IAM2628 – CEO Helps Businesses Modernize Account‑to‑Account Online Transactions

I AM CEO Handbook Volume 3 is HERE and it's FREE. Get your copy here: http://cbnation.co/iamceo3. Get the 100+ things that you can learn from 1600 business podcasts we recorded.

Hear Gresh's story, learn the 16 business pillars from the podcast, find out about CBNation Architects and why you might be one and so much more. Did we mention it was FREE? Download it today!

Transcription:

The full transcription is only available to CBNation Library Members. Sign up today!

Dave Glaser Teaser 00:00
We provide an infrastructure layer, if you will. So we act as a processing platform for businesses that are processing payments. And really every business processes payments, right? We all, businesses get paid and they pay their bills or they pay their employees and their vendors, or they get paid by their customers or their partners.

Intro 00:21
Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:49
Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast, and I have an awesome guest on the show today. I have Dave Glazer. Dave, excited to have you on the show.

Dave Glaser 00:56
Hey, Gresh, good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Gresham Harkless 00:58
Yes, super excited to have you on and talk about all the awesome things you've been working on. And of course, before I do that, I want to read a little bit more about Dave so you can hear about some of those awesome things.

And Dave serves as Dwolla's CEO and joined Dwolla in March of 2021, bringing more than 20 years of experience and enterprise payments experience to one of the fastest growing companies in the country.
Dave worked at MasterCard as a Senior Vice President of Global Acceptance Solutions, spearheading new point of sales initiatives, acceptance products, and solutions for acquirers and merchants, including the industry's first cloud PLS acceptance technology.
Now, prior to MasterCard, Dave also was the Chief Customer Excellence Officer at WorldPay, leading a successful IPO and a $10.4 billion merger with Vantiv.

His career began in fintech at CyberSource, helping drive the rapid growth that resulted in $2 billion acquisition by Visa.

And one of the things I really loved about doing some homework before I started talking with Dave is that he predicts that the future of payment is that it's real-time disappearing payments.

Where users don't even notice funds moving due to the seamless technology, which he predicts will be ubiquitous in the decade. And Dwolla, what I really love, takes the complexity out of account-to-account payments so you can focus on what really matters your business.

I think so many times we get caught up in doing all the things when you can kind of stay in your zone of genius and we have tools and things that we can lean on to make that possible.

It's such an awesome thing. So Dave, excited to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

Dave Glaser 02:29
I am. Thanks for having me again. Appreciate it. That's a great intro.
It's fun to kind of hear my background. You forget all the things that happened over 25 years of career.

[restrict paid=”true”]

Gresham Harkless 02:39
Yeah, absolutely. That's why it's awesome to have and be on shows like this because we get to kind of make sure that we toot your horn because you're doing so many awesome things.

It's so much easier to read it than I imagine it is to kind of check all the boxes and do all the things I imagine.

Dave Glaser 02:51
Yeah, you're right.

Gresham Harkless 02:52
Absolutely. So what I wanted to do was rewind the clock a little bit. I know I touched on it a little bit and hear a little bit more about your story, your journey, what I like to call your CEO story.

Dave Glaser 02:59
Great. Yeah. You know, it starts way back. I, you know, I think about where I grew up and how I grew up. I grew up in a small town, a coal mining town, really in, in Southwestern Pennsylvania, about 50 miles South of Pittsburgh, a town called Waynesburg. And I don't know, there was, I loved growing up there.

It was a small town, tight community, kind of everybody knew everybody and supported everybody. But there was always something to me that knew I was going to leave there.

Dave Glaser 03:23
Right. I wanted to, I wanted to be, in the business community. I wanted to be in cities. I wanted to be in bigger places, thinking about the future.

And so I didn't know what that path was going to look like. I think when I left there out of high school, I thought I wanted to be a teacher. So that was my initial path, was to be a high school math teacher. By the time I got through four years of my education degree, I decided I didn't want to be a teacher.

So then I was like, Oh crap, what am I going to do? Right. So this has been on my mind lately because my, uh, my daughter graduated college a couple of years ago. So, luckily she's following her dream, but, uh, mine was a little different.

So I ended up, you know, I ended up in, um, like IT consulting. So I worked for EDS and then IBM. And that was really the first part of my career where I was working with businesses all over the country, helping them upgrade and modernize their PC technology, their network infrastructures as a systems engineer.

And then About eight to 10 years into that career, I stumbled into CyberSource, which was in, when was that?
That was 2000. When I joined CyberSource, they were really the leader in credit card payment technology for the internet.

So CyberSource was founded in 1994, I believe, and they were really the first online credit card company for internet businesses. And so that's how I stumbled into payment.

So I led the consulting group at CyberSource and we built that up. And then kind of the rest is history into payments and what we call now FinTech.

Gresham Harkless 04:59
Yeah, I absolutely love that. And so I would love to drill down a little bit more here, a little bit more about what you're doing at Dwolla. Could you take us through a little bit more on how you're serving your clients and making that impact there?

Dave Glaser 05:08
Yeah, you bet. Yes, so Duwala's really focused on providing payment solutions for businesses and really businesses of all sizes. What's interesting about the payment space is that it's always evolving.
And it's because of, you know, new, new waves of thinking, new technology, innovative ideas that are, that are able to be presented and built upon.

And, you know, it's always been a, it's always been a technology business. So there's always disruptors popping up in the business and, and. You know, so what's great about being at Dwolla is the sort of the pace of change and where, where we get to sit. So we provide an infrastructure layer, if you will.

So we're, we act as a processing platform for businesses that are processing payments and really every business processes payments, right?

We all businesses get paid and they, they pay their bills or they pay their employees. They pay their vendors or they get, they get paid by their customers or, or their partners and a lot of times those, those payment systems are disjointed.

You can imagine, you know, accounts receivable and accounts payable. A lot of times, especially in big businesses are two separate parts of the business. There's two separate platforms. You can imagine that some businesses still write paper checks.

Some businesses deal with cash, right? So they're not really, haven't even moved to digital processing yet or taking advantage of digital and internet technology.

One of the first areas of payments that we all innovated in was during the age of the internet, right? When the internet came online in the late 90s, early 2000s.

And so I guess the best suited payments for the internet at the time were credit cards. And so we got so used to using our cards. And the card technology evolved really quickly to make it really easy to pay online and to get paid online. Where we didn't see the pace of change keep up was with bank account payments.

And so that's where Dwolla really fits in. We help businesses make bank account payments feel like card payments on the internet, right?

So we've internet-enabled the 40-, 50-year-old banking network that's existed in the US, but we've modernized it and allowed modern businesses with modern tech stacks and modern developers to really take advantage of these modern flows. So that's where Dwolla fits.

Our purpose is to really help businesses upgrade, update, modernize. A lot of people talk about digital transformation in existing businesses. We're right at the heart of that. We're helping them create visible payments for their business.

Gresham Harkless 08:02
Yeah, I love that. So I wanted to drill down a little bit more. You might have already touched on this, but ask you for what I would like to call your secret sauce. It could be for yourself, the business, or a combination of both.

But I wonder if that ability to kind of understand the forest for the trees, you understand that not just this is something that's just going to check off the box.

But it's something that's actually going to be able to be passed on to the organization, to the people that the organization is serving, and so on and so forth. Do you feel like being able to kind of understand that and continue to innovate as part of that secret sauce?

Dave Glaser 08:31
You know, our focus, like I said, is on solving these bank account payment challenges. And so we've been very, very narrow in our focus to be the best at what we do to help businesses perform account to account based payment processing. And that can be on, like I said, this, the legacy bank technology like ACH. that a lot of people know of.

It's the oldest open banking network in the world. It could be using what we call real-time payment network or the Federal Reserve's FedNow network. It could also be using debit cards. Debit cards are all linked to checking accounts or savings accounts.

And so our secret sauce, part of it is being focused, very, very focused on account-to-account payments. There's lots of different sorts of payments we could endeavor to also process.

But given our shape and size and the demand that's in the market, we realize that it's really important for us to focus on account to account. So that's what we're well known for.

So that's one of the items for the business. The other is we want to solve all sides of that equation, as I referred to before. I talked about sort of accounts receivable and accounts payable. If you think about receivables as money coming into the business, we call that pay-ins.

And then payables, or the money leaving the business, payouts, like for wages or vendor payments, et cetera, insurance claims. We solve for both sides of that equation.

A lot of businesses will only solve for one side or the other, where Dwolla can solve for both sides. And we do that by having what we call a digital wallet that sits between the pay-in and the pay-out.

And that allows businesses to move money from their customers, whether they're customers or consumers or businesses, they can move money into their digital wallet, they can move it around digital wallets in their own network.

And then they can move it out to bank accounts. They can do the pay-outs. And so that combination of payment methods and what we call funds flows is really Dwolla's secret sauce. It really separates us from any other player.

So those businesses that truly want to make bank account payments disappear and be as automated and simple as possible for their users, they come to Dwolla.

Gresham Harkless 10:37
That's such a huge thing. So I almost wonder if that's part of what you would like to call, what I like to call your CEO hack, which can be like an app a book or a habit that you have.

But I know the saying is always, we have two ears, one mouth for a reason. Do you feel like that listening is part of the CEO hack that you feel like you lean on a lot?

Dave Glaser 10:53
Yes. And I think it's something that I've had to practice really hard because I think by nature, I'm a problem solver.

You know, I like to, I like to jump right in and brainstorm, like jump at the whiteboard and start like just getting, I get excited about inventing or creating or solving the problem. Um, But really understanding the problem statement is probably 90% of the battle.

And so that's something that I've had to learn and become more patient with in general. I mean, just in general, I've had to learn patience because my bias was always to go fast.

But yeah, so going slow, making sure we paused, listen to really understand the challenges, the problem statements, and then developing that dialogue has been a really important career lesson and something I'm always working on.

Gresham Harkless 11:40
What would you consider to be a little bit more of what I like to call a CEO nugget?

So you might have already touched on this, but this could be a word of wisdom or piece of advice. I like to say it might be something you would give as a form of advice to a client, your favorite client, or potentially you would tell your younger business self.

Dave Glaser 11:55
Well, going back to trust, because I think I've implied, like I always say, everything starts with trust. We talk about it that way at Dwolla.
I talk about it that way with my daughters and my family. You know, it's really important to to have high integrity, to establish trust with folks, to earn credibility, right?

And to earn business, et cetera. The idea is thinking about trust as a foundational layer for everything that we do. And it's not just trust, like, oh, I trust you. It starts with what we call a vulnerability-based trust.

So vulnerability-based trust is the kind of trust where if you screw up, people are gonna understand that you meant well, but you just screwed up, right?

Or if you're having a bad day, people are gonna remember that you're having a bad day, you're not a bad person. And then the opposite, right? So if you're having a bad day and you come in hot at me, I can give you some space.

I'm probably not going to get angry at you, but also maybe you come back to me the next day or that afternoon and say, Hey man, I came in hot today and I'm sorry. Right.

You get to a point where you can, you can apologize. You can know that if you need to apologize, it's a safe place to do that.

But also people know that you will. Right. And that they can be, they can be safe in that place. It's a place, you know, it's also about.

You know, recognizing tendencies, right? I know if I don't sleep well the night before, I'm probably gonna be grouchy in the morning. So what am I gonna do about that? Well, maybe I'll go for extra exercise in the morning, or maybe I'll meditate a little longer in the morning.

So things like that, I think, that help build vulnerability-based trust. And it takes a lot of awareness and effort, self-awareness. But when you build that kind of trust with your colleagues, with your family, with your friends, it's like you become unstoppable as a team.

You become unstoppable when you know you can fumble, or one of you can fumble, but the others will pick you up. And then you can get moving again quickly. right? You don't get stuck there.

You don't get stuck with like, bad behavior, bad feelings. One of my, one of my colleagues used to say, he'd call it a pebble in your shoe.

He's like, if you're walking around with a pebble in your shoe and you're not getting it out or tell me about it, it's going to come up in a weird way later. Like you're going to, you're going to blow up because that pebble is going to really hurt tomorrow if you don't get it out today.

So let's talk about it. Right. I always liked that phrase. So there's a few nuggets there from Pat Lencioni and the nugget in your shoe, the pebble in your shoe.

Gresham Harkless 14:46
Yeah, those are huge things. And so now I want to ask you one of my absolute favorite questions, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO.

Our goal is to have different quote unquote CEOs on the show. So Dave, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Dave Glaser 14:57
I think, you know, I'll go back to that word patient. I've needed to learn to be patient with myself and be patient with the folks around me.

Because I think, like I said in the past, I've wanted to go fast. But I've learned I can go fast by going slower and helping people learn and grow, make mistakes, and learn over an arc of time and an arc of experiences in similar ways that I got to.

And so being a CEO, to me, is all about presenting a vision and representing shareholders understanding customer needs, but really it's about helping the whole organization move forward. And trust and patience is a big part of that.

Gresham Harkless 15:43
Dave, truly appreciate that definition. Of course, I appreciate your time even more.

So what I wanted to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best people can get an overview, find out about all the awesome things you and your team are working on.

Dave Glaser 15:57
Yeah, well, I'd love for everybody to follow Dwala at dwala.com and follow me on LinkedIn. A couple of times a week, I usually share stories about payment systems and solutions that are, I call it, hiding in plain sight.

Gresham Harkless 16:12
Yeah, absolutely. And of course, to make it even easier, we'll have the links and information in the show notes as well, too, so that everybody can follow up. And I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Dave Glaser 16:19
You're welcome. Great to meet you, Gresh. Thanks for taking the time. We'll see you soon.

Outro 16:22
Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO podcast powered by CB Nation and Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co.

I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Check out the latest and greatest apps, books, and habits to level up your business at ceohacks.co.

This has been the I AM CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless Jr. Thank you for listening.

[/restrict]