Plastiq at 2019 Future Digital Finance Conference

If there is one thing I love doing, it’s talking about Plastiq. Last year we received an invitation to talk about Plastiq at the¬†2019 Future Digital Finance Conference – with the challenge that I would need to speak in front of an audience of over 200 senior executives from the Financial Services Industry about Plastiq. I absolutely accepted right away!

The conference is coming up next week in Amelia Island, I wanted to share what’s been on my mind. I will present in a¬†session that has a brand new format, which the conference introduced this year. FinTech companies can showcase their promising disruptive technologies to an audience of senior executives from banking and financial services. I will first have five minutes to share our technology solution (and the problems it solves) and then field questions for ten minutes from a panel of Financial Services executives.

I am really excited to take part in this conference! Talking about Plastiq will not be a challenge; the challenge will be capping my talk to 5 minutes! At Plastiq we are tackling a huge problem in the world of business-to-business (B2B) payments. The current B2B payments market is estimated at $20t (that’s trillion) annually, with only a small percentage of those dollars being paid through cards. Most business owners cannot use their business credit card simply due to the lack of card acceptance by sellers/vendors. We step in to offer a solution to that exact problem, and give them a bunch of benefits in the process – card rewards, business tax deduction, early pay discounts and more!

We are solving this huge problem, and as I will touch on in my presentation next week, we are actually doing it in a non-disruptive way. It’s so cliche these days to be a startup in the Bay Area and cite that you are ‚Äúdisrupting‚Äù some existing market, replacing or displacing someone in the ecosystem. In my viewpoint we are actually NOT disruptive – rather we are an enabler, as everyone in the ecosystem wins with Plastiq:

• 1. The cardholder get to use the form of payment they want to use (their card) – so they win!
• 2. The bank that issued the card gets more quality volume on their card program – so they win!
• 3. The payment networks (Visa, MasterCard etc.) get more volume on their networks – so they win!
• 4. The seller/vendor wins because they get paid, likely faster – so they win!

Wow, sorry, went off on a tangent there. It’s going to be hard to cram everything I want to say about Plastiq into 5 minutes‚Ķwish me luck!