused on powering the digital banking and cardholder experience of the financial institutions.
Peter Renton 25:26
Gotcha. So why focus only on debit and not credit? Is it just for scale purposes?
Mitch Jacobs 25:32
Credit’s actually easier. And we do have FIs that are issuing credit. We just started with debit, because that was our first installation.
Peter Renton 25:39
Gotcha, gotcha. Okay, okay. And then, it seems to me that this is something whose time has come like this should have been a solved problem five years ago, and, or 10 years ago, and it’s not, like, I’m just wondering about when and how you move a little bit more upscale? Like you talked about these community banks and credit unions, but then you could go to sort of a larger regional bank, like, as I said, like Chase, and Capital One should have this technology, and they don’t, you know, how do you think about the problem beyond just the small credit union community banks?
Mitch Jacobs 26:13
We, by the way, we’re in the process now with a top 10 financial institution working on their program. Look, I think, I think that there’s a reason why this problem has sat out there for so long. It’s just really hard. It’s one of those businesses where you gotta have like, you know, seven different things that are all working, each of those things is hard. And they all have to be connected. And, you know, it’s only once you do that, then you really have something. And so starting with, I think it’s just classic edge of the wedge, right? It was just, it’s just so good to start in, you know, I think we’re in 1500 neighborhoods now in the United States, like such a great way to tackle the problem. And in the process, we built a great network, like we have, you know, the core of the system and where the name Plink comes from, and the vision of this all, is the idea that we’re all going to have personal links, that every merchant we transact with is a, there should be a ledger that is maintaining the state of that relationship. That’s what a Plink is. It’s that ledger. And so the idea is that, you know, Peter Renton right now you have, you have probably 1000s of Plinks, you’d be shocked at how many businesses you’ve gone to over the last five years. But there’s really 100 that matter to you. And there’s probably 25 in your daily life that really matter to you. And so starting with, you know, community banks and communities was a great way to really become awesome at that whole continuum from starting with a giant, messy dataset, identifying the merchants building that infrastructure of merchant accounts, particularly for the merchants that matter to those card holders. Now that merchant side of our network is 1.5 million merchants. And so now we can go to a top 10 financial institution and say, Look, if you you know, if you make a data connection in AWS, in Google Cloud, in Azure, if you make a data connection to us, within, depending on how much server power we throw at it, within hours, we’re going to be able to tell you exactly what the Plinks are. We already have merchant accounts, all you know, for the vast majority of those businesses, where we know a lot about those merchants, and we know a lot about how your card holders are interacting with them. So now you can really get to the business of personalization. And I think you know, that’s like, all these institutions started using that word like five years ago. I think today what they realize is it’s much easier to say than it is to do.
Peter Renton 28:50
Right. It’s really about loyalty in many ways. Because I have a dry cleaner, it’s pretty close to my house run by a middle aged Korean couple. And there they don’t even have a chip, there’s still a swipe credit card processor. They don’t have technology, and they’re not interested. And I’m thinking you know what? I’ve been going to you for 10 plus years. And I don’t go to other dry cleaners. And I’ve never received any recognition of my loyalty, no discounts, nothing. And I’m thinking, you know I’ve probably spent 1000s of dollars with this company over a decade or more, and yet there’s no recognition. So is the loyalty piece sort of what the sort of the end game is here?
Mitch Jacobs 29:35
I’ll tell you, let me let me address that specific situation, and just a couple things about it, and then I’ll talk about the end game. With that experience that you’re having, and that frustration that you’re experiencing, something that’s just to note is that you may not be that likely to just immediately switch your dry cleaner. But you might switch which card you use to make that transaction.
Peter Renton 29:57
Sure. Happy to.
Mitch Jacobs 29:58
And therein lies the like, right now, these financial institutions are spending $57 billion a year offering 1-3% cashback. How much do you care about that 1-3% cashback? Maybe a little by the way, I don’t want to, I mean it is the #1 marketing trend on the card issuing side right now. So I’m not saying…
Peter Renton 30:19
I’m a points guy, so I like the points.
Mitch Jacobs 30:21
Ok yeah, I’m a points guy as well. And so shout out to The Points Guy. I’m really upset about, I haven’t wrapped my head around it yet, around the Delta changes yet. I have to figure that out.
Peter Renton 30:33
Well so, I’m a United guy, so. I live in Denver, the United hub, so.
Mitch Jacobs 30:37
Oh of course, yeah. So with the drycleaners situation, the question for the financial institution is, well, if they could take just a small, tiny amount of that money they’re spending, either that interchange, you know, marketing money, you know, all of these financial institutions spend about 10 basis points of the assets that they have. So it’s about a million dollars per billion of assets that they’re spending on marketing. Billion dollar credit union or bank is pretty small, like very small, they’re still spending a million dollars in their local community. And they’re spending it on like, you know, banners on the Little League, you know, homerun wall. And it’s like, there’s, you know, what they could be spending it on, is getting Peter Renton to switch which card he’s using, because when you make that switch the card that’s at the top of your wallet, like very likely, that’s the card you’re now using until some other event triggers a switch. So you know, so I think that there’s a lot of opportunity there for financial institutions to shape, you know how card holders are using their cards, but they don’t have the tools right now to be able to, you know, really target those dollars, and the Plink is that tool. It lets the dollars go to the highest ROI, return possible. And so that’s what you know, and of course, the dry cleaner is a stakeholder as well, you know, and providing the small business owner with a UI where they can see all of the headroom that they’re missing. You know, sometimes you may go there every five weeks. And other times, you might go there every seven weeks, or you could go there every three weeks. And that’s, you know, that is information where the merchant and the FI are both stakeholders. And so the system’s doing all of that automatically. Going back to your question about the end game. So, you know we kind of look at this and say, Alright, today there’s transactions and the, you know, the standard MasterCard, Visa payment transaction is an off and settlement. It’s you know, ISO 8583 message format transaction, that’s what it is. Plink adds a layer called transaction personalization. And we think that you know, when you walk around fintech, you know, Fintech Nexus, Fintech Meetup and you walk around, you know, Money20/20, I think one of the things that really holds back the whole room, is the fact that down deep in the stack is this transaction system that is just so limited in what its basic functionality is. And so when you add transaction personalization, you open up personalization across any financial product where spending behavior is a major factor in the products, in what’s being offered with the product, how it’s being, you know, the go to market around the product. So we’ve been talking, you know, in this conversation so far about loyalty and commerce, but personalized lending. You know lending is very impacted by your spending. Personalized savings, you know, how you’re moving money in and out of your savings, or your investing accounts, all of these things are impacted by spending behavior. And if you can clean up that really low level of the stack, and make the transactions very useful, and in a system where the action and we haven’t talked much about this, but this is a really, really important point, where the action is fully automated, then you’re in, then we’re in a place where now financial services can truly be personalized. And so you got to be able to get like the gap today between data and action is enormous. And so we’re closing that gap. And then that’s what enables real personalization across the full spectrum of financial services.
Peter Renton 34:46
Wow. Okay. Well, we’ve gone over time, Mitch will have to leave it there. Really fascinating learning about it. I mean, I must admit, I didn’t really grasp how this all worked until we’ve had this conversation, so. Great to chat with you as always, and thank you so much for coming on the show.
Mitch Jacobs 35:02
All right. Thanks so much, Peter.
Peter Renton 35:05
Well I hope you enjoyed the show. Thank you so much for listening. Please go ahead and give the show a review on the podcast platform of your choice and go tell your friends and colleagues about it. Anyway, on that note, I will sign off. I very much appreciate you listening, and I’ll catch you next time. Bye.
