Cory Bricker’s Post

My philosophy on pricing. Keep it simple and keep it fair. For every line item on our pricing schedule, our client knows exactly what it is without any ambiguity. For example, check processing (printing, clearing, positive pay) , ACH fee, straight forward low cost bps fee on card, and wire fee - with a few extras based on decisions such as stopping a check. They know with certainty the calculation that was used to create every line item. They can easily calculate it with data at their disposal. And at the end of the day, they know exactly what our service costs them so that they can develop transparent pricing for their customers. When any vendor approaches me with one of these 300 line item pricing schedules, which somehow has become the standard in the financial services industry, I simply say thank you but I can’t offer this to our customers because I don’t understand it. Trust is built over years and lost in an instant. We don't gamble with that.

A prospective customer said to me “Wow, you guys can do way more than our [big name bank] can do” I laughed and said “Trust me, they can do way more than us. The problem is finding the person that knows how to get it to you.” My pitch - Every time you ask a question, I save you a year by knowing the answer. And we can do most of what they do.

At CassPay, I’m pretty religious around only building services that make sense for our core business. Being a great payments partner bank to B2B, C2B fintechs. What made me think about this was a recent meeting with a core service provider. I was trying to grow my business with their core offering and had scheduled a meeting to discuss it. For some reason, rather than hearing me, the person kept trying to sell me new product lines like consulting or data reporting tools, which I didn't want. When I probed a bit deeper, I got to the root of it. They only get paid on selling new stuff. Is this a corporate bureaucracy thing where some senior executive made a bad purchase and is now trying to force the sales teams to justify it? Why not just grow around your core and help companies do more business with you that way?

I asked a big Fintech CEO what they looked for in a bank partner. This was his answer: “I laser focus on the most efficient movement of money. In that regard, I look at my bank’s: 🔹 Tools 🔹 Efficacy 🔹 Readiness 🔹 Gating factors 🔹 Types of businesses they are built for 🔹 How they drive incremental scale For our business, we are hunting whales so we need legitimate operators with an experienced team, that will be partners versus vendors.” I could not have said it any better. And they became our customer.

A lot of our client relationships in sponsor banking start from a place of fear. These are the common themes - 👉 Fintechs who are afraid of being shut off one day. Not for anything they did, or the inherent risks in their business. Fear that the bank will simply change its stance one day without explanation and their business is over. 👉 Fintechs who fear random policy change, or what they call “change for the sake of change.” These changes usually follow changes in talent at the sponsor bank. With burn-out being a common occurrence in bank compliance, a new person steps in who wants to do things differently than their predecessor and the burden falls to the fintech to make all these changes that were not on their roadmap. 👉 Another common one is less fear, and more good risk planning. Fintechs will come to us for redundancy. Making sure they have a plan B in place. I am more than happy starting off as plan B and earning the right to be plan A. Regardless of your reason, I want you to know that Cass is open for business. We have deep subject matter expertise in banking, fintech, and payments (processing $100B a year) and a wholly owned bank to support our clients.

A client asked me if we can do RTP. I said, “Any bank can implement RTP. Why do you want it?” She said, “Our customers are asking for it.” I dug deeper. It turns out their customer wanted to do something like 3 RTP transactions a month. I said, “Great, I’ll do 3 domestic wires a month for free and save you months of implementation time and expense.” They got the same speed, lower expense, and no headache. Ask questions. There are often far easier ways to skin a cat and get happier customers in the process because you took the time to understand. We can do RTP one day, and we will, but only when it makes sense for our customers…

As part of my prep for developing this LinkedIn series, I interviewed one of my many favorite clients to understand what made our relationship special. These were the words they used: ◾ Salt of the earth people ◾ Honorable ◾ Can execute ◾ Don’t beat me up over every penny ◾ Easy to get someone on the phone but seldom need to call ◾ Figure stuff out ◾ Have payment depth ◾ Excellent team that works for its clients ◾ Flexibility that’s unusual It’s been a great relationship since the beginning. It’s growing exponentially now based on their execution and the trust we’ve built. And we are both equally excited for the future. Love my clients.

The year was circa 2017. I had been speaking with several people in the industry and really hit it off with Ben Bianchino who was working for Store Financial (now EML) at the time. We had formed a good relationship talking about potential clients, industry happenings and directions we were going to take. One day Ben calls me and says the bank they use to sponsor their card program can’t process ICLs, can you? After explaining to him I have never heard of an ICL, I said “give me a day or two to see what I can find out.” I called our head of bank operations, MaryBeth L., who has become a key thought leader in the success of CassPay. After she explained what an ICL was to me in practical terms, she proceeded to explain how we handle them and how we could execute this program for Ben and his client. We spent a little time building the integrations we needed with our ICL processor and started the program. This particular program is one of our largest now.  As icing on the cake, we have also grown our ICL processing business to 3 other sizable clients and are open for more. And the moral of the story is ICL stands for Image Cash Letter :)